Auditing the Academy: A Comparative Study of Neoliberalism and Academic Knowledge Production in Northern Europe

This project aims to empirically investigate how neoliberalisation of the academy — especially as it is experienced through research assessment, rankings, key performance indicators, benchmarking, and similar audit processes — has affected academic knowledge production in the Social Sciences, and if so, to document what some of the key impacts might be. The present research is undertaken in five jurisdictions that are ‘representative’ of both the Nordic countries and Northern Europe: Iceland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The research involves individual interviews with academics (social scientists), interviews with key informants, and discourse analysis of documentary evidence.