Review of “The Quantified Scholar: How Research Evaluations Transformed the British Social Sciences”

Abstract

The Quantified Scholar by Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra tackles a subject that is discussed fervently behind the scenes of academia, in the corridors of universities, or during the breaks at departmental meetings, that is practices of assessing scholars’ work. With extended computational case studies on the work of social scientists in the United Kingdom, Pardo-Guerra builds a platform to address the two key questions in the book: do universities foster a form of scholarly excellence and selectivity that is, in fact, visible, measurable, accountable to the public? And how do the quantification and ranking of scholars and their work, through lists, assessment exercises, and other devices, affect the scholarship itself? Pardo-Guerra argues that knowledge produced by social scientists has become increasingly homogenous within and across institutions through a process of epistemic sorting. The book demonstrates that a key driver of homogenization has been a research evaluation exercise in the United Kingdom that started in 1986 and that epistemic sorting can be understood as a mechanism leading to institutional isomorphism in academia. The latter is my interpretation of this concept because, while the author once refers to (p. 10) the classic work of DiMaggio and Powell (1983), he does not fully explain how epistemic sorting differs from coercive isomorphism, which DiMaggio and Powell suggest is the result of “both formal and informal pressures exerted on organizations by other organizations upon which they are dependent and by cultural expectations in the society within which the organization functions” (p. 150). This definition seems to apply to the situation of social science scholars struggling with national research evaluation exercises in the United Kingdom as presented in the book.