Abstract
The article offers a socio-economic explanation of the much-discussed proliferation of evaluations, performance indicators, rankings and ratings in higher education and research. The aim is to show that these social technologies not only restructure the word of knowledge via status competitions but also serve to align academic stratification with socio-economic inequality. The theoretical framework is derived from critical analyses of the knowledge economy and from the credentialist theory of Randall Collins. Both accounts are further elaborated. With regard to the knowledge economy, the argument is that status hierarchies enable a privileged and profitable use of knowledge even where it is not feasible to establish intellectual property rights. In order to establish this argument, credentialism is extended from a theory about the labour market privileges of graduates to a theory about the social valuation of knowledge producers, knowledge products and knowledge institutions in general. Three main propositions are developed and defended: (1) A capitalist knowledge economy can only work as a status economy where income levels of qualified work and the exploitation of intellectual assets depend on accepted entitlements; (2) basic infrastructures of assessing the status of knowledge and knowledge workers are cultivated in higher education and research; (3) by codifying trust in knowledge, these academic (e)valuations facilitate its private appropriation in reputational capitalism.
Notes
The direction of these consequences is ambivalent. While credentialists like Bourdieu are left-leaning, there is also a right-wing, anti-intellectual version: ‘There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard everyday and put their skills to test that aren't taught by some liberal college professor.’ (Rick Santorum, cit. in Mettler 2014: 19f)
This last point has been demonstrated for young German scholars by Rogge (2015): Publication strategies are not only deliberately cultivated but also taught.
It must be noted, however, that (non-academic) employers often prefer established connections and informal reputation to (e)valuations and even rankings; formalized credentialing counts more in academic competition.
Ironically, Bourdieu’s analysis of this process has become empirically contestable in the case of France where, since the 1970s, inheritance is increasingly economic, while the explosion of super-wages in the USA more and more interacts with academic pre-selection (Piketty 2013: 379–424; 286–321).
The data can be found at the following webpage, introduced by a warning about student debt: https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/.
Marginson plausibly speaks of a ‘prestige motivation’: ‘especially in the elite universities […] finance is less an end in itself than a means to the real end, status’ (Marginson 2008: 9). This is especially likely where media of measuring status have been established. Sometimes knowledge status as such, or for unspecified use, is also pursued on political and institutional levels, with massive costs, as in the German Excellence Strategy.
This point has already been made by Gouldner: ‘The New [intellectual] Class is a cultural bourgeoisie who appropriates privately the advantages of a historically and collectively produced cultural capital’ (Gouldner 1979: 19).
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Reitz, T. Academic hierarchies in neo-feudal capitalism: how status competition processes trust and facilitates the appropriation of knowledge. High Educ 73, 871–886 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-017-0115-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-017-0115-3