Instrumentalism and the publish-or-perish regime

Motivated by concerns about the nature and implications of the current publish-or-perish culture in the academe, we firstly examine based on which perceptions and interpretations individual researchers at universities cope with, survive, or even flourish, in the context of the publish-or-perish regime. Secondly, we probe, following a critical agenda of fostering non-instrumentalist understandings of research, to which extent local conditions may impact these perceptions, interpretations, and ways of coping. We conducted interviews with 32 researchers from six different research units in European universities across all ranks of the academic hierarchy, from first-year PhD students to very senior professors. Our focal descriptive category is instrumentalism: the degree to which an instrumentally rational understanding of research as a means of producing publications as items of countable performance dominates the entire research process from its very beginning. In our study we find notably heterogeneous forms of instrumentalism, which we have termed modes of instrumentalism, from purposely instrumentalist to critical non-instrumentalist modes. We identify and describe local research cultures as mediating the perceptions of individual researchers, and thus the influence of the global publish-or-perish regime on them. Based on our conceptualisation of degrees and modes of instrumentalism and the local research cultures we sketch some measures for fostering non-instrumentalist research cultures that would help in resisting the undesirable effects of the publish or perish regime.