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Abstract:
Evaluation has been put on the agenda of most Governments as
a central process to enhance the public research institutions’ performance (Geuna,
1999, Geuna and Martin, 2003, Shapira and Kuhlman, 2003). New agencies or
intermediate bodies have been settled up, both at the Government and at the
institutions’ level, aiming to assess the quality of research and its impact on
the socio-economic environment.
In Italy, the pressure for a greater accountability of the public research
institutions started at the beginning of nineties, but the system was deeply
modified in 1999.
Moreover, the Government at the beginning of 2004 launched a formalised
evaluation exercise (the VTR), aimed to assess the research performance of all
the public institutions (Universities and public research agencies) across
scientific fields, for a three-years period. The modification recently
introduced in the Government criteria for the core funding allocation to the
Universities would assure the impact of VTR results on funding decisions.
Different key interested groups, both from academics (Conference of Rectors) and
from stakeholders (mainly Industrial Associations), contributed to the
development of the described process, by interacting with the Government and
with the intermediate bodies in charge for establishing the evaluation
procedures.
The aim of the paper is to investigate how the new evaluation procedures, even
at this early stage, have been implemented by the public research institutions,
and how these procedures are changing the internal models of research direction
and organisation. The paper was prepared for the Sociology of the Sciences
Yearbook Conference on “Changing Knowledge Production through Evaluation”
Bielefeld, 9-11 June 2005
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