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How Can Science and Research Work Well? Toward a Critique of New Public Management Practices in Academia From a Socio-Philosophical Perspective

While New Public Management practices (NPM) have been adopted in academia and higher education over the past two decades, this paper is investigating their role in a specifically socio-philosophical way: The preeminent question is what organization of science is likely to make science and research w...

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Autor principal: Kruse, Jan-Philipp
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9014301/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35445165
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/frma.2022.791114
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author Kruse, Jan-Philipp
author_facet Kruse, Jan-Philipp
author_sort Kruse, Jan-Philipp
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description While New Public Management practices (NPM) have been adopted in academia and higher education over the past two decades, this paper is investigating their role in a specifically socio-philosophical way: The preeminent question is what organization of science is likely to make science and research work well in the context of a complex society. The starting point is an obvious intuition: that academia would be “economized” by NPM (basically, that something is coming from the outside and is disturbing the inside). Habermas provides a sophisticated theorization for this intuition. In contrast, the thesis advanced here is that we should consider NPM potentially problematic—but not for descending from economics or administration outside academia. It is because NPM often cannot help research and science to function well. In this (rather “essayistic” than strictly deductive) consideration, I will therefore tentatively discuss an alternative approach that takes up critical intuitions while transposing them into a different setting. If we understand science and research as a form of life, a different picture emerges that can still bring immanent standards to bear, but at the same time compose them more broadly. This outlines a socio-philosophical critique of NPM. Accordingly, the decisive factor is not NPM's provenance. What is decisive is that it addresses some organizational problems while at the same time creating new ones. At the end, an outlook is sketched on how the specific situation of NPM allows some hypotheses on academy's [by “academy”, I am referring to the whole research community (like “academia”)] future organization. Ex negativo, it seems likely that qualitative evaluation criteria and creative freedom will have to play a greater role.
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spelling pubmed-90143012022-04-19 How Can Science and Research Work Well? Toward a Critique of New Public Management Practices in Academia From a Socio-Philosophical Perspective Kruse, Jan-Philipp Front Res Metr Anal Research Metrics and Analytics While New Public Management practices (NPM) have been adopted in academia and higher education over the past two decades, this paper is investigating their role in a specifically socio-philosophical way: The preeminent question is what organization of science is likely to make science and research work well in the context of a complex society. The starting point is an obvious intuition: that academia would be “economized” by NPM (basically, that something is coming from the outside and is disturbing the inside). Habermas provides a sophisticated theorization for this intuition. In contrast, the thesis advanced here is that we should consider NPM potentially problematic—but not for descending from economics or administration outside academia. It is because NPM often cannot help research and science to function well. In this (rather “essayistic” than strictly deductive) consideration, I will therefore tentatively discuss an alternative approach that takes up critical intuitions while transposing them into a different setting. If we understand science and research as a form of life, a different picture emerges that can still bring immanent standards to bear, but at the same time compose them more broadly. This outlines a socio-philosophical critique of NPM. Accordingly, the decisive factor is not NPM's provenance. What is decisive is that it addresses some organizational problems while at the same time creating new ones. At the end, an outlook is sketched on how the specific situation of NPM allows some hypotheses on academy's [by “academy”, I am referring to the whole research community (like “academia”)] future organization. Ex negativo, it seems likely that qualitative evaluation criteria and creative freedom will have to play a greater role. Frontiers Media S.A. 2022-04-04 /pmc/articles/PMC9014301/ /pubmed/35445165 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/frma.2022.791114 Text en Copyright © 2022 Kruse. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Research Metrics and Analytics
Kruse, Jan-Philipp
How Can Science and Research Work Well? Toward a Critique of New Public Management Practices in Academia From a Socio-Philosophical Perspective
title How Can Science and Research Work Well? Toward a Critique of New Public Management Practices in Academia From a Socio-Philosophical Perspective
title_full How Can Science and Research Work Well? Toward a Critique of New Public Management Practices in Academia From a Socio-Philosophical Perspective
title_fullStr How Can Science and Research Work Well? Toward a Critique of New Public Management Practices in Academia From a Socio-Philosophical Perspective
title_full_unstemmed How Can Science and Research Work Well? Toward a Critique of New Public Management Practices in Academia From a Socio-Philosophical Perspective
title_short How Can Science and Research Work Well? Toward a Critique of New Public Management Practices in Academia From a Socio-Philosophical Perspective
title_sort how can science and research work well? toward a critique of new public management practices in academia from a socio-philosophical perspective
topic Research Metrics and Analytics
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9014301/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35445165
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/frma.2022.791114
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