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Short abstract:

This presentation will model the Dutch 'Recognition and Rewards' initiative, drawing on problem-frame stakeholder mapping. This technique is useful for highlighting whether quality frames employed by researchers will align with assessment reform movement's more abstract collective action framings.

Long abstract:

Recent times have seen the rise of a trans-national research assessment reform movement. The Netherlands is perhaps the country that is overall, furthest along in enacting this reform agenda across its national research system. Its 'Recognition and Rewards' initiative frames Dutch science as excessively relying on narrow, quantitative performance criteria, calling instead on multiple actors to work towards broadening what counts as quality when assessing academic research and researchers and diversifying career pathways.

In this talk, I will combine problem frame stakeholder mapping (Bryson, 2004) with science studies accounts of researchers as 'agents of science policy'. This novel synthesis is useful, firstly, in helping to map, analyze, and evaluate 'mid-flow' responses among various Dutch research system stakeholders to the Recognition and Rewards problem framing to date. Secondly, it helps to highlight what is currently a significant 'known unknown' in how these reforms will play: whether the research quality framings researchers employ in their roles as evaluators and producers of knowledge, will align favorably to Recognition and Rewards' problem framing. On this second point, I argue that problem frame stakeholder mapping is a potentially useful empirical technique for exploring relations between collective action frames at the level of social movements and the research quality frames drawn on by researchers. This is important, as how the research assessment reform movement's problem frames play out at the researcher level of the science system is likely to be highly consequential for whether its values and ambitions can be meaningfully realized at all long term.