‘Trust the people, not the institution’: university preparation for the Research Assessment Exercise 2020 in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

A considerable body of studies on neoliberalism in higher education has conducted macro-level philosophical analyses regarding the effects of assessment regimes on university management. This article expands the literature by providing an important set of empirical findings pertaining to Hong Kong universities’ coping strategies in preparing their academics for the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE 2020). Based on 16 in-depth interviews and document review at two universities in Hong Kong, this study reveals that the institutional preparation for the RAE 2020 can be considered as a multifaceted discourse that complexly interweaves managerialism and academic professionalism. This article further discusses how neoliberal forces, as manifested in the RAE 2020 policy, are locally interpreted, resisted and negotiated as they are shaped by different local contextual factors. The findings indicate the need for greater commitment to academic professionalism in research management and stress the importance of manager-academics’ benign and mediating engagement in the coping process.

KEYWORDS:

• Neoliberalism
• managerialism
• university management
• manager-academics
• Research Assessment Exercise

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous participants in this study for their incredible generosity and support. We would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Task Force on Review of Research Policy and Funding. (2018). Review Report. https://www.ugc. edu.hk/doc/eng/ugc/publication/report/report20180911/review_report.pdf.

2 UGC (2021). University Grants Committee RAE 2020 – Panel Membership. https://www.ugc.edu.hk/eng/ugc/activity/research/rae/pm/rae2020pm.html

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by University of Hong Kong’s Seed Fund for Basic Research [grant number 201711159252].