What to count and who to count on? Productive and nonproductive scientific activity in the context of research university – the perspective of key grant recipients

Due to socio-economic changes, universities are increasingly becoming organizational actors instead of a community of scholars. They tend to be evaluated on the basis of the results of their planned activities, which leads to a battle for position and prestige and prestige. Higher education reforms in Poland are going to contribute to the transformation of universities into organizations. The reforms put pressure on the quality of research measured by publications in journals indexed by international databases of scientific periodicals, forcing universities to compete in order to be categorized as research universities. For researchers, this means a change of criteria in the assessment of scientific work: peer reviews are replaced by audit-like procedures that are formally regulated. This paper aims to analyse the extent to which the reformed university model corresponds to the beliefs and behaviours of those who operate in these new organizational conditions. The basis for the analysis was a qualitative study (17 individual in-depth interviews) conducted with people who currently play a central role in the staff policy of the university considered as an organization – outstanding active researchers obtaining grants from external funds. The results of the study show that the transformation of a university into an organizational actor means that the university is primarily seen as an employer. In this perspective, accountability is reciprocal: the university exacts/ requires results from employees, but employees expect the employer to have an organizational and cultural framework for achieving them.