Contenu du sommaire : L'évaluation de la recherche : pour une réouverture des controverses

This article examines the trajectory of an assessment tool dedicated to the humanities and social sciences : the list of journals published in July 2008 by the official French Research Assessment institution (AERES). It highlights the filiations of that tool with previous assessment practices, describes the intense criticism that its publication has provoked, and examines the sociotechnical arrangements performed to support a compromise around a perimeter of scientificity. Far from the conventional wisdom of managerial pressures restricting the autonomy of researchers, this article analyzes journal lists as a powerful reminder of disciplinary conventions, singular epistemic and historical tensions dividing the humanities and social sciences.

This paper analyses the production of media rankings of higher education institutions within an historical, sociological and constructivist perspective. It appeals to the history and sociology of the media, on the one side, and to the history and sociology of quantification, on the other side. Around their emergence in the late 1970s, and focusing on the case study of the French monthly magazine Le Monde de l'éducation, the paper shows the impossible neutrality of these devices based on quantification. Media rankings of higher education institutions are in fact irreducible to their content and methodology; they are also political, journalistic, commercial, organizational and technical devices. This media-centric approach is considered for rethinking contemporary media rankings by exploring the backscene of their methodology and contents.

The current discourse on institutional research evaluations has been shaped by a dominant thesis. As an externally initiated form of performance monitoring, evaluations are considered to be both the expression of and drivers of a comprehensive deprofessionalization of the academic profession. Both evaluating and evaluated researchers assume they will have to adjust their value and evaluation systems in keeping with external benchmarks. Our empirical analysis of evaluation processes at a microlevel contrasts with this thesis, and shows that the academic profession's central values persist, and continue to structure the ways in which the profession makes decisions and acts. One of these values is that evaluations should not just serve to monitor performance and sanction, but instead provide collegial consultancy and feedback. But how is consultancy possible in a performance-monitoring context whose consequences are potentially serious? We address this question by analyzing the decisions and actions of evaluating and evaluated researchers in the context of the German Leibniz Association's evaluation procedure.

In France, evaluations of universities and scientific research institutions are under development and increasing in significance; in particular with the rise of varied formal devices relying on “substantial subjectivity” or “mechanical objectivity”. This article questions the impact of these evaluation tools on the “singular” establishments (Karpik, 2007) and on their future. In this paper, the authors describe a French research institution and bring to light its singular characteristic, in particular its atypical organizational model -based on its size, and on narrow interactions between education, research and industry. The authors are interested in the way the formal de-vices they described “handle” the evaluation of the institution. While the evaluations based on “substantial subjectivity” are globally favorable if not very favorable, they also arouse some controversies. Above all, the institution has difficulty with devices relying on “mechanical objectivity”, in particular with international rankings. The authors underline their normalizing power before discussing, beyond the case studied, the possible emergence of a “desingularisation” process in French academia, which would transform universities and scientific research institutions into differentiated goods, or even into standard goods.

This article is based on twelve in-depth interviews with communication scholars working within the French-speaking part of Belgium. It investigates how they perceive and integrate to their publishing practices the somehow controversial concept of quality, as it is used nowadays in order to evaluate the scholarly publications within the humanities and social sciences. Three specific assumptions underlying the recent discussions around the evaluation will be questioned here as well, id est the explicit and formalized character of the current requirements for quality, the dichotomy of the researchers' attitudes regarding those requirements between full acceptance and stubborn resistance and the unilateral nature of the impact of the evaluation on the publishing practices. It appears indeed that although the respondents primarily link the « prescribed quality » with the production of articles in international top journals, the criteria that should be used in order to prioritize those journals and to differentiate between them are not explicitly formulated. Largely informal, the « script » of quality relating to the evaluation of scholarly publications gives rise to deeply ambivalent representations on the side of the interviewed researchers, and to perceptions of threats as well as of opportunities. This ambivalence seems to resolve itself in everyday practices that « tinker » with the prescribed quality requirements. These kinds of daily tinkering practices should indeed be more valued by policy makers and academic authorities, not the least because of their high potential in societal innovation.

Researchers' answers to the new performance imperatives have been interpreted in terms of strategic boundary work. The authors show that such an approach overestimates the strategic rationality of researchers and the intelligibility of the transformations in the scientific field. The paper analyses the discourses of nanoscience and nanotechnology researchers about French science policy. It shows that the proliferation of devices, information and incentive leads researchers to interpret, and make sense of, the new context. The analysis of this interpretative work underlines the enduring diversity of practices and representations, rather than an adherence to the principles and norms of science policy. Such a sense-making does not only manifest itself through a radical criticism of science policy, but also through a more pragmatic criticism of its ambivalence and contradictions.

The role of the Internet as a source of medical information is essential for citizens, but also for hospitals. These institutions are betting on the development of a web page as a strategy enabling them to improve their relationships with patients, especially patients with cancer. In this paper, we realize a bibliographic review on the online communication of hospitals and a case study on the role of the web page European hospitals French (France, Belgium, Switzerland and Luxembourg) in their relationships with patients suffering from a cancer. The conclusion of the study is that hospitals must make greater efforts to develop Web pages oriented really patient and really based on the release of figures as well as the hierarchy of information.