Science policy as implicit cultural policy: evaluation of the arts in Polish academia

ABSTRACT

This paper is concerned with the evaluation of artistic production within the Polish science policy. It analyses the performance-based research funding system (PRFS) in Polish higher arts education and discusses the assessment techniques and value hierarchies underlying the evaluation model. We analyse data from the Integrated System of Information on Science and Higher Education, to examine the cultural activity of artists-academics in Poland and discuss the impact of science policy on the cultural sector. We also compare the Polish system with alternative solutions introduced in other countries (e.g. UK, Australia, Finland, Sweden) and consider possible consequences of different evaluation paradigms.

KEYWORDS:

• evaluation
• implicit cultural policy
• Poland
• research evaluation
• academia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The assessment exercise following the Regulation enacted in 2019 will be conducted in 2021.

2. The data structure and different levels of data aggregation in the 2017 evaluation do not allow us to directly compare two evaluation exercises.

3. Since 2019 only two categories of achievements (1st and 4th) are taken into account in the evaluation of artistic institutions.

4. The remaining evaluation categories and the process of weighting and summing the points are described in the previous publication (Kulczycki, Korzeń, and Korytkowski 2017).

5. With each new regulation, this table has been somewhat modified (for example, in 2019 new types of achievements were added to it) but the general assessment rule (assignment of points to specific types of productions) was maintained.

6. In 2016 the Ministry introduced more precise definitions (e.g. high-graded movies or theatre performances must have a running time of at least 70 minutes) but they were abandoned with the enactment of the new law in 2019.

7. Please note that the total number of the items is different from that in Table 1 due to the fact that interdisciplinary types of achievements were excluded from Figure 1.

8. The ‘theatre and film’ category is not presented as it was not possible to distinguish between creation- and presentation-based achievements.

9. Names of artists in Table 2 were changed for the sake of anonymization.

10. This observation was made by one of the authors who participated in the Ministry’s consultations.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kamila Lewandowska

Kamila Lewandowska, Assistant Professor and head of Research Laboratory at The A. Zelwerowicz National Academy of Dramatic Art in Warsaw. PhD in Economic sciences. Her work focuses on the evaluation of art in different policy contexts. She is particularly interested in how cultural productions are evaluated and valued within cultural and science policies.

Emanuel Kulczycki

Emanuel Kulczycki, Professor of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, PhD in Philosophy. He is the chair of the European Network for Research Evaluation in the Social Sciences and the Humanities, head of Scholarly Communication Research Group AMU and a policy advisor for the Ministry of Science and Higher Education in Poland.