Nostalgia for the world without numbers

Abstract

: The argument between propagators and opponents of quantitative performance measures in research and higher education is at a stalemate. On the one hand are those who promote enthusiastically quantitative performance measures, not giving much thought to issues of misrep-resentation and unintended consequences. On the other are the ‘essentialists’ denying the admissibility of transforming qualitative assessments into quantitative ones and reverting to a fundamental argument about the nature of science in general and the university as its core institution in particular. In between are the ‘pragmatists’ who occupy a strategic position in being the forward oriented vanguard combining reflective analysis and shaping the technology of indicators and their applications. I argue that the confrontation of promoters and essentialists is missing the point. Blind belief in the technology of numbers is as misplaced as its outright rejection that does not recognize the strength of social change driving it. In fact, individual scientists, universities and research institutions, large scientific publishing companies as well as science policy and bibliome-tricians are entangled in a tight arrangement in which quantitative measures have become the central currency and everyone profits from dealing with it in some way. Control by numbers is a social technology fired by digitization and has replaced trust in institutions. The old world of academia is thus past. There is no alternative to the pragmatists’ efforts to shape that technology.