Evaluative Inquiry: Engaging Research Evaluation Analytically and Strategically

Traditional frameworks for academic evaluation are focused on registering the achievements of research units’ academic and societal achievements. These frameworks and the ways they are usually carried out are built on a few dichotomies: academic versus societal spheres, quantitative versus qualitative approaches, and representative versus intervening analyses. We argue that these dichotomies contribute to a notion of academic achievement that is unrealistic, in a normative and descriptive sense. The concept of the “evaluative inquiry,” as proposed here, amends the linear and individualised notion of academic work and its evaluation and discusses the implications of these moves for the work of the analyst. We suggest instead to understand academic achievement as distributed over a host of academic and non-academic participants to be studied by means of a portfolio approach. This approach to research evaluation requires a more engaged analyst who takes evaluation seriously as both an analytical and a strategic project.