Assessing economic research and the future of heterodox economics. Failures and alternatives of journals, departments, and scholars rankings

Evaluating economic research today is a most contested fi eld. Th is applies, most notably, since individual careers of a whole generation of critical young economists are aff ected. And it applies in economics, perhaps more than in any other discipline, since it is the most important academic discipline for the ideological legitimization of capitalism and one of the few, perhaps the only, fundamentally divided and contested discipline. What the ruling forces of the economy, of professional politics, of science administration, and particularly of economic science have made out of the complex issues and processes of evaluating research quality is reducing them down to a simplistic, allegedly exact, objective, and obvious, but fundamentally mistaken procedure of a one-dimensional ranking of quantitative domination, a cumulative dictatorship of mass. And this is done in surprisingly unprofessional ways, subject to many obvious misconceptions and failures. For example, the Also? Der alte fruchtlose Streit eines ›Entweder/Oder‹ ist, wie schon Schumpeter in Zusammenhang mit der Menger/Schmoller-Auseinandersetzung sagte, »im Wesentlichen eine Geschichte vergeudeter Energie« (Schumpeter 1965: 994). Die Fragen bezüglich Pluralismus, Mainstream-Ansprüchen und dergleichen bleiben aktuell und Gegenstand fortlaufender Diskussionen. Die FAZ/HB-Konfrontation hat allerdings wenig dazu beigetragen.