Merit and Worth: How Academics’ Preferences for Evaluation are Socially Shaped

Panel 2 Bourdieu (1988) argued that the university is a site of struggles for status, control and valued forms of capital. In addition to the distribution of capital and resources, these battles involve the manner in which capital is defined and which forms of capital are valued. He further argued that criteria for evaluating work always involve an implicit, tacit dimension and that academic evaluations are not simply technical exercises intended to measure the quality of academics. This paper addresses the issue of the evaluation criteria for university tenure and promotion. It distinguish merit and worth, both are aspects of value, but while merit is intrinsic to the individual and can be assessed by the degree to which he/she conforms to certain standards upon which experts agree, worth is extrinsic and is determined by comparing the individual´s value relative to some set of external requirements. Whereas merit criteria are highly stable, criteria of worth are highly variable depending on context. Empirically, in tenure evaluations it is very difficult to disentangle merit and worth; tenure and promotion are not usually granted simply on merit; some possibility that the candidate will serve some organizational purpose should exist too. In this paper we refer to academic evaluation criteria as devices to asses both merit and worth. The paper approaches the problem from a novel perspective of inquiry, namely the preferences of academics regarding such evaluation criteria. Despite criticisms (Leiden manifesto), bibliometric criteria (papers published and citations) appear as the gold standard for evaluation of academic careers and have gained salience on the allocation of rewards, tenure and promotion. Data from 4,460 faculty members surveyed in a representative sample of Spanish public universities for the analysis. First results indicate that academics are divided regarding the set of evaluation criteria that should be used in tenure and promotion decisions at the department level. Additionally bibliometric indicators are only partially considered among those criteria. In this context, our research question concerns the individual, career-related, self-interest and belief factors associated with the preference for using bibliometric criteria in evaluation for tenure and promotion. Our results show that individual and career factors, like gender, age, academic rank or research field, are significant predictors of the preference for bibliometric criteria. Contrary to rational choice approaches, interest related variables have a limited association with the preferences. The most important predictors are the beliefs regarding the missions of universities, the need to change the balance of merits at the national accreditation level, and a negative appraisal of about the situation of the university tenure system; overall, the results provide support to the cultural cognition approach. The findings have implications for research policies as well as for university practices and management. Bourdieu, P., 1984/1988. Homo Academicus | Translated by Peter Collier. Stanford University Press.