What is it about?
As universities are increasingly trying to behave like corporate enterprises competing for the highest score within global academic ranking systems (such as Quacquarelli Symonds or QS, Times Higher Education or THE, and the Academic Ranking of World Universities or ARWU), the fast-paced churning out of research products that can be used in the new Global Knowledge Economy has become a top-priority. Products, however, should not just be produced but also rated. This article examines the distortions created by the proliferation of research products and of assessment exercises by focusing on how foreign protocols of assessment are being imported into the Italian academic system. In so doing, the author reflects on the hardening of disciplinary boundaries and the intellectual alienation that result from the import into the Italian scholarly world of the ‘quality revolution’ ongoing in the British higher education since the 1980s.
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Why is it important?
This article offers a timely reflection on the parallel misrecognition of scale and context underlying neoliberal capitalism and describes the forms of reflexive alienation engendered by the contemporary knowledge economy—what post-workerist theorists call cognitive capitalism.
Perspectives
Emblematic of the dual erasure of scale and context underlying the modus operandi of neoliberal audit cultures, the copycat application of exogenous standards of excellence has produced shifts, frictions, and paradoxes, prompting an exponential proliferation of reviewing efforts. Besides clashing with entrenched modes of knowledge production not reliant on the peer-review, the application to the primarily Italophone academic world of assessment procedures that presuppose larger (and mostly Anglophne) communities of practice engenders intellectual alienation and poses serious challenges to the completion of the rating exercise.
Aurora Donzelli
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This page is a summary of: The copycat paradigm, Language Culture and Society, December 2023, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/lcs.00041.don.
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