Chapter 6: Metrics as Time-saving Devices

Academics never seem to have enough time. Their everyday life is filled with emails, meetings, marking, grant applications, travelling, and other assorted miscellaneous tasks. Many would confess or proclaim that there is little time for the ‘real’ academic work of reading, reflecting, (re)searching, writing, and truth-seeking. There is the sense of busyness that is not necessarily conducive to productivity, and there is the feeling of breathlessness and suffocation that is corroding the autonomy and space for experimentation and exploration. Many have considered the relentless demand or request to produce more – more publications, more citations, more students, more public engagement, more impact, and so on –as a consequence of neoliberalism and the regime of new public management since the 1980s. Coinages such as ‘audit culture’ (Power, 1997) and ‘evaluation society’ (Dahler-Larsen, 2012) are attempts to understand as well as to resist the outcome-oriented (e.g. value for money) and top-down management of the academic lifeworld.