Who cares about excellence? Social sciences under think tank pressure

Abstract

The emphasis on excellence in university reform efforts around the world coexists uneasily with the increasing privatization and commercialization of academic research and education. While the profitability of truth is arguably most important in the natural sciences, social science and the humanities are also in a twist. Traditional centres of academic research – public or private universities with or without students – have lost the core position they held during much of the second half of the 20th Century in the sphere of social scientific policy research, for example. A new market oriented mode of policy research and consulting features a range of science backed players among which private partisan think tanks perhaps are the most prominent. Think tanks include a wide range of public or private organizations that do not only and not even primarily serve academic purposes, and yet are capable of generating highly competitive contributions both to intellectual conversations and political processes. Observing the historical impact of sprawling groups of well organized neoliberal think tanks dedicated to partisan research, intelligence briefing and public intervention reveals the extent to which categories of innovation, efficiency and excellence are insufficient to capture relevance criteria important to the transformation of social sciences and knowledge power structures past and present.