Metric capital: how academic indicators become interactional resource

Abstract This article develops a sociological theory of how academic indicators acquire force in academic life. Based on Randall Collins’s interaction ritual theory, it distinguishes three analytically separate layers that are often conflated in studies of bibliometrics: reception traces, valuation tokens, and metric capital. Academic interactions leave traces in the form of citations, mentions, and article downloads. Selected ones are then stabilized by digital infrastructures, which reduce them to tokens by collecting, certifying, and making them internally comparable. Individual academics accumulate these tokens into a portfolio of objectified symbols that can be mobilized in further interactions—both informally and formally. In this way, they constitute a form of capital. It is activated through three mechanisms. First, it influences the course of interaction before it begins (pre-entrainment), is transferable through structural holes, and also allows for the closure of discussions during evaluation rituals where diverse evaluation cultures or low competence in assessing the quality of work exist. Metric capital can be separated from a scientist’s informal reputation within the scientific community in various ways. The article thus proposes to expand the discussion about measures from the question of what they represent to the question of how they interactively shape the scientific order.