Playing the Indicator Game

Roland Bal analyzes the strategies his research group developed to deal with the interlinked dynamics of research evaluation in a multi-disciplinary institutional environment characteristic of much STS research. Scholars in such environments constantly need to navigate and negotiate the standards of evaluation, in complex choreographies of cooperation and competition with other disciplinary groups.
Bal describes strategies his group has successfully used, and how these strategies have both shifted the way research quality is assessed within the department as well as changed the way his group works and publishes. In conclusion, he describes performance management systems and research practices as co-constituted and calls for a debate on which forms of evaluation infrastructures allow for better ways of doing research in STS.