Research evaluation and organisational learning in the university: a possible coexistence?

The role of the classic quality control system in science, the peer review,is to produce trustworthy knowledge and act as a peer-to-peer learning process. Scientific work is to a large degree still organised as a craft guild with integrated and loosely organised apprenticeship training for young scientists. Recent studies of knowledge creation in organisations have demonstrated how complex the process of knowledge in organisations has become. However, in the university accidental and random models for learning is still dominating, leaving the important decisions in relation to learning to individual scientists and not to the organisation. Following the introduction of new models of research evaluation with an accounting perspective responding to policy demands for 'better' management, such individualised and loosely organised learning systems can easily be overlooked by large scale and systematic research evaluation systems introduced buy most universities. What will then become of the classic internal and tacit modes of scientist learning?