Instrumentalism and the publish-or-perish regime

Abstract

<p>in the academe, we firstly examine based on which perceptions and interpretations individual<br>researchers at universities cope with, survive, or even flourish, in the context of the publish-orperish<br>regime. Secondly, we probe, following a critical agenda of fostering non-instrumentalist<br>understandings of research, to which extent local conditions may impact these perceptions, interpretations,<br>and ways of coping. We conducted interviews with 32 researchers from six different<br>research units in European universities across all ranks of the academic hierarchy, from first-year<br>PhD students to very senior professors. Our focal descriptive category is instrumentalism: the<br>degree to which an instrumentally rational understanding of research as a means of producing<br>publications as items of countable performance dominates the entire research process from its<br>very beginning. In our study we find notably heterogeneous forms of instrumentalism, which we<br>have termed modes of instrumentalism, from purposely instrumentalist to critical noninstrumentalist<br>modes. We identify and describe local research cultures as mediating the perceptions<br>of individual researchers, and thus the influence of the global publish-or-perish regime<br>on them. Based on our conceptualisation of degrees and modes of instrumentalism and the local<br>research cultures we sketch some measures for fostering non-instrumentalist research cultures<br>that would help in resisting the undesirable effects of the publish or perish regime.<br></p>