The Unintended Consequences of Using Direct Incentives to Drive the Complex Task of Research Dissemination
- Authors: Muthama, Evelyn , McKenna, Sioux
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/187116 , vital:44569 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.25159/1947-9417/6688"
- Description: Universities have used an array of incentives to increase academic publications, which are highly rewarded in the South African higher education funding formula. While all universities use indirect incentives, such as linking promotion and probation to publication, the mechanisms used in some institutions have taken a very direct form, whereby authors are paid to publish. This process has paralleled a large rise in publication outputs alongside increased concerns about quality. Significantly, there are ethical questions to be asked when knowledge dissemination is so explicitly linked to financial reward through the payment of commission to academics. Based on an analysis of institutional policies and data from an online survey and interviews with academics from seven South African universities, we argue that when money is the main means used to encourage academics to contribute to knowledge, numerous unintended consequences may emerge. These include a focus on quantity rather than the quality of research, a rise in predatory publishing, and resentment among academics. We argue that incentives, in particular direct payment for publications, undermine the academic project by positioning publications in terms of exchange-value rather than their use-value as a contribution to knowledge building.
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- Date Issued: 2020
Conditions constraining and enabling research production in Historically Black Universities in South Africa
- Authors: Muthama, Evelyn
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: Universities and colleges, Black -- South Africa , Universities and colleges -- Research -- South Africa , Education, Higher -- South Africa , Universities and colleges -- South Africa -- History , Black people -- Education -- South Africa -- History , Discrimination in higher education -- South Africa -- History
- Language: English
- Type: text , Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/131527 , vital:36591
- Description: The South African higher education system has a highly uneven landscape emerging from its apartheid past. Institutions remain categorised along racial lines within categories known as ‘Historically Black’ and ‘Historically White’ institutions, or alternatively ‘Historically Disadvantaged’ and ‘Historically Advantaged’ universities. Alongside such categorisations, universities fall within three types, which arose from the restructuring of the higher education landscape post-apartheid through a series of mergers: traditional universities, comprehensive universities, and universities of technology. This study which is part of a larger National Research Foundation-funded project looking at institutional differentiation in South Africa, sought to investigate the conditions enabling and constraining production of research in the Historically Black Universities (HBUs). By providing clarity as to the nature of truth and the concept of knowledge underpinning study, Critical Realism ensures that the study moves beyond the experiences and events captured in the data to the identification of causal mechanisms. Archer’s theory of Social Realism is used alongside Critical Realism, both as a meta-theory to provide an account of the social world and as a more substantive theory in the analysis of data. Social Realism entails understanding that the social world emerges in a complex interplay of powers in the domains of structure, culture and agency. Identifying the powers in each of these domains that enabled or constrained research development meant moving beyond suggesting simple causal relationships to ensure that I identified the complexities of the interplay of mechanisms. Data was collected from all seven institutions designated by the Department of Higher Education and Training as HBUs, by online survey, in depth interviews with academics and heads of research, and through the collection of a range of national and institutional documentation. Using analytical dualism, I endeavoured to identify some of the enablements and constraints at play. There were a number of areas of strength in research in the HBUs. There has also been a significant increase in research output over the last decade; however, the study also identified a number of mechanisms that constrained research productivity. The study found that while there were a number of mechanisms that appeared to have causal tendencies across all the institutions, there were a number of very specific institutional differences. There was very little consistency in understanding of the purpose of research as being key to what universities and academics do. The implication of this incoherence in the domain of culture (i.e. beliefs and discourses in Archer’s terms) is that various interventions in the structural domain intended to foster increased research output often had unintended consequences. Unless there are explicit discussions about how and why research is valuable to the institution and to the country there is unlikely to be sustained growth in output. In particular, the data analysis raises concerns about an instrumentalist understanding of research output in the domain of culture. This in part emerged from the lack of a historical culture of research and was found to be complimentary to managerialist discourses. Another key mechanism identified in the analysis was the use of direct incentives to drive research productivity. Such initiatives seemed to be complementary to a more instrumentalist understanding of the purpose of research and thereby to potentially constrain the likelihood of sustained research growth. While many of the participants were in favour of the use of research incentives, it was also evident that this was often problematic because it steered academics towards salami slicing, and other practices focused on quantity as opposed to quality research. Predatory publications, in particular, have emerged as a problem whereby the research does not get read or cited and so it fails to contribute to knowledge dissemination. Another constraint to research production was related to the increased casualisation of academic staff, which has exacerbated difficulties in attracting and retaining staff especially in rural areas. In South Africa, 56% of academics in universities are now hired on a contract basis which constrained the nurturing of an academic identity and the extent of commitment to the university and its particular academic project. In the HBUs, these employment conditions were exacerbated by increased teaching loads as a result of increased number of students (undergraduates and postgraduates) that have not been matched with similar increases in academic staff. There was a nascent discourse of social justice that focused on research as a core driver of knowledge production in some of the HBUs. This is potentially an area of strength for the HBUs especially emerging from their rural position as there was a complementary culture of social concerns. There was evidence that the nexus between research and community engagement could be a strong means of both strengthening institutional identity and increasing research productivity. But unless the nexus is clearly articulated, a systematic process of support is unlikely to emerge. Given the extent to which the rural positioning of HBUs has been acknowledged to constrain research engagement, this finding has a number of positive implications.
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- Date Issued: 2019
Death of the PhD: when industry partners determine doctoral outcomes
- Authors: Frick, Liezel , McKenna, Sioux , Muthama, Evelyn
- Date: 2017
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/66680 , vital:28981 , ISSN 1469-8366 , https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2017.1263467
- Description: Pre-print , The PhD is the highest formal qualification and signifies a scholar’s rite of passage as a legitimate contributor of new knowledge in a field. Examiner reports make claims about what is legitimate in a thesis and what is not and thus articulate the organising principles through which participation in a field is measured. The authors analysed 39 examiners’ reports on 13 PhDs produced over a five-year period by scholars from the Higher Education Research doctoral studies programme at Rhodes University in South Africa. Drawing on aspects of Karl Maton’s Legitimation Code Theory (LCT), this study uses the dimensions of LCT:Specialisation and LCT:Semantics to explore what kinds of knowledge, skills and procedures and what kinds of knowers are validated in the field of Higher Education Research through the examination process. The study found that despite concerns in the literature about the a-theoretical nature of the Higher Education Studies field, examiners valued high-level theoretical and meta-theoretical engagement as well as methodological rigour. In addition, examiners prized the ability to demonstrate a strong ideological position, to use a clear doctoral voice, and to recognise the axiological drive of the field. The analysis showed that examiners were interested in strong contextualisation of the problem-spaces in higher education in South Africa but also commented positively on candidates’ ability to move from troubling an issue within its context to being able to abstract findings so as to contribute to the field as a whole.
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- Date Issued: 2017
The contradictory conceptions of research in historically black universities
- Authors: Muthama, Evelyn , McKenna, Sioux
- Date: 2017
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/187183 , vital:44577 , xlink:href="http://dx.doi. org/10.18820/2519593X/pie. v35i1.10"
- Description: Research is conceptualised in multiple and contradictory ways within and across Historically Black Universities (HBUs) with consequences for knowledge production. Under the apartheid regime, research was deliberately underdeveloped in such institutions and this continues to have an impact. We argue that if HBUs are to move from the constraints of the past into the possibilities of the future, there is a need for a thorough understanding both of how research is currently conceptualised, and of the consequences of such conceptions for research output. We used a critical discourse analysis of interviews, documents and survey data from seven HBUs to identify the dominant discourses about the purposes of research. The findings are four dominant conceptions of research that sometimes contradict each other across and within the HBUs. These are research as integral to academic identity; research for social justice; research as an economic driver and research as an instrumentalist requirement for job security, promotion and incentives. These conceptions seemed to emerge in part because of the history of the institutions and create both constraining and enabling effects on research production.
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- Date Issued: 2017
Book Review Growing the next generation of researchers: A handbook for emerging researchers and their mentors, Holness, L
- Authors: Motshoane, Puleng , Muthama, Evelyn , McKenna, Sioux
- Date: 2015
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/187205 , vital:44579 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.14426/cristal.v3i2.56"
- Description: South Africa urgently needs more researchers (NRF, 2008; NDP, 2011). We also need a transformation in the demographics of our researchers. One indicator of this is that currently only 14% of university professors are black African, and only 2% are black African females (DHET, 2012). The Staffing South Africa's Universities Framework includes a number of initiatives to drive the process of growing the next generation of academics. For example, the nGAP project has inserted 125 new posts into the higher education system in 2015, with more to follow. This project allows for new academics to undertake postgraduate study and develop as teachers and researchers through mentorship, a reduced teaching load and so on.
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- Date Issued: 2015