Knowledge Rules

Demands for “measuring” the “value” of knowledge have never been so pressing. Whether in the name of the public, or for the sake of building competitive “knowledge economies,” universities and other knowledge institutions are being re-engineered in ways that destabilize traditional notions of teaching, research and publishing. The purpose of Knowledge Rules is to generate an informed discussion about the metrics involved in different forms of evaluations: editors, the academic book market, faculty hiring committees, tenure commissions, funding agencies or international rankings of universities all involve evaluative criteria and metrological scales that often remain implicit. The development of information and communication technologies also transforms the ways in which academic knowledge is validated and diffused, as citation indexes, search engines or other electronic interfaces redefine the patterns of its circulation, but also the forms of its publication.

How are these developments transforming the academic landscape? What is their impact on the ways in which knowledge is made public or, on the contrary, privately appropriated? How are they changing the nature of the social relations involved in teaching or researching? What are the new forms of mediation between knowledge and its publics? To the extent that the value of knowledge is never an abstract question, but the result of socially situated operations of measurement and evaluation associated with different interests and agendas, we hope that Knowledge Rules will contribute to a better understanding of these issues by generating a discussion cutting across disciplinary and professional boundaries.

On the web: Knowledge Rules

Citation: Knowledge Rules, ed. Nicolas Guilhot, http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/knowledgerules/.