This paper highlights how the «explosion» of the procedures of meritocratic “evaluation” of scientific research fragments the scientific biography of each researcher in numerous and usually brief units. The paper focuses on two major detrimental consequences of this proliferation of “evaluation” procedures. Firstly, researchers spend a lot of time showing that they deserve their job and their salary. As a consequence they lose the motivation intrinsic to their work, to their choice to be researchers: vocation, passion, pleasure to work well and “produce” new knowledge rather than serial and often useless publications for the sake of squaring the numbers required for the “evaluation” procedures. Secondly, researchers are forced to renounce their past which no longer falls within the periods “evaluated” by those procedures, are treated until retirement like newcomers and must continuously show, each time starting from scratch, that they have “produced” something, that they are someone. As a consequence they lose self-esteem: if their value is perpetually under scrutiny, they work and live in perpetual crisis. If the future is always the only thing that matters, the object of the “evaluation” is no more the scientific biography of a researcher, but just a segment of a research activity detached and independent from that biography.
Il ricercatore scientifico "comme un etre sans passé": ancora sugli "effetti collaterali" della "valutazione" meritocratica della ricerca
Mauro, E.
2018-01-01
Abstract
This paper highlights how the «explosion» of the procedures of meritocratic “evaluation” of scientific research fragments the scientific biography of each researcher in numerous and usually brief units. The paper focuses on two major detrimental consequences of this proliferation of “evaluation” procedures. Firstly, researchers spend a lot of time showing that they deserve their job and their salary. As a consequence they lose the motivation intrinsic to their work, to their choice to be researchers: vocation, passion, pleasure to work well and “produce” new knowledge rather than serial and often useless publications for the sake of squaring the numbers required for the “evaluation” procedures. Secondly, researchers are forced to renounce their past which no longer falls within the periods “evaluated” by those procedures, are treated until retirement like newcomers and must continuously show, each time starting from scratch, that they have “produced” something, that they are someone. As a consequence they lose self-esteem: if their value is perpetually under scrutiny, they work and live in perpetual crisis. If the future is always the only thing that matters, the object of the “evaluation” is no more the scientific biography of a researcher, but just a segment of a research activity detached and independent from that biography.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
