Metrics of misrecognition

Purpose This conceptual paper aims to provide a critical analysis of the practice arrangement bundles governing promotion and evaluation systems within flagship universities as a socioeconomic system profoundly shaping academic identity and institutional ethics. Design/methodology/approach Using an empirical Ricoeurian hermeneutic operationalized into five steps – (1) purposive selection of scholarly texts from the higher education literature covering promotion and evaluating and governing systems, (2) a hermeneutic of suspicion in systematically questioning the text-based ideology of each of the documents, (3) a hermeneutic of recovery to highlight the possibility of alternative meanings and ethical perspectives, (4) an integration of disparate interpretations into four interpretive provocations, (5) to maintain an audit trail to safeguard the intelligibility of interpretation, this research presents its workings by detailing an applied instance of application of the hermeneutical circle. Findings The analysis reveals that the promotion system functions as a practice arrangement bundle that perpetuates a metricized ethical economy characterized by misrecognition, asymmetry and instability. This system forces academics into identity negotiation fraught with epistemic violence and moral injury, displacing institutional responsibility onto individuals while systematically devaluing care, collegiality and slow scholarship. Originality/value Firstly, the methodological contribution of the author’s paper is that the author provides a replicable approach to using the hermeneutical circle (from Ricœur’s philosophical hermeneutics) in institutional analysis. Secondly, the author’s conceptual contribution is that the author enrich the conceptual lenses of institutional misrecognition (from Sennett) and narrative foreclosure (from Bruner) with our empirical findings on academia promotion practices.