New Hegemonic Tendencies in the Production of Knowledge: How Research Quality Evaluation Schemes and the Corporatization of Journals Impact on Academic Life

Abstract

Many governments have now established systems for ranking academic journals in terms of their “quality,” as evidenced by their “impact on the field.” This article argues that the new ranking systems maintain or extend existing hegemonies of knowledge. While the declared goal of the schemes is to measure “academic output” more realistically than is possible with purely quantitative measures, the result is that journals previously considered equal are now ranked. While there has been consultation with academics, in Australia, for example, the scope provided for criticizing the scheme was limited to the details of how to rank particular journals. This formalization of journal rank orders will increase the degree of hierarchy in an international publishing world that is already full of disparities, between the core and periphery of power/knowledge, and between global and more local languages. If schemas of journal evaluation are shaped by the ethnocentrism of the globally dominant players, alternative cultural value-systems may be ignored and journals in marginal countries devalued. Another danger is that ranking can further marginalize different, alternative voices within our own culture, or within a shared global culture. Critical analysts in the humanities and social sciences, as well as all natural scientists whose work is in some way politicized, are particularly vulnerable to the kinds of punishments that now go along with publishing unpopular