How disciplines react to universities steering: what impact on missions?

Higher Education Institutions have increasingly strengthened the governance of academic knowledge improving the monitoring, evaluation and the enhancement of their scientific efforts (Leysyte and Dee, 2012; Reale and Seeber, 2011) so that in most European countries the HE context is marked by the rise of steering activities. Literature highlights as evaluation impacts on the way scientific knowledge is produced, organized and disseminated, affecting the "conventional hierarchies of knowledge, expertise and practice" (Nowotny, 2006; Kogan, 2000). The work discusses whether and how evaluation used as steering device is likely to transform Universities impacting also the reconfiguration of their mission; to this aim the paper focuses on recruitment choices and logics as specific issue. The aim is to highlight different responses to steering pressure emerging across and within disciplines with respect to these key decisions. Our research questions are: how evaluation impacts on recruitment decisions? What differences across and within disciplines emerge? To what extent recruitment decisions highlight changes of the university mission driven by evaluation? We want to show that recruitment inside academia follows logics that are related to the dynamics of the scientific field and the practices toward quality; transformations or reconfigurations of university missions by the way of evaluation do not seem to play any significant role.