La valutazione della qualità della ricerca nelle discipline manageriali: buoni propositi, cattive pratiche e urgenti cambiamenti

(Research Quality Evaluation in the Managerial Disciplines: Good Intentions, Bad Practices, and Urgent Changes)

Abstract

The evaluation of university professors’ activities has recently become a crucial issue in the academic debate, with a particular consideration for research funding. Beyond the mere financial aspects of such a domain, there is a reputational framework involved in this field that reshapes the power architecture of the Italian universities – and of society as a whole through this. This essay focuses on the evaluation of university professors’ activities within the field of managerial sciences. Despite significant differences between the Italian and the Western research evaluation approaches, in the last thirty years the field has seen a deep change in research methodology: the approach developed by mainstream economists at the international level has at last been adopted. This approach highlights mere research activities as the main – if not the only – criterion to evaluate the quality of a good professor. Teaching activities and knowledge transfer have almost lost relevance. Hence, the evaluation of university professors’ activities is only based on peer reviews and citation indexes, de facto delivering the evaluation only to self-referential academics. After highlighting the questionable aspects of this narrow approach, the essay shows how research is not currently evaluated on the basis of a serious scientific methodology. Finally, the paper criticizes the evaluation of the quality of research activities based on bad tools provided by what has now become a pseudo-science and attempts to add, to the current evaluation approach, the assessment of non-academic factors such as knowledge transfer skill, awards from non-public or non-academic institutions, and the evaluation of the general culture that good professors and scholars should hold.