Organizational use of evaluations: Governance and control in research evaluation

Organizations perform evaluations in order to demonstrate their trustworthiness to theoutside world and to produce knowledge for use by the management of the organization.In the planning and application of specific evaluations in the organization, differentparticipants or stakeholders very often disclose different, hidden or conflicting agendas.In recent years, the use of evaluations in organizations has grown rapidly and we havewitnessed the rise of a new bureaucratic instrument in the realm of knowledgeproduction in organizations, viz., internal evaluations. Such evaluations produce a set ofdata as part of the evaluation process and the long-term impact of this new systematicallyorganised set of data on organizational activities are normally not taken seriously intoconsideration when the use of evaluations in organizations are discussed. Saiddifferently, evaluations have become a major factor in the management of organizations,but the academic literature on internal evaluation very rarely discusses the impact of thisinstrument on the long term behaviour and activity of members of the organization. Thislacuna in the literature persists despite the well known fact, established by numerousstudies of organizational sociology, that people tend to adapt to external behaviouraldemands especially when related to power relations in the organization.keywords: research evaluation, governance, social control, publication counts.