Paper long abstract:

Drawing upon qualitative data generated within five research projects I have participated in over the last ten years, I will discuss the main effects of the “RIV points” – the new academic currency introduced in the CR by a quantitative research assessment in 2004. Implemented with the declared intention of promoting transparency, excellence and international competitiveness of the Czech research system, it has had some intended and many unintended consequences, hardly controllable from the policy centre.

In my presentation I will focus on the social sciences and discuss two aspects specifically. Firstly, I will introduce the notion of 'domestication' to account for a variety of individual and institutional coping strategies in different disciplinary, institutional and research contexts. While the research assessment has substantially influenced academic practices, it can also be observed that researchers and institutions often strive to simply repackage their established habits into new brands. Secondly, by talking about 'power clinch' I will trace the coexistence, in university settings, of the research assessment with redistribution of another type of academic currency – the academic titles. Pursuant to the university law, habilitation and professorship procedures are enacted through peer review judgements of scientific council members manifested in a secret vote and, as such, can be highly unaccountable. Rather than balancing out the quantitative accounting logic of the assessment with a different accountability logic, it can operate as a mechanism to disregard academic performance of the new generation of academics to sustain the status quo for the (male dominated) professoriate established in 1990s.