تغییر اجتماعی، فشارهای نهادی و خلق دانش: تجزیه و تحلیل کتابسنجی

Contemporary academic environment can be characterized by an overwhelming trend toward enhancing research productivity and knowledge creation. The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of radical social change and subsequent institutional pressures on internationally relevant knowledge creation. The setting examined is business and economics science in Eastern Europe. Using a case study of Slovenian business schools and deploying a bibliometric analysis we find that research productivity is increasing significantly. We note however dilemmas pertaining to the content and quality of knowledge created. Further, we find that international research cooperation has positive quality effects. From a theoretical perspective, we argue that radical social change was not mirrored by such change in normative institutions, whereas recent changes in regulatory institutions seem to have a substantial positive effect on research performance.

Contemporary academic environment can be characterized by an overwhelming trend toward enhancing research productivity and knowledge creation (Colyvas et al., 2002 and Silver, 2009) best represented by the “publish or perish” adage (Gendron, 2008 and Long et al., 2009). In the EU and USA, more than 90% of scientific discovery is disseminated to wider audience in the form of scientific publications (Abramo et al., 2008, Cohen et al., 2002 and Munoz-Leivaa et al., 2012). There are three main reasons for such trend. First, due to increasing social pressures for accountability of academia, research productivity represents a method of legitimization of the academic profession (Greenwood et al., 2008, Modell, 2003 and Suchman, 1995). Second, research productivity is a mean of reducing information asymmetry between supply (universities) and demand (students) in the knowledge market by serving as a proxy for organization’s overall quality

The main contributions of the paper are threefold. First, we highlight changes in knowledge creation in a transitional country by examining research output over a long time period. While research productivity is increasing significantly, we note dilemmas pertaining to the content and quality of knowledge created. Second, from a theoretical perspective, the employment of an institutional framework advances our understanding of the interaction between the wider social and organizational pressures on individual behavior. We find that radical social change was not mirrored by such change in researchers’ values, beliefs and behavior thus changes in regulatory institutions were required to initiate “appropriate” behavior as assumed by international research standards. Third, from a methodological perspective, research productivity studies typically start with a particular sample of journals representing a particular scientific area. This approach however is biased due to interdisciplinary nature of sciences, as researchers may also publish in journals not in the sample (Chan et al., 2007b). To circumvent this bias, in our study the unit of analysis was researcher, rather than a journal.