This article investigates how German universities function as collective “discursive spaces” for academic freedom amid debates often framed as “cancel culture.” Drawing on a representative survey of 9,083 full-time academics across 158 institutions in mid-2024, we employed vignettes on four controversial issues – gender-sensitive language in exams, civil clauses in military research, the Middle East conflict, and explanations for crime rates of immigrant groups – to assess expectations for institutional responses. Descriptive analyses reveal that, rather than favoring passive or coercive stances, a broad majority of respondents across disciplines, status groups, and genders endorse universities to facilitate a discursive space for controversial issues. However, when state authorities threaten autonomy by mandating or banning military research clauses, respondents exhibit lower confidence in campus deliberation and greater support for legal action. The analyses also reveal that political orientation shapes preferred modes of engagement: left-leaning academics more readily back their universities to mobilize deliberative measures (e.g., committees, public forums), while right-leaning academics are comparatively less inclined to mobilize such avenues. The findings challenge individualistic conceptions of academic free speech, highlighting its collective negotiation within the administrative frameworks of the university. By shedding light on both enabling and constraining institutional dynamics, the study contributes a nuanced empirical perspective to debates on academic citizenship, institutional resilience, and the conditions under which universities cultivate or curtail academic freedom.

Although high-risk research is a key concern for research policy and science studies, there is little knowledge about what funding agencies or researchers mean by risks. This paper draws on 80 grant proposals from the social sciences and humanities (SSH) and the natural sciences (NSC) that have been submitted to the Reinhart Koselleck funding program of the German Research Foundation. The qualitative analysis shows both similarities and differences in how applicants in the two fields claim risks: in both fields, the most prominent notions refer to results and methodologies. While results at risk are interpreted similarly, methodological risks differ between the two fields. The analysis also reveals a greater variety of different risks in the SSH compared to the NSC. The paper suggests that research policy and science studies should avoid treating “riskiness” as a given and consider different notions of risk across a disciplinary spectrum that includes the SSH.

Als Prinzip für die Herstellung und Legitimation sozialer Ordnung gilt Meritokratie entweder als normativer Maßstab moderner Gesellschaften oder als eine von der Empirie sozialer Ungleichheiten laufend widerlegte Ideologie. Der Beitrag wählt einen anderen Ausgangspunkt und widmet sich den Herausforderungen der konkreten Umsetzung des abstrakten Leistungsprinzips. Anhand von Berufungsakten zu 145 Berufungsverfahren aus der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts wird ein spezifisches Problem rekonstruiert: Meritokratie ist in Berufungsverfahren nicht das einzige Prinzip zur Herstellung und Legitimation sozialer Ordnung. Die Besetzung von Professuren ist nicht nur an der Bestenauslese, sondern auch an der sozialen Passung von Kandidatinnen und Kandidaten orientiert. In der Praxis entsteht so das Ordnungsproblem, die Orientierung an Leistung mit der Orientierung an sozialer Passung zu vereinbaren. Der Beitrag zeigt, erstens, dass dieses Problem überhaupt erst entsteht, als das meritokratische Prinzip in den 1970er-Jahren so verbindlich wird, dass Leistungszuschreibungen die alleingültige Rechtfertigung für Berufungsentscheidungen sind. Zweitens wird herausgearbeitet, wie Gutachterinnen und Gutachter und Kommissionen mit diesem Ordnungsproblem umgehen und die meritokratische Bestenauslese in Berufungsverfahren mit der sozialen Passung von Kandidatinnen und Kandidaten vereinbaren. Der Beitrag trägt zu einem differenzierteren Verständnis des Leistungsprinzips bei, indem er praktische Probleme bei der konkreten Umsetzung des meritokratischen Prinzips beleuchtet.

As a principle for the establishment and legitimation of social order, meritocracy is regarded either as a normative standard of modern societies or as an ideology that is constantly refuted by the empirical evidence of social inequalities. This article proceeds from a different starting point and focuses on the challenges that emerge when the abstract principle of meritocracy is put into practice. Drawing on archived files of 145 professorial appointment procedures from the second half of the 20th century, the article reveals a specific problem: Meritocracy is not the only principle applied to establish and legitimize social order in appointment procedures. Professorial hiring is oriented not only toward selecting the best candidates but also toward their social fit. In practice, it is necessary to reconcile both principles, the orientation toward merit and the orientation toward social fit. The article shows, first, that this problem of social order first arose in the 1970s when the meritocratic principle became so binding that merit was the sole justification for appointment decisions. Second, it reveals how reviewers and committees dealt with this problem and reconciled the meritocratic selection of the best with the social fit of candidates. The article contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the principle of meritocracy by shedding light on problems in the practical accomplishment of the principle.

Competition is usually considered a mechanism for the allocation of scarce resources. This paper draws attention to a neglected effect of academic competition: competition provides participants with a normative orientation about field-specific values by informing them about which activities will be rewarded. We conceptualize this as a socializing effect. We study the socializing effects of competition for postdocs because this group is especially exposed to the dynamics of academic competition. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 60 postdocs in history and physics in Germany, the analysis reveals the orientations and values that competition conveys to postdocs. Since different forms of competition for publications, funding, and jobs are not neatly synchronized, they convey various expectations. Postdocs cope with this multiplicity, prioritizing a specific form of competition that is competition for funding. This comes at the expense of activities and tasks that are not organized competitively. The socializing effect of competition should be reflected more thoroughly not only by scholarship on academic competition but also by research policy that promotes competition.

If there is one thing all university rankings have in common, it is that they are the target of widespread criticism. This article takes the many challenges university rankings are facing as its point of departure and asks how they navigate their hostile environment. The analysis proceeds in three steps. First, we unveil two modes of ranking critique, one drawing attention to negative effects, the other to methodological shortcomings. Second, we explore how rankers respond to these challenges, showing that they either deflect criticism with a variety of defensive responses or that they respond confidently by drawing attention to the strengths of university rankings. In the last step, we examine mutual engagements between rankers and critics that are based on the entwinement of methodological critique and confident responses. While the way rankers respond to criticism generally explains how rankings continue to flourish, it is precisely the ongoing conversation with critics that facilitates what we coin the discursive resilience of university rankings. The prevalence of university rankings is, in other words, a product of the mutual discursive work of their proponents and opponents.

This introduction outlines the analytical potential of the concept of 'device' that is key to the special issue 'Devices of evaluation'. Evaluation relies not only on the human capacity to value, classify, compare, or judge, but also on social operators that affect evaluations in different ways. The notion of 'devices' puts the focus not on human actors but on things, tools, and instruments, on (infra-)structures and procedures, on assemblages and constellations which human actors either draw on when they attribute value or worth, or which have their own agentic capacity and facilitate or enforce evaluations themselves. We propose three perspectives through which a focus on devices can have analytical potential and thus contribute to the study of evaluation in academia: Devices facilitate and accomplish evaluation as trans-situational relays, they connect different forms of evaluation, and they enable, guide, and shape comparisons among very different valuation constellations and contexts. Broadening the focus in this way, the concept can improve our understanding of the non-human side of evaluation. The contributions to this special convey the idea that devices of evaluation are crucial for understanding the production, diffusion, and institutionalization of value and worth in academic contexts.

At first glance, Bourdieu’s field theory might be considered an unlikely case for research on transnational and global phenomena. However, scholarship in the last two decades shows that field analysis can indeed be useful to study cases beyond the national realm. Reviewing this research, this contribution is organized in three sections: It starts with a discussion of the (post-)national orientation of the field theoretical research program and outlines the ontology of transnational and global processes according to this program. Second, the contribution reviews the main strands of post-national field analysis and distills from this literature the empirical foci and analytical priorities. The third section takes stock of the theoretical efforts that have recently been made to de-nationalize the field theoretical research program and identifies the theoretical and conceptual contributions made in the process. The contribution concludes with an empirical, a methodological, and a theoretical question that should be addressed by future research.

In this article, we introduce the special issue of Higher Education that centers on the question of the institutionalization of rankings in higher education. The article has three parts. In the first part, we argue that the grand narratives such as globalization and neoliberalism are unsatisfactory as standalone explanations of why and how college and university rankings become institutionalized. As a remedy, we invite scholars to pay closer attention to the dynamics specific to higher education that contribute to the proliferation, persistence, and embeddedness of rankings. In the second part, we weave the articles included in the issue into three sub-themes-continuities, interdependencies, and engagement-which we link to the overarching theme of institutionalization. Each contribution approaches the subject of rankings from a different angle and casts a different light on continuities, interdependencies, and engagement, thus suggesting that the overall story is much more intricate than often assumed. In the third and final part, we restate the main takeaways of the issue and note that systematic comparative research holds great promise for furthering our knowledge on the subject. We conclude the article with a hope that the special issue would stimulate further questioning of rankings-in higher education and higher education research.

Our contribution sheds light on the dramaturgies of evaluation that precede candidate selection in academic organizations. The dramaturgies unfold across committee meetings, reviews, and reports that funnel the pool of candidates into a shortlist of prospective members. Because they are prolonged and not all stages involve copresence, the continuity and consistency of evaluative processes is a central dramaturgical problem. It highlights the constitutive role of written documents for the continuity and consistency of organizational evaluation processes. We marshal evidence from a comparative study on academic candidacy in two organizational settings: grantmakers, who select candidates for funding, and universities, who select candidates for professorships. Drawing on archived records produced in the context of research grant applications and professorial recruitments between 1950 and 2000, we distinguish two regimes of textual agency throughout the processes of evaluation: documents structure the process of candidate selection throughout dramaturgical stages, and they act as relays that transfer assessments of human actors across dramaturgical stages and time. In addition, by focusing on organizational access and showing how organizations make people before even hiring them, we draw attention to the emergence of a highly scripted dramatic figure in academic life: the candidate.

Curricula vitae (CVs) are a crucial device for the evaluation of academic personae and biographies. They play a key role in the competitive assessments that underpin the reproduction of the academic workforce. Drawing on 80 CVs which have been part of candidates’ applications for vacant professorships, our article provides a longitudinal study of the development of CVs used by German scholars in professorial appointment procedures in the disciplines of German studies and history between 1950 and the late 2010s. The analysis reveals the evolution of CVs by tracing their various morphological shifts. We distinguish four formats throughout the period of study: CVs initially had a (1) narrative format that develops into an (2) intermediary segmented form before CVs take on a (3) list form in which biographical information congeals into distinct categories. In the 2010s, the list form develops into a (4) hyper-differentiated list form in which coherent biographical representations are finally dissolved into almost eclectic accumulations of finely grained performance categories. Against the backdrop of this finding, the contribution concludes with three general observations: First, the evolution of CVs reflects changes in the institutional environment, not least the increased competitive pressures in academic careers. Second, the evolution of biographical representations also conveys a transformation of the academic persona throughout which boundaries between personal and professional biographies are established. Third, we propose a reactivity of current list form CVs through which academics are disciplined to live up to the categories that wait to be realized in their CVs.

Social inequality is a core concern of sociological research. But how central is the topic to Studies of Valuation and Evaluation (SVE)? The authors argue that the answer to this question depends on how the boundaries of SVE are drawn. If it is understood narrowly as an institutionalized field of research defined by a specific research community and publication outlets, social inequality has remained largely neglected in SVE. But if it is understood more broadly as a perspective defined by a dedicated interest in (e)valuation, there are, in fact, several strands of sociological research that are concerned with both social inequality and processes and practices of (e)valuation – even though they are not considered part of the institutionalized field of SVE. Focusing on research that has evolved around four key concepts drawn from the sociological canon – classification, consecration, stigmatization, and homophily – the main part of the chapter offers a discussion of these existing lines of scholarship and shows how they contribute to our understanding of the relationship of (e)valuation and social inequality. The chapter concludes by proposing a roadmap for a more systematic and integrated study of this relationship.

The contribution proceeds from the observation that current discussions on research and funding policy increasingly conflate the concept 'research quality' with the concept of 'research performance'. After distinguishing the notions of 'quality' and 'performance', the first step of the contribution is devoted to central dimensions of 'research quality': plausibility, originality, scientific and social relevance. Broadly speaking, these four dimensions have authority across disciplinary cultures. The first step thus concludes with a discussion of notions of research quality that are rather discipline specific. In a second step, the contribution sheds light on central indicators of 'research performance': third-party funding, publications and citations. The contribution concludes with a discussion that relates the concepts of 'quality' and 'performance' by asking to what extent 'research performance' is actually indicative of 'research quality'.

AbstractAcademics generally present the acquisition of academic proficiency as a learning process dedicated to specializing in an area of expertise. During their careers, scholars are expected to develop their academic profile by progressively building on their knowledge and their professional networks in their chosen specialty. However, prompted by reflections on their own experiences and by exploratory conversations with colleagues, the authors find that this portrayal of streamlined professionalization in academia hides playful deviations from the primary path into new intellectual and social spaces. They introduce the notion of a Spielwiese [literally: playing meadow] to describe these spaces, how they emerge, and how academics engage with them. The authors conclude by laying the groundwork for a typology and outline a research agenda for Spielwiesen in academia, whose utilizers should consider national career systems, disciplinary contexts, and different cohorts and career stages.

Der Beitrag diskutiert den Stellenwert der Ethnografie in der Hochschulforschung. Ihren Ausgangspunkt nimmt diese Diskussion in der Diagnose, dass das Verhältnis zwischen Ethnografie und Hochschulforschung kompliziert ist. Dieses Fremdeln ist zunächst kontraintuitiv, weil es sowohl aus Perspektive der Ethnografie als auch aus Perspektive der Hochschulforschung eine Reihe von guten Gründen dafür gibt, hochschulische Kontexte ethnografisch zu beforschen. Der Beitrag geht der Frage nach, warum es trotzdem Berührungsängste zwischen Ethnografie und Hochschulforschung zu geben scheint und argumentiert, dass eine mangelnde Passung zwischen methodologischen Prinzipien der Ethnografie und spezifischen Charakteristika der Hochschulforschung den geringen Stellenwert der Ethnografie in der Hochschulforschung erklären kann. Vor dem Hintergrund dieser relativ abstrakten Überlegungen konkretisiert der Beitrag beispielhaft, vor welchen Herausforderungen ethnografische Hochschulforschung steht und warum es sich lohnen könnte, sich diesen Herausforderungen zu stellen.

This article develops an integrative perspective on the nexus between power and sociological research methods. By reflecting upon two of the most widely used methodological approaches in sociology – standardized survey research and qualitative interview research – we develop a comprehensive heuristic framework for examining the ways in which the use of sociological methods affects and intersects any social scientific practice: (1) the power effects that societies and institutional settings exert on methods and the use of methods, (2) power in the use and implementation of methods, and (3) the power effects that methods and the use of methods exert on societies and institutional settings.

Ethnographic research is the product of multiple practices. Yet, only a few of them are addressed in methodological textbooks or seminars. The contribution introduces a special issue on practices of ethnographic research. It reflects on the relation between practices and methods and highlights the consequences of the practice perspective for epistemology, methodology, reflexivity, teaching, and social studies of the social sciences.

The contribution examines whether systematic research assessments go hand in hand with a dedifferentiation of disciplinary cultures. The case of application for this question is the British Research Excellence Framework (REF). The analysis reveals that history departments in the upper rank groups of the REF publish first and foremost articles in high impact journals, while those departments that are not rewarded by the assessment publish mainly contributions to edited volumes. The contribution concludes that research assessments that are generically applied across disciplines and that are both symbolically and materially efficacious go hand in hand with a dedifferentiation of disciplinary cultures in terms of publication activities.