Performance-based funding and institutional practices of performance prediction

Abstract

ABSTRACT Since the financial crisis in 2007–2008, higher education systems across Europe have increasingly become subject to performance-based funding reforms. Performance-based funding in higher education thus constitutes one of the most tangible and widespread examples of how performance data are incorporated into governance instruments in educational governance, and in consequence, how a mundane management practice like budgeting has become a data practice. This article investigates how university managers predict their future performance in the context of budgeting. In order to understand the enacted relations between the present and the future implied in practices of prediction, the article analyzes the meticulous and often invisible practices of prolonging individual data points into the future in two case studies, encompassing long-term budgeting in a Danish and a Norwegian university. The analysis shows that these prolongation practices differ across the two cases, involving serial and continuous temporalities, respectively. However, in both cases, the prolongations are made up of various calculations, regulations, sensations and affectivities, which then become constitutive in the sense that the resulting long-term budgets severely restrict the room for maneuver of managers. The article thus conceptualizes these data practices as preemptively restrictive and prospective decision loops, affecting decision-making in the present.