Page 58 - Through the gate of the neoliberal academy • Herschberg

56 CHAPTER 3
raise these numbers. New forms of assessing academic performance or scientific excellence come with this development.
The changing academic landscape has led to an increase in studies on staff evaluation, and specifically, the evaluation criteria (Lamont, 2009; Musselin, 2010; Van Arensbergen et al., 2014a). Science studies have predominantly engaged with the accuracy of contemporary performance indicators, such as productivity, citation indexes and peer review (e.g., Anninos, 2014; Basu, 2006; Werner, 2015). Human Resource Management-oriented research has examined the HR practices facilitating the recruitment, selection and retention of academics and has recently centred on talent management (Davies & Davies, 2010; Thunnissen et al., 2013). Research in sociology and (critical) organisational studies have emphasised the social construction of evaluation criteria (Lamont, 2009), group dynamics during the evaluation process (Van Arensbergen et al., 2014a) and the production of inequalities in the process and criteria (Lund, 2015; Nielsen, 2016; Özbilgin, 2009; Van den Brink & Benschop, 2012b).
This chapter adds and builds on this latter category of studies by examining how evaluators construct and apply evaluation criteria in academic selection procedures. These criteria are not constructed and applied in a vacuum, but are embedded in academic, national and global contexts. In the wake of the neoliberalisation of academia, the academic labour market is globalised (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997); however, multiple studies have shown how academic labour markets are still distinguished by substantial national characteristics (Enders & Teichler, 1997; Musselin, 2005, 2010). In her extensive study on hiring processes, Musselin (2010) describes how national career systems, as well as institutional and disciplinary features, impact both the ideal type of candidate and selection criteria. This study builds on Musselin’s approach by including macro-discourses when studying selection criteria, which has not been done before.
At the macro-discursive level, two grand discourses that seem most prominent in the current debate on the neoliberal and global university are taken into account: the discourse of internationalisation (e.g., Fabricius, Mortensen, & Haberland, 2017; Leisyte & Rose, 2016; Schartner & Cho, 2017), and the discourse of excellence (e.g., Butler & Spoelstra, 2014; Ramirez & Tiplic, 2014; Van den Brink & Benschop, 2012b). Internationalisation has increasingly become a keyword in policies of European higher-education institutions (Fabricius et al., 2017), as a process of integrating an international dimension into university research, teaching and service functions (Knight, 1994). Excellence has also become a ‘holy grail’, a norm or standard that all higher-education institutions should supposedly strive for. Ramirez and Tiplic