Individual Academic Productivity vs New Managerialism in Academic Research

Abstract

The paper considers individual academic productivity and the new managerialism in academic research as a set of social relations, common and opposite interests of a scholar and a university. The balance of interests is a necessary condition for regulating the contradictions among participants in public relations, including academic research. Reforming higher education results in new managerialism spreading wider and in scientific results paid attention to. The increasing accountability with a lack of mutual trust and information asymmetry creates the illusion of an imbalance of academic researchers’ interests in favor of management. The power potential of the new managerialism can become an instrument of both pressure and encouragement of individual academic productivity. As is shown in our review, this productivity, mainly published papers, is influenced by the principles of its assessment. The evolution of approaches to the academic results promotion provides a large variety of criteria for the selection of indicators to assess scientific activity. The game theory allows to reduce this variety to one common ground, where winning is considered to be the basis of relationships in academic research. As a result, there is a matrix model of four strategies – the extreme forms of scholar-and-management relationship manifestation within the system of academic research. Only one of these strategies means a balance of interests and long-term cooperation, the other three imply the contradiction of individual academic productivity vs the new managerialism and are short-term. The use of winning in a game as a basis and criterion of assessment for the individual academic productivity normalization contributes to opportunistic behavior neutralization. The author makes the conclusion that the type of strategy affects the combination of simple and qualitative indicators and professional expertise when assessing scientific results. It is reasonable to choose the indicators of assessment according to the most balanced strategy of regulating the contradictions among participants in academic research.