Overview
- Examines the consequences of a performance management system found in a number of countries in the world
- Analyses data collected from central government policy-makers, university top management, department chairs and individual faculty members
- Draws lessons for policy-makers, university leaders and researchers in the field
Part of the book series: Public Sector Organizations (PSO)
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Table of contents (15 chapters)
Keywords
- performance management
- Bibliometric research indicator
- University funding
- scholarly reactions
- university governance
- implementation
- incentives
- management tools
- isomorphism
- rational adaption
- academic inventives
- principal-agent theory
- colonization
- misrepresentation
- monitoring
- ambiguities
- unintended consequences
- goal displacement
- normative structure
- extrinsic motivation
About this book
—Bruno S. Frey, Permanent Visiting Professor at the University of Basel and Research Director CREMA - Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts, Switzerland
"Performance Management at Universities could not possibly be more timely. With universities and university faculty throughout the world being pressed to give more evidence and more precise indicators about their productivity, this thoughtful contribution provides a much needed and unusually thoughtful analysis of the possibilities and pitfalls found in current approaches to university performance evaluation. Given policy-makers’ and politicians’ calls for evidence-based management and evaluation, let us hope that policy-makers heed their own rhetoric and act on the evidence provided here. The authors show that performance measures, while sometimes beneficial, are subject to gaming and manipulation and that more precision does not necessarily equate with better performance, but rather altered performance. This superb book should be read by anyone interested higher education evaluation as well as by those who are subjected to it."
—Barry Bozeman, Regents' Professor, Arizona Centennial Professor of Technology Policy and Public Management, School of Public Affairs, Arizona State University, USA
"In Performance Management at Universities, Mouritzen and Opstrup definitively answer the question: What are the effects of national university performance-based funding schemes that use bibliometric indicators? As these schemes have proliferated, the question has become urgent. The authors marshal comprehensive data on the Danish university system to sift through the many predictions commonly made by academics newly subject to these systems to identify what actually happened to Danish research as the system took hold."
—Diana Hicks, Professor, School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, and first author on the Leiden Manifesto on research metrics
This book gives an account of what can happen when performance management is introduced at universities. How do scholars – for better or worse – respond to a system which counts the number of articles and books? Many myths exist about scholar’s reactions: They cheat, slice their production to the least publishable unit, become more risk averse and will go for the low-hanging fruits; in short, they develop a “taste for publication” at the cost of a “taste of science”. Systematic knowledge about the consequences of such systems for the motivation, behavior and productivity of university scholars is in short supply. The book is a major contribution to remedy this situation.
Authors and Affiliations
About the authors
Niels Opstrup is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Management, University of Southern Denmark. His research interests include performance management, psycho-social work environment, relations between politicians and bureaucrats, incentives and university governance.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Performance Management at Universities
Book Subtitle: The Danish Bibliometric Research Indicator at Work
Authors: Poul Erik Mouritzen, Niels Opstrup
Series Title: Public Sector Organizations
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21325-1
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Political Science and International Studies, Political Science and International Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-21324-4Published: 16 July 2019
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-21327-5Published: 14 August 2020
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-21325-1Published: 01 July 2019
Series ISSN: 2946-2290
Series E-ISSN: 2946-2304
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVII, 297
Number of Illustrations: 9 b/w illustrations, 7 illustrations in colour
Topics: Public Policy, Governance and Government, European Politics, Educational Policy and Politics, Administration, Organization and Leadership, Higher Education