The Systemic Construction of Academic Capitalism

In The Science as Vocation, Max Weber highlights that an academic career is a matter of fate. Moreover, the author admits to not knowing of any similar career with this characteristic. This early 1900s topic sows the seeds of this paper’s concept of problem setting. The research question is: within a knowledge-based society and intellectual capitalism, how are training and development, recruitment and human resources management linked to fate? This research analyzes the academic world as an example of an organization where human capital represents an intellectual resource; it is a laboratory full of case studies. From the Mertonian distinction between manifest and latent functions, this research first pursues the study of the new logics behind new HRM policies within academia. As a latent function, this research aims to study the development of standards (social, isotropic and legal) emblematic of the academic system and intellectual capital. The isotropic standards (ranking and rating organizational standards) are the hinge between the production and circulation of effective social standards, although without legal value and legal standards, theoretically valid but not always effective. In that respect, isotropic standards seem to be functional in overcoming the difference between scientific and humanistic knowledge. The objective of this research is the social construction and development into isotropic standards (and perhaps into legal standards as well) of the mechanisms underpinning the HR policies of academic intellectual capitalism; its focus is on the comparability of the research outcomes. This paper is something of a surgical sectioning of academic capitalism through a deep methodological reflection on the relationship between the concepts and definitions, and operational-variables and indexes embedded within the rating and ranking procedures of intellectual capital. The procedures are the organizational standards (rooted within the international scientific community) that are the benchmark for the establishment of legal standards, as Leslie, Slaughter and Rhodes said about academic capitalism; the paper stresses once again the importance of the development of organizational best practices.