Abstract:

The emphasis on producing subsidy-earning research publications at higher education institutions has led to academics, researchers, and professional (administrative) staff in these institutions increasingly turn their attention to research activities. Institutions have created positions for research chairs, research professors, and other research-related positions to manage research portfolios, leading to research becoming an important key performance area (KPA) on par with the teaching and learning KPA in performance appraisals of higher-education staff. The quality of research publications is often sacrificed in favour of quantity, fuelled by performance management incentives, flowing from the South African Department of Higher Education and Training’s (DHET’s) subsidy formula [1]. Higher education authorities push for more research output, leading to researchers “polony-slicing” their publications to obtain more mileage out of their research [2]. Journals are flooded with submissions, compromising the quality of reviews and predatory, or pseudo-predatory journals find innovative ways to enter the market, creating a spiral of undesirable scenarios. Further, to increase the number of research publications, postgraduate students are required to submit their research for publication before submitting their dissertations or theses for examination. Following an interpretive research strategy, research challenges as presented in literature and experienced by the authors are unpacked and synthesised through an inductive research choice into a problematisation framework [3]. Future work in this area will involve the development of a solution framework to address the said challenges as well as surveys among stakeholders in higher education.

References:
[1] South Africa. Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET). (2017). Policy on the Evaluation of Creative Outputs and Innovations produced by South African Public Higher Education Institutions. Pretoria, South Africa. South Africa. Department of Higher Education and Training.
[2] Mouton, J., Redelinghuys, H., Blanckenberg, J., Lorenzen, L., Ford, K., Visage, A. and van Niekerk, M. (2019). The Quality of South Africa’s Research Publications, Final report to the DHET, Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology (CREST), University of Stellenbosch, South Africa.
[3] Imbrogiano, J. P. (2021). Contingency in Business Sustainability Research and in the Sustainability Service Industry: A Problematization and Research Agenda. Organization & Environment, 34(2), 298-322.

Keywords:

Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET), performance management, problematisation, research incentives, subsidy-earning (-bearing).