Chapter 2 is dedicated to a discussion of the conditions which enabled the emergence of research evaluation systems. Beyond the general phenomena that characterize modern society, such as rationalization, capitalism, or bureaucratization, there are also other elements that should be included as constitutive conditions for evaluative power. The chapter goes on to provide a systematic account of economization and metricization. It argues that these are the two main forces that shape contemporary academia, having enabled the emergence of research evaluation systems. Economization is defined as promoting the idea that science’s economic inputs and products should be utilized for bolstering the economy, while metricization reduces every aspect of science and social life to metrics. The varied impacts of these two forces are described by means of an expansive account of the social processes, values, logics, and technologies of power that undergird today’s research evaluation systems. This chapter therefore lays the foundations for one of the book’s key claims. This is that metrics should be understood as merely a symptom rather than the cause of the difficulties confronting academia today.

Chapter 22 reviews how market-based thinking has come to dominate our value system, and how the overconcentration of power may negatively influence the rate at which we can make progress. For example, as neoliberalism became embedded in modern economic theory, pro-market policies such as reduced regulation, the privatization of public services, and lower taxes became more commonplace. The growing market-based norms in science stem from the fact that this approach to economics began diffusing into other spheres of public life. The way we approached economics also became the way we approached science. Suddenly, scientific discoveries became linked with economic profit maximization and innovation policy, a by-product of neoliberalism’s grip on public affairs. The second part of the chapter highlights how there is an increasing concentration of power and resources in medicine among few actors and disease groups, reflecting on the findings from previous chapters. Chapter 22 also explores how this overconcentration of power may have negative consequences for socially-relevant research, and concludes by providing solutions to counteract this concentration.

This chapter argues that changes to the academic labour process have fundamentally deskilled or deprofessionalized academic labour. The chapter is based on a neo-Marxist appraisal of the proletarianization of academic labour. We argue, first, that universities in Anglosphere countries have become commodified due to the privatization of their funding. Second, the decline in public funding and rise of student fees has resulted in a decomposition of academic labour that minimizes costs and increases the surplus from student fees. Third, the capacity of the state and universities to break down the skills of academic labour is enhanced and then restructured in terms of market veridiction. In the process universities become corporatized and locked into a state regulatory regime that interpellates and cajoles academics into that market-driven mission. Lastly, the chapter contends that academics are alienated from their labour and proletarianized in the process, though they do show forms of resistance which can be regarded as ‘weapons of the weak’ to counterattack the commodification process, and they rely on the remnants of professionalism to defend their conditions.

In this chapter we return to the present to argue for the urgency of a new approach to ethics education and to the place of ethical reasoning in the university as a whole. We note the rise of the literature of the corporate university and criticisms of the moral compass of the university that make teaching ethics to students more difficult. We suggest the deep heritage of the humanities can be brought to bear on this problem.