‘Rigorous’ and ‘systematic’ for what? A critical re-examination of educational research and its material existence beginning from the Italian situation

Abstract

The paper critically discusses the neoliberal politics of knowledge and the soft normative regime that steers and directs the material condition of existence of educational research, starting from the case of Italy. The fundamental aspects, which regard the form, the ends (and indirectly the content) of a research, are to a substantial degree subtracted from the free determination of the researchers. To speak, therefore, of being rigorous and systematic in educational research means in the first place to investigate the forms and ways in which constituent elements of research come to be constructed in the real interaction between ‘governors’ (National Agency for the Evaluation of the University System and Research in Italy) and the ‘governed’ (researchers), marked by the hegemony of the former over the latter. Some consequences of the new game of science are discussed: first, on the researchers themselves; second, on the internal articulation of the tradition of research in the educational research field, in Italy.

Introduction

The problem of being ‘rigorous’ and ‘systematic’ in educational research will not be treated in substantial or genetic terms, with recourse to analytical categories of an epistemological or logical nature, isolating the question from economic and political factors that condition the material existence of an area of specific research. It is instead on the analysis and interpretation of these latter factors that this article will focus. Educational research, like educational practice itself, is a subset of a wider social system, and so moves within a ‘horizon of connections’ (Adorno, 1959: 8). We need to examine these connections, thereby avoiding considering it as an expression of an absolutely immediate order, or as a monad without doors or windows.

The reasons for this choice are the following. All sectors of research, in Italy as, I assume, elsewhere (and not only) in Europe – each with differing times, modalities and intensities of their own, have been made to submit to a soft normative regime – the neoliberal politics of knowledge ¹ – that imposes monitoring and orients the material conditions of existence without the researcher being alerted to any restriction of his or her freedom. ² Not only in financial terms to direct arguments and the content of research in directions held to be preferable for extra-scientific (and extra-educational) motives, but also for that which regards the so-called ‘quality’ of the research, and so the way in which this must be conducted, and explicitly what its purposes must be. To monitor and orient the material conditions of a research project means: a quality research, and therefore one that is rewarded, is such if it satisfies determinate formal requisites of a structural type and if it is oriented toward reaching determinate ends.

The extra-scientific power which we will discuss is the governmental power that, through the administration of the State ³ , particular techniques and procedures, guides the conduct of people, both in learning and research institutions, and through them. An important detail is the following: ‘the government, far from trusting only to discipline for reaching the more intimate meanderings of the individual, seeks […] to obtain a self-governance of the individual, that is, to produce a determined type of relationship with themselves’ (Dardot and Laval, 2010: 10). It governs half of one’s freedom, playing actively on the space of freedom left to the individuals so that they conform autonomously to a determinate norm.

Among the techniques responsible for guiding the conduct of people is the so-called assessment of the ‘quality’ of the research, according to discretionary indicators which, thanks to the recent debates in France ⁴ and Italy ⁵ , we can realistically see as a true form of governance ⁶ , ‘a new way to give orders’, as was written without minimizing euphemisms (Gori, 2011), a ‘dispositive of voluntary servitude’ (Gori and del Volgo, 2009), a ‘regime of truth’ (Pinto, 2012).

In more general terms, we will try to bring to light and to sketch the lineaments of action of this governmental power, as an implicit pedagogy and factory of the neoliberal subject. The philosophy of education can find, along these lines of inquiry, its field of analysis in the critique of governance of educational policy and of neoliberal knowledge, in order to examine which non-neutral forms of rationality are at work in them. The rising importance ‘on “managed research”, and the pressures to obtain “funded research” constitute further evidence that academic freedom, at least in terms of the academics’ determination over research are concerned, are increasingly “compromised”, or at least “under pressure”’ (Olssen and Peters, 2005: 326).

The fundamental aspects of research, which regard the form, the ends (and indirectly its content), are prevented from being freely determined by the researchers. Research is monitored and guided a priori, in the case of Italy, by the National Agency for the Evaluation of the University System and Research (ANVUR), founded in 2006, and whose director, a political appointment, is currently a professor of General Surgery, with research interests in the area of Thyroid Surgery. On the Governing Board, we find five other professors from the following disciplines: cognitive, neuropsychology, economics, material physics, philology, mathematical analytics. The Director of Research Quality Assessment, an economist, developed as a researcher at the Study Centre of the General Confederation of Italian Industry (Confindustria – the principal employer’s association in Italy), and directed the Study Centre. ANVUR itself, we read in its own mission statement published in 2010, ‘works according to the best practices of evaluation at the international level’, ‘defines criteria and methodology for evaluation based on objective and verifiable parameters’, ‘exercises functions of guiding the activity of evaluation’. The National Agency of Evaluation ‘steering the assessment activities’, ‘drawing up the procedures’, ‘providing benchmarks for public fund allocation’, ‘assessing the effectiveness and efficiency of public funding programmes’ (see Mission: www.anvur.it), claims the right to establish the very definition of the ‘quality’ of research to be its own mandate, through the instrument of evaluation of the quality of research, and has diffused the perfect incarnation of neoliberal techniques of governance and of how to conduct the conducted.

This is the normative context in which the practice of evaluation (and the practices of research) takes place. As we see, the disciplinary competence and the consequent vision of research present in the Governing Boards and at the head of Research Quality Assessment exclude entire disciplinary fields: political science, sociology, jurisprudence, philosophy, history, pedagogy, art. These latter disciplines return in the ‘group of experts’ that evaluate the ‘products’ of research, but they are not in the command module.

To speak, therefore, of being ‘rigorous’ and ‘systematic’ in educational research, in my view, means in the first place to critically investigate the forms and ways in which these two constituent elements of research (and the research itself in its structural elements) come to be constructed in the real interaction between ‘governors’ (ANVUR in Italy) and the ‘governed’ (researchers), marked by the hegemony of the former over the latter. ⁷ Gramsci’s thesis for which ‘every relation of hegemony is necessarily a pedagogical relation’ that is tested ‘in the whole field of international and world events’ is particularly relevant here (Gramsci, 2011).

The theme of the relationship between politics and science is not new, this is clear; today it presents itself through peculiar means that we need to investigate. The values that direct educational research will be taken seriously here, but I do so in order to theoretically demonstrate their relative nature. Every concept that expresses them, following Horkheimer, will be conceived not as an intellectual atom needing operational translation, but as a fragment of a wider reality in which it finds its meaning (Horkheimer, 1947).

Note on the theoretical constellation of reference

The present study, critical-theoretical and not empirical ⁸ , is situated alongside and in dialogue with the tradition of critical Marxian theory. This is particularly so inasmuch as it treats of the apparently socially necessary, or of the ‘critique of ideology’. More specifically it refers to the critical theory of society of the ‘first’ Frankfurt School, whose analytical methods intervene as presumed constants within the developed argument. The sporadic references, here and there, to a few terms from Foucault, do not signify any privileged use of biopolitical categories and are not central to the critical theory constructed here and applied to neoliberal policies of knowledge and its incarnations. In Adorno, in the Minima Moralia of 1951, we find the idea, utilized below, of thought that has ‘become its own watchdog’, due to which ‘thought has forgotten how to think itself’ and so ‘thinking no longer means anything more than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think’ (Adorno, 2005: 197). Neoliberalism, understood in its essentials, is analysed here – this not being a political theory essay – as a new configuration of capitalist market accumulation.

The purpose of this article, as in this theoretical tradition (Horkheimer, 1992), is not to articulate conceptual structures that organize experiential data and allow analysis of the empirical world to become part of the processes of production. Rather, critical theory is descriptive, prognostic and evaluative. It is motivated by an interest in creating a truly human society. In this sense, the concern for human happiness – including that of researchers themselves – can be achieved only through a change in the material conditions of existence (Marcuse, 1968: 66–67). The internal coherence of this study, then, is founded on the relationship that arises between theorizing and the praxis of transformation to which it seeks to give voice and means. Its coherence is therefore ethical and political. Within this approach, the troika of educational research–assessment–ANVUR (the latter in Italy) provides the fragment of reality that leads us to the political-economic factors that it signifies. We need to always keep in mind the long-term material conditions – neither natural nor accidental – difficult to change, which influence our society in various ways and shades, through the forms and modes of the capitalist market economy. The new economic configuration of capitalism – neoliberalism – develops from the preceding ones as an ordinary mutation (Han, 2017). It is within this framework that educational research will be discussed here.

The new game of (quality) research

Who decides today what the game of research is, or how quality research must be? And further: with what right does someone assign value to something? Do the researchers, starting from judgments of a logical, epistemological and educational nature, take into account the internal history of their research field, or do they instead consider its politics, embodied in ad hoc agencies (ANVUR in Italy, Hcéres in France, for example), starting from economic judgments? Are the youngest researchers knowledgeable about the relevance of the philosophical questions presupposed in the activity of research? Observing the Italian situation, and the field of educational research, I believe I can answer ‘no’. It seems that the neoliberal researcher, entrepreneur of him or herself, interested in the performative, and no longer in the denotative aspects of his research, which has assumed the activity of the market as the paradigm for human praxis in general, is day by day becoming reality. To philosophize about research, to reason over the concept of rigour or systematic thinking, appears to be an unproductive luxury, or just passé. The most urgent thing is to pay attention to the indicators of quality, to the verdict of the Research Quality Assessment, to the benchmarks for scientific credentialling. This last parameter is symptomatic and sheds light on the normative context in which the practice of research can happen. The ‘value-benchmarks for non-bibliometric candidates (2018–2020)’ for the sector ‘pedagogy and pedagogical history’ for the position of associate professor are the following: 13 articles in the last five years, four articles in the Class A journals in the past 10 years, a book in the last 10 years. To become a full professor, only one book is needed in the past 10 years, but also required are 32 articles plus seven in the Class A journals. The content, for the moment, is not an issue. ⁹ These benchmarks are a technique of governance that changes form (and content) in a research field: in the area of educational research, in the near future, the only form or at least the prevalent one will be the article and no longer the book.

In reply to this situation, I begin from a critical analysis of a key element that characterizes research: assessment, developing on what has already been discussed. How are the ‘products’ of research assessed? Research increases its value if it is published in a ‘Class A’ journal. Who establishes the rules that generate the classifications of journals (of the educational research area in our case, but this is a general issue) in such a way as to distribute them in ‘classes’ of merit (A, B, C, D)? ANVUR, through the collaborations between academics of each sector. Once the classification is done, through criteria presented as neutral but which in reality are normative and derived from administrative-political perspectives, anyone that wants to publish in a Class A journal must package his or her research in such a way as to cover the requisite expected bases, thereby applying the required standards. He or she must publish in a top journal, because when the ‘quality’ of the research is assessed, or when it is examined (as always through the procedures of ANVUR) for hiring or promotion, having been published in a Class A journal becomes decisive. And this process of assessment concerns both the young researchers at the start of their career as well as the older professors who compete for the highest academic and professional title. Just as having published, preferably in the English language, in an international journal included in the list of ANVUR (EERJ is not part of it), which functions as an actual Ratings Agency like those that assess individual State economies, which pre-selects, always with the help of expert academics, those held to be worthy. The scientific publications become in this way ‘quasi-money’, units of account, for careers, financing, classifications, and they grow as a financial mass such that no-one can any longer credibly read them, and so it becomes inevitable to assess them as indexes and algorithms.

What, therefore, do ‘rigour’ and ‘systematic’ mean within these determinate normative contexts, fruit of a chain of conventions that retroactively act on the behaviours of the researchers? That an already predetermined ‘rigour’ and a ‘being systematic’ exists a priori with respect to the chain of conventions originating from ANVUR and from the corresponding and compatible research methods (empirical research for the most part) and, only secondarily, from the traditions of research that refer to the journals held to be first class, in any case progressively altered by the process of adjusting to and of normalization imposed by governmental means. The epistemological and logical questions, and the methodological consequences, up to the individual approaches to research become secondary in importance. The deliberations and the judgments of the researcher that cannot not publish within the foreseen perimeter and according to the indicators of pre-defined quality are possible only within a limited field.

If, for example, the journal X of Class A publishes only qualitative empirical research, to the researcher interested in publishing there is no choice but to submit a qualitative empirical research, using the prescribed standards of being rigorous and systematic expected for this kind of investigation, or else no rigour and nothing systematic if these are not held to be relevant, as is prevalent in a post-modern, libertarian approach under the insignia ‘anything goes’, taking up, and at times misinterpreting, the motto of Feyerabend. Further, the new game of science, synchronizing its speed of execution with that of the markets, involves rapid timing: this progressively puts out of play any slower or longer researches that take the form of full and thick essays in favour of short and concise articles. In the case of educational research, in Italy, by now the ‘points’ assigned to the two types of publications by the academic and non-academic ‘juries’ tend to be the same. For example: an article of five or six pages long published in English in an international first class journal accredited by ANVUR – independently of its content – that does not add anything to what is already known, can in the end be worth as much or more than an essay of 400 pages written in Italian whose author committed five or more years to a single research, destined hopefully to influence its sector of research in the long run, something that cannot be assessed in advance. And this, it is clear, is not an argument based on ‘sovereignty’ or on nationalism, an invitation to re-enclose ourselves within the national linguistic borders.

Some consequences of the new game of science, which I have shortly described, and with a quick look at one segment of its mechanism: first, for the researchers themselves; second, for the internal articulation of the tradition of research in the educational research field, in Italy. On the researchers: they progressively abandon that which is not explicitly a form comprising the behaviours of research expected and rewarded with the mark of quality. The arguments for researches will be for those that are best financed and not those that are most urgent on the basis of scientific and educational considerations. The methods and the research approaches adopted will bit by bit be held to be standard (empirical research) and able to generate quickly the required results, privileging the goal of publication to make a university career. On the internal articulation of the traditions of research, in the case of Italy: coming to be determinate is the progressive prevalence of standard empirical research, and the progressive abandonment of the lines of philosophical, theoretical and historical research – ‘Filosofia dell’Educazione’, ‘Pedagogia Generale’, ‘Storia della Pedagogia’ – that require lengthy times, and that are not able to produce immediately useful results that can be translated into improving existing educational practices.

One result of this tendency is the list of Class A journals published by ANVUR and updated on 31 October 2018 for job competition (regarding entry into university and subsequent career advancement) 11/D1 (‘Pedagogia Generale’ and ‘Storia della Pedagogia’). The list includes more than 300 national and international journals, published primarily, though not only, in the English language. The journals explicitly or principally theoretical or historical are a tiny minority, even where the relevant disciplinary areas of the journals are ‘general’ (and so theoretical) and ‘historical’. But in the same list you can find, for example, the following journals: Academy of Management Learning & Education; Brain and Cognition; Educational Assessment; Journal of Neurolinguistics; School Leadership & Management and Australasian Journal of Educational Technology.

The result is that ‘general’ or ‘theoretical’ research tends to disappear and so does traditional history. The keywords of this empirical research are ‘management’, ‘assessment’, ‘measurement’, ‘technology’. The practices that govern publications, and therefore the conduct of the researchers, are always the fruit of the same normative context that leads to exclusions. What is produced without anyone having explicitly given orders, but only through the lever of neoliberal governmental techniques, is the particular way of evaluating or assessing the quality of research, that we can consider a new way of giving orders on the part of a faceless sovereign; one that presents itself as impersonal, objective, oriented toward favouring merit, even as democratic and participatory, given as well to a strong rhetoric that is persuasive of public opinion.

Educational research in Italy, due in part to State processes, is witnessing the progressive disappearance of basic research, research that is non-productive of immediate utility for the improvement of existing educational practices, so as to make work better that which is already functioning: long term, and slowly developing researches that, instead of starting from an existing unquestioned theoretical argument, begin by putting it into doubt through critical investigation. It is clear that for this type of research the philosophical problem of being rigorous and systematic is a relevant problem; that means, for example, attention to the coherence between epistemological premises and methodological choices, attention to the coherence between the logic of the research and its prefixed objectives, logical control of the assumed theories as a frame of references, non-contradictory construction of the crucial apparatus that one intends to utilize, orientation toward the pursuit of truth in non-instrumental or pragmatic terms, nor ‘post-modernist’. Popper, citing Russell, was particularly concerned on this last point, writing words that are worth re-reading with attention:

‘I believe that Russell is right when he attributes to epistemology practical consequences for science, for ethics, and even for politics. He points out, for example that epistemological relativism, or the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth, and epistemological pragmatism, or the idea that truth is the same as usefulness, are closely linked with authoritarian and totalitarian ideas’ (Popper, 1960: 43).

On truth in educational research, Bridges has written in a very specific way, and correctly (Bridges, 1999). These are preliminary philosophical questions that should interest every type of research and so also empirical research, every type of research that wants to be rigorous and not inconsistent, systematic and not improvised, free, or at least not too closely governed; every type of study that wants to be in a strict sense research and not run the risk of being simple market research or a client satisfaction study. It is in fact not enough that an organizational ensemble of activities of measurement self-defines itself as research to make it truly so. The ‘inventory of the known’, to cite Adorno, is very useful but it is not research. And further: if everything is research, what then is research?

Attention to those kind of preliminary philosophical questions is for the most part, today, absent in empirical or ‘experimental’ Italian research, or else is treated in an un-problematic way as a small task to quickly get over and done with, in a few lines adopting pre-packaged solutions – often not very rigorous from a philosophical point of view – to immediately move on to what really counts, that is, the collection of data and their treatment according to important techniques and methods of psychology and the social sciences. The implicit recommendation, at times explicit, to not theorize and to use the preferred techniques (see Smith, 2006), because that which counts is what works, is revelatory. In the case, instead, of philosophical, theoretical or historical research, this type of problem has always been relevant, the theme of rigour has always been seen as central for educational theory, and as one of the theoretical tasks entrusted to the philosophy of education (Cambi, 2000). In the last few years, even in this sector of educational research, the interest in this kind of question has declined. Some in the academic research community, once theoreticians, have become empiricists and statistical apprentices, and at the same time historians are ever more adopting conventional quantitative and qualitative research approaches (for example, ethnography), converging towards empirical research and the collection of data.

What do these processes of homologation of research mean?

This analysis brings us to wider spaces, but it is possible to advance at least two interpretative keys. The first refers to the fact that knowledge has changed jurisdiction, and not starting today, and that, unfortunately, Lyotard, almost 40 years ago, saw correctly. The real criterion of science is the criterion of technique: ‘Technology is therefore a game pertaining not to the true, the just, or the beautiful, etc., but to efficiency – a technical “move” is “good” when it does better and/or expends less energy than another’ (Lyotard, 1984: 44).

Permit me now to not be very poetic and to be crudely materialist: the relationship that runs between producers (the researchers), the suppliers (the teachers), the consumers (the students, etc.) has assumed the form of that which runs between producers and consumers of commodities, the value-form. Knowledge, in its form as information-commodity indispensable to productive power, has become one of the major key factors in the world competition for power. Knowledge is and will be produced to be sold and is and will be consumed to be valorized in a new type of production: in both cases to be exchanged. It ceases to be an end in itself, it loses its own use value, recalling the categories of the Marxist tradition.

The legitimization of science is realized therefore through performativity. The consequence is the delegitimization of those knowledges that do not satisfy this criterion. Who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what advantage comes from deciding? The question of knowledge becomes the question of government.

The second interpretive key refers to the analysis of critical studies of neoliberalism (Dardot and Laval, 2010; Harvey, 2005), and in particular to the change of statute jurisdiction of knowledge, which finds expression for example in the expression ‘knowledge economy’, which means: the economy furnishes the model of what knowledge must be, an income generating information, an accumulable capital, a continuous series of innovations and obsolescences. The relative knowledge of the philosophical premises of educational research has difficulty satisfying these requirements. Every knowledge item taught, or every new knowledge, does not need to be transformed into a real commodity in order to receive the form of a commodity and to be treated as a commodity. The value-form of knowledge is the effect of the normalization that is applied to it through the managerial instruments used for its management and assessment (therefore its governing, as Lyotard would say). The transformations of research are guided by the model of innovation, according to which knowledge has no worth except for its efficacy in contributing to the competition that companies face in the national and international market. A certain type of empirical research is perfectly compatible with this exigency, inasmuch as it is more easily synchronizable with the velocity of material and immaterial production and with the ‘new reason of the world’ (Dardot and Laval, 2010). The others lose bit by bit their right to exist. Being rigorous and systematic is only the catalepsy of the market (Hayek, 1966) and the algorithm of value.

Neoliberalism and its anthropological technique

I think that from the preceding considerations emerges the necessity to think and cultivate a specific field of inquiry for the philosophy of education, alongside its traditional tasks, as we have already stated. In a particular way, I hold that the philosophy of educational research must be accompanied by a philosophy of the neoliberal politics of knowledge, not occasional, not necessarily critical, but stably committed to this type of study (see, for example, Bridges, 2017); a philosophy that poses itself as critical of neoliberal rationality and of the politics of knowledge that take form within that general framework. Educational research is governed by devices that descend from this general system of the governing of the conducted; a government of the conducted that acts as a kind of machine for the reprogramming of the self-knowledge of the body to which it is applied, and also for the re-education of the resistant subjects.

The current policies of knowledge can be traced to the general principles of neoliberalism. With this term, which alludes to the new configuration of capitalism, we mean:

‘…a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the State is to create and preserve an institutional structure appropriate to such practices’ (Harvey, 2005: 2).

Where markets still do not exist, for example the market for learning or knowledge, they must be created, if necessary with the intervention of the State. The neoliberal discourse has become hegemonic and paradigmatic to the point that ‘it has become incorporated into the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world’ (Brown, 2018; Harvey, 2005: 3). The ‘growing centrality of economic parameters and of market mechanisms in every meaningful area of social life’ (De Carolis, 2017: 13) demonstrates well the ability of neoliberalism to pose itself not only as a political project that is prevalent worldwide, but also as a chain of objective transformations deeply implanted at the institutional, productive and communicative level, as in every area of civil society. The State ‘must use its power to impose or invent market systems’, given that ‘competition – between individuals, firms, territorial entities…is considered a virtuous mechanism’ in itself. (Harvey, 2005: 79). The power of the mechanisms of the market has ended up sweeping away the traditional boundaries, ‘pushing itself to colonize and to redesign from the foundations an ever-growing number of areas of collective praxis’ (De Carolis, 2017: 51). Not that knowledge, for example, or creativity, De Carolis argues (2017) are effectively exchanged, sold and bought on the market, ‘the essential thing is that…the market gives credit to their value and incorporates this in the evaluation of specific products (for example educational degrees)’ and scientific publications. As a rationality, neoliberalism tends to give form and substance not only to the action of those governing but also to the conduct of individuals among the governed. The term ‘governance’ (Deneault, 2013) which we are discussing here is not to be understood in the strict institutional sense, of ‘governance of the institutions’ but regards ‘the activity that consists in governing people’s conduct within the framework of, and using the instruments of, a State’ (Foucault, 1988). The term ‘governmentality’ means the multiple forms of this activity of governance of the living with the aim of conducting or managing their conduct, so that they can govern themselves giving form to a particular type of relationship with themselves. Those that ‘govern’ in this sense, it goes without saying, may or may not be part of an institutionalized government (Dardot and Laval, 2010: 11). The principal characteristic of neoliberal rationality plays on two important axes: the ‘generalization of competition as a norm of behavior’ and ‘the firm as the model of subjectivity’ (Dardot and Laval, 2010: 8–9). The logic of the market overflows its natural boundaries, producing a new model of subjectivity that Dardot and Laval call ‘financial and accounting subjectivity’. In other words, it is a question of producing within individual subjectivity a relationship with oneself analogous to one’s relationship with capital (Dardot and Laval, 2010: 22). This rationality, developing itself fully in the decade 1980–1990 even if the original theories are much older ¹⁰ , signals a difference from the original liberalism, which was based on establishing limits to political government. We no longer even ask what such limits should be, if they be the market itself, if they be rights, if they be calculations of utility. Now, rather, we ask ‘how can we make the market the principle of governance of people and of governance of itself?’. The logic of the market, as a normative logic, unfolds itself thus from the State to the most intimate details of subjectivity (Dardot and Laval, 2010: 26). If therefore at stake is the ‘fabrication’ of subjectivity (such as that of the researcher) conforming to a way of conceiving economic production, therefore according to the fundamentals of neoliberal anthropology, that rationality works on the active side also as an implicit pedagogy. It is clear that what will suffer the greatest in this process will be the humanistic disciplines, which are the most difficult to synchronize with the ‘spirit of the times’ and with its rules of the game, at least without reinventing themselves from top to bottom, up to and including voluntary progressive amputations.

Of what ‘quality’ do those who speak of quality according to governmental assessment devices speak? The ‘quality’ at stake in reality is in regard to a judgment, dependent on an external recognition of value, and which coincides with the forms of judgment about quality. It is really this notion of ‘quality’ understood ‘as judgment…based on the norms that must guide such judgments (formalized to the highest degree as “normative”) that which resides in the principle of quality control, which is posited as a guide for all practices of assessment’, as Pinto argues (Pinto, 2012: 123). Judgment, and here we get to the point, does not follow ‘the thing’ but rather anticipates it: ‘quality migrates from the thing to the processes of production of the thing, or to their control’ (Pinto, 2012: 123–124). In this precise sense, assessment of research quality is an instrument of control, guidance, direction. It is for this reason that activities are formalized and normalized according to their approved standard; all in the name of transparency, of equality, in the name of managerial rationality and technique, of a formal ‘objectivity’ that presents itself as incontestable, although its methodological unreliability has already been clearly documented. The desired result, in fact, determines the methodology employed (Maléval, 2011: 21–22) and it is perhaps useless to repeat that other assessments would produce different results, since every discourse on method is controversial, open and plural. To put assessment into question, to seek to re-examine it from a perspective that is not in harmony with a self-validating rhetoric that imposes a consensus that has been strengthened by the logic of inevitability opens the door to themes of great import that can challenge a multitude of problematic dimensions.

The quality researcher

As far as research is concerned, things move along the same track. Just as it is necessary to give form to the neoliberal professor, it is also necessary to bring about the ideal researcher according to the administrative drift that is underway. In this case as well, assessment plays a decisive role capturing, guiding, determining, modelling, controlling, the conduct and the discourses of researchers or those who intend to put at the centre of their work the obsolete concept of freedom of research. A romantic residual, a useless and non-operationalizable redundancy, the champions of innovation could call it.

Disciplining works here too by other means, one among many being the research methods when they are conceived of as an indisputable standard, for which it is only a question of learning to use them in an accurate way, without losing time to critically investigate their assumptions, the implied concept of rigour, their internal consistency. In this case as well we will proceed by looking closely at theoretical distancing, without expecting to deal exhaustively and in detail with the question at hand.

The researcher of the new century is above all a manager, argues Ségalat provocatively:

‘Manage, oversee, compile reports. The system in which (the researcher) evolves tends to make him resemble the manager of a minimarket more than the disheveled thinker lost in thought…the administration that manages him is interested less – not to say not at all – in what he discovers but instead in the correct execution, line by line, of the budget’ (Ségalat, 2010: 29–31).

It can nevertheless become useful for the new researcher before dealing with the discourse on method or before making his epistemological position explicit to take a brief course on management and accounting. The technical–administrative drift to which research is now subordinated touches on an apex that is symptomatic and revelatory: it is necessary, solely, to declare ahead of time what the research will find, defining the hoped for final results. Is this possible? If this criterion is laughed at by Ségalat – ‘Mister Einstein, could you send us a theory of relativity in the next three years? Mister Fleming, discover antibiotics before the grant is finished, otherwise it will be necessary to reimburse us’ (Ségalat, 2010: 32) – who is a geneticist, how can such a request be dealt with by, say, a medieval historian or an educational researcher? It is clear that not everyone is Le Goff or Dewey but this is not the point. What, again, is the tacit operation at work? For the researcher to carry out his or her research, they need funding. In order to obtain funding they must satisfy certain criteria that are extraneous to the subject of their research, withdrawn from their judgment and from public discussion. Yet, they have no choice but to construct their research project in light of these criteria, packaging it in the pre-established format, thereby conducting their own conduct in a coherent way. If in addition they must also declare in advance what they hope to find, the main result is that they will probably not discover anything new and will limit themselves to inventing or re-inventing what is already known; to re-define it, re-interpret it as much as you like, without, however, even minimally going beyond it into the unknown of discovery. The value of an idea, writes Adorno in Minima Moralia, ‘is measured by its distance from the continuity of the familiar. It is objectively devalued as this distance is reduced; the more it approximates to the preexisting standard, the further its antithetical function is diminished’ (Adorno, 2005: 50). If the researcher does not intend to distance himself from the pre-approved standard, from the normative of ANVUR for Italian researchers, and from the results of his research, already rigorously described before getting to work on it, he will produce and accumulate data and presumed ‘facts’, empirical evidence of a finite number already predictable in preliminary phases of the work itself, simple contingent descriptions that do not allow for any discovery, no real advance in knowledge, in other words, only recording what is already repeatedly present.

The question is extremely serious and weaves together various facets in a single warp. At stake is the evolution of the way we conceive of research. Once the researchers are put into competition with each other, the race to have projects accepted can begin. Publications, which have become the goal, have a very precise function: the researcher is ever more the manager of a form of capital that is taken advantage of by transforming published articles into funding and these in turn into published articles. And to learn to leave be any ambitions for riskier research, which might lead to following new paths that do not correspond to the required formats, which could probably begin to bear fruit, neither calculable nor describable with rigour and predictability, in time frames that are too long for the standards of scientific productivity. For some things require time, the most precious resource for research that seeks to discover something. That which we again seek to reveal is that, for intervening criteria, an implicit pedagogy has to act undisturbed; one which governs the conduct of the governed, the researchers, such that they spontaneously act according to the behaviour demanded, training in themselves – and by themselves – the habitus of the desired researcher.

But who is the ‘good researcher’ or the quality researcher? Are we sure that it is he or she who learns and internalizes the criteria of assessment, the indicators of quality making these become the normative ideas of true research, who is a good manager of him or herself, shrewd compiler of projects by the batchfull, a competitive and frenetic racehorse in publications and journals that are well known to be first class?

It is worthwhile now to consider research methods, starting with a precise question: what is the complex of approaches and investigatory methods, in the social sciences and humanities, that best incorporates and maintains the neoliberal normative? We can try to answer this by recalling the antitheses formulated by Adorno–Horkheimer between ‘theoretical imagination’ and ‘blindly pragmatized thought’, positioning the ‘standard view’ of the research on the latter pole, certainly not on the former. The subject of advanced industrial society largely tends to think in operations more than in concepts (the concept is nothing more than its operations), is afraid of distancing herself from the facts or in any case feels uncomfortable in having to distance herself, and certainly analysing the facts negatively does not seem ‘natural’ to her; the transcendent elements of reason are not familiar to her, she is oriented toward identifying the efficient procedure and not so much to unproductively seek ‘that satisfaction that men call truth’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 13). How much weight does this cognitive orientation have, which imposes operationalism in physics, and behaviourism in the social sciences, and whose common approach is a radical empiricism in how it deals with concepts? (Marcuse, 2007: 16). How much do these mental habits count in the configuration of a specific methodological framework that perfectly conforms to neoliberal rationality?

Some see a Baconian ascendancy in part of ‘educational research’ today, where the emphasis falls on procedure, its protocols, its ‘methods’ and ‘tools’ in a strict sense, and on their functioning, rather than on questions regarding how one conceptualizes and theorizes, without taking thereby into account intellectual sophistication, the quality of judgment and comprehension (Smith, 2006).

Research has to be empirical in the strict sense, as is argued, for example, from the very first principle guiding the influential American document Scientific Research in Education – namely, ‘Pose significant questions that can be investigated empirically’ (Shavelson and Towne, 2002: 3). If the question is not empirically investigable then it is not significant: a principle of exclusion controls and guides a field of research. It seems natural that educational research must be empirical and consequently adopt the pre-accepted research methods.

What do these iterations mean, these ‘sales pitches’ masquerading as constituting seriousness? Due to the totalitarian imposition of ‘factual proofs’, of propositions based on evidence, of the obsessively repeated ‘mantra’ that ‘what counts is what works’ (Oancea and Pring, 2008), what do these de-politicized words really say, what does this language say that seeks us out and that, like myth, is imperfectable, indisputable, that urges us to receive its expansive ambiguity? (Barthes, 1957), that with its clarity finds things, but does not explain anything? The neoliberal narrative device produces and reproduces in subjects, of whatever form, the attitude of a certain, particular type of research that becomes the type of research. Thought, noted Adorno in not yet Foucauldian times, submits to the social checks on its performance not merely where they are professionally imposed, but adapts to them its whole complexion. Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem. Thought, having lost autonomy, no longer trusts itself to comprehend reality, in freedom, for its own sake. This it leaves, respectfully deluded, to the highest-paid, thereby making itself measurable. It behaves, even in its own eyes, as if it had constantly to demonstrate its fitness (Adorno, 2005: 196).

An inventory of the known and test of intelligence, ‘little homeworks’, Cèline of Professor Y would call them. It is the research method, with its leads and its weights, that provides for surveillance of the researcher once he or she is assumed to ‘govern oneself’ and for thought that controls itself. The researcher, in a Baconian way, must never ever be abandoned to his or her wanderings, because such are inevitably exposed to the risk of being unproductive, of leaping and flying, as if they were complacent and asocial visionaries. To punish them, if necessary, quality assessment will suffice.

What then is the supersession of administrative drift, implied and supervised? The first step is the attempt to bring it to light, establishing in the meantime ways of seeing and perspectives able to make their priority its fractures and its flaws.

Rethinking educational research, its rigour, its systematic nature, coherence and consistency, in emancipatory terms, consequently perhaps means trying to reconstruct the preconditions for it becoming thinkable, inhabiting as contemporaries the pedagogical time of the anachronism; trying to make visible the negative inherent in the potential of the already existing.