Evaluationsverfahren aus laborkonstruktivistischer Perspektive

Today, it is increasingly common to evaluate scientific organisations. Consequently, the old debate on adequate procedures and criteria for the assessment of scientific quality is relevant again. The paper emphasizes the impact of the codes of practice on the process of judgement. Following Luhmann (1969), evaluations are conceptualized as procedures – as independent social systems they develop a certain momentum of their own. At the same time, they are limited by a number of previous selections such as roles and required techniques. The analysis focuses on these selections. The main question is to which extent there are different codes of practices in different regimes of evaluation and to which extent we can assume them to have a structuring impact on the process of assessment. Subjects of our analysis are the codes of practice of the Wilhelm-Leibniz-Gemeinschaft in Germany, the “Standard Evaluation Protocol for Public Research“ in the Netherlands an the „Research Assessment Exercises“ (RAE) in Great Britain. A constructivist perspective as Karin Knorr Cetina has offered, serves as an heuristic foil to reveal the social components of rules and techniques.