Thomas Franssen

The Material practices of quantification: Measuring ‘deprivation’ in the Amsterdam Neighbourhood Policy

The use of indicators and indexes in social policy, as part of evidence-based policy, is understood by governmentality scholars as ‘techniques of governance’. However, we know very little about how the process of quantification is enacted in the material practices that constitute social policy itself. In this article we focus on a particular quantified object: the ‘Normal Amsterdam Level’ (NAP), used in an Amsterdam Neighbourhood Policy programme. We follow the NAP from its birth, to its life and its afterlife. We show that the qualification ‘deprived’ calls forth a whole set of problematic arrangements which are lost in a process of quantification. We understand the NAP as a generative device that actively assembles and arranges the world. These assemblages are rendered ‘hard’ through semiotic, statistical and visual techniques that produce facts about targeted neighbourhoods in relation to a city-wide average, thus serving as evidence and legitimisation for policy interventions.

Reflections around ‘the cautionary use’ of the h-index: response to Teixeira da Silva and Dobránszki

In a recent Letter to the Editor Teixeira da Silva and Dobránszki (2018) present a discussion of the issues regarding the h-index as an indicator for the evaluation of individual scholars, particularly in the current landscape of the proliferation of online sources that provide individual level bibliometric indicators. From our point of view, the issues surrounding the h-index go far beyond the problems mentioned by TSD. In this letter we provide some overview of this, mostly by expanding TSD’s original argument and discussing more conceptual and global issues related to the indicator, particularly in the outlook of a strong proliferation of online sources providing individual researcher indicators. Our discussion focuses on the h-index and the profusion of sources providing it, but we emphasize that many of our points are of a more general nature, and would be equally relevant for other indicators that reach the same level of popularity as the h-index.

The Drawbacks of Project Funding for Epistemic Innovation: Comparing Institutional Affordances and Constraints of Different Types of Research Funding

Abstract Over the past decades, science funding shows a shift from recurrent block funding towards project funding mechanisms. However, our knowledge of how project funding arrangements influence the organizational and epistemic properties of research is limited. To study this relation, a bridge between science policy studies and science studies is necessary. Recent studies have analyzed the relation between the affordances and constraints of project grants and the epistemic properties of research. However, the potentially very different affordances and constraints of funding arrangements such as awards, prizes and fellowships, have not yet been taken into account. Drawing on eight case studies of funding arrangements in high performing Dutch research groups, this study compares the institutional affordances and constraints of prizes with those of project grants and their effects on organizational and epistemic properties of research. We argue that the prize case studies diverge from project-funded research in three ways: 1) a more flexible use, and adaptation of use, of funds during the research process compared to project grants; 2) investments in the larger organization which have effects beyond the research project itself; and 3), closely related, greater deviation from epistemic and organizational standards. The increasing dominance of project funding arrangements in Western science systems is therefore argued to be problematic in light of epistemic and organizational innovation. Funding arrangements that offer funding without scholars having to submit a project-proposal remain crucial to support researchers and research groups to deviate from epistemic and organizational standards.

Diversity in the Large-Scale Pole of Literary Production: An Analysis of Publishers' Lists and the Dutch Literary Space, 2000-2009

This article analyses the structure of the Dutch literary space through an analysis of 215 publishers’ lists of Dutch fiction and poetry publishers. Examining the ways in which publishers include different genre-language combinations on their lists offers a novel way to understand the structure of literary spaces. Earlier research has mainly seen analyses of the organisational field and the practices of actors, and until now has neglected the publishers’ lists of publishing houses. This neglect is critical as it has simplified ideas about what publishing houses actually publish on the different poles of contemporary literary fields. My analysis of the Dutch literary space shows that, besides small poetry publishers, all other publishers – in terms of their publishers’ lists – are part of the large-scale pole of literary production, but that this large-scale pole is much more diverse and complex than conceptualised in earlier research.

Portfolios of Worth: Capitalizing on Basic and Clinical Problems in Biomedical Research Groups

How are “interesting” research problems identified and made durable by academic researchers, particularly in situations defined by multiple evaluation principles? Building on two case studies of research groups working on rare diseases in academic biomedicine, we explore how group leaders arrange their groups to encompass research problems that latch onto distinct evaluation principles by dividing and combining work into “basic-oriented” and “clinical-oriented” spheres of inquiry. Following recent developments in the sociology of (e)valuation comparing academics to capitalist entrepreneurs in pursuit of varying kinds of worth, we argue that the metaphor of the portfolio is helpful in analyzing how group leaders manage these different research lines as “alternative investment options” from which they were variously hoping to capitalize. We argue portfolio development is a useful concept for exploring how group leaders fashion “entrepreneurial” practices to manage and exploit tensions between multiple matrices of (e)valuation and conclude with suggestions for how this vocabulary can further extend analysis of epistemic capitalism within science and technology studies.