Disciplined reasoning: Styles of reasoning and the mainstream-heterodoxy divide in Swedish economics
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"Disciplined reasoning: Styles of re..." refers background in this paper
...Drawing also on recent work on scientific evaluation practices, I argue that conceptions of scientific quality are variable, and that institutionalised evaluation practices themselves evolve and differ over time and between disciplines (Gemzöe 2010; Lamont 2009), and may employ specific judgement devices, with potential effects on the outcomes of evaluations (Hammarfelt and Rushforth 2017; Rijcke et al. 2016)....
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...…variable, and that institutionalised evaluation practices themselves evolve and differ over time and between disciplines (Gemzöe 2010; Lamont 2009), and may employ specific judgement devices, with potential effects on the outcomes of evaluations (Hammarfelt and Rushforth 2017; Rijcke et al. 2016)....
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...152 the use of bibliometric indicators (Rijcke et al. 2016). In this vein, Hammarfelt and Rushforth have shown how indicators, like authors’ h-index, Google scholar citation counts, JIF or journal rankings are used as aids in the evaluation of scientific oeuvres, drawing on Swedish expert evaluation reports from three different disciplines (biomedicine, history, and economics) (Hammarfelt 2017; Hammarfelt and Rushforth 2017). I will draw on their notion that this use of bibliometrics in evaluation reports can be understood as a judgement device, and that we should study how these are employed by evaluators and integrated into their judgement practices. The use of such judgement devices adds a very different social aspect to the evaluation practice, which potentially contributes to the determination of evaluation outcomes. If the role of the habitus in peer review functions means that the individual evaluator’s judgement functions as a subjective mediator in the reproduction of disciplinary standards, the use of bibliometric indicators instead reallocates more of the judgement to the system of academic journals and their editors and reviewers. For example, imagine a reviewer of candidates for a professorship. This expert may rely solely on reading the applicants’ submitted texts, using his or her deep knowledge of the field and scholarly judgement to rank the candidates and provide arguments legitimising the ranking in terms of quality criteria. The reviewer may also invoke an external quantitative indicator, like the JIF of the applicants’ publications and use it both to categorise (that is, base the ranking fully or partly on it), and furthermore to legitimise the ranking, where the measure becomes an indicator of quality, impact or similar evaluation criteria. In effect, the evaluation outcome relies to a greater extent on previous evaluations distributed among reviewers and editors at various scientific journals. This way, the evaluation becomes in a sense more objective, but it is nevertheless a social and susceptible form of cognitive particularism, a form of social objectivity where the outcome of social processes, once categorised and quantified into numbers, achieve an air of inevitability and objectivity. This complex and distributed quantification of evaluation is an instance of what Fourcade and Healy (2017) have called a classification situation, where new powerful technologies of quantification and categorisation come to take on a life of their own in the ordering of social life....
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...As argued in the literature review in chapter 3, recent research at the crossroads between bibliometrics and science studies has started to investigate the epistemic impact of 152 the use of bibliometric indicators (Rijcke et al. 2016)....
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...152 the use of bibliometric indicators (Rijcke et al. 2016)....
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276 citations
"Disciplined reasoning: Styles of re..." refers background in this paper
...Following the general thrust both of the STS field, and of the more recent turn towards the sociology of social knowledge (Camic et al. 2011), my aim is to reach closer to actual knowledge-producing practices and the knowledge producers themselves....
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