Gaming and Performance Metrics in Higher Education: The Consequences of Journal Lists

Introduction

Academia has become increasingly competitive and performance-oriented over the past two decades (Espeland and Sauder, 2016; Fleming, 2021). Researchers have described a ‘performatisation’ of scholarly work, which involves demonstrating the capacity to publish in ‘top’ journals (Gendron, 2008; Humphrey and Gendron, 2015). At many universities, this culture has become institutionalised through the introduction of journal lists specifying the outlets that faculty should choose for their articles. These lists assign varying levels of prestige to academic journals, primarily based on their impact factor. In Denmark, publishing in listed journals has become an important criterion when candidates are assessed for associate and full professorships during hiring and promotion. In this sense, journal metrics and faculty’s successes in publishing with prestigious (primarily US) outlets have a notable impact on academic careers in Denmark and in many other European countries (Helgesson and Sjögren, 2019; Nygaard et al., 2022).

This development is part of a neoliberalisation of academia (Fleming, 2021). Neoliberal ideals prescribe that universities should be managed as market enterprises, with measurable goals being defined and performance being assessed and reported to stakeholders (e.g. Benner and Holmqvist, 2023; Gendron, 2008). A heightened ‘control by numbers’ has reinforced competition among individual scholars, departments and universities striving to live up to accountability demands (Lynch, 2015). Neoliberal universities are often associated with commodification of research where knowledge is produced not only for its own sake but also for the achievement of quantifiable goals (Gendron, 2008). In this sense, neoliberalism can be seen as a significant force behind performance measurement systems, such as journal lists, which increasingly regulate the conduct of researchers (Mingers and Willmott, 2013). Scholars argue that neoliberal management has generated a new academic ethos (Kallio et al., 2016) that displaces traditional values like Merton’s (1968) imperatives of science. Studies also show that academics largely comply with the new managerial demands although sometimes resisting them at an ideological level (Kalfa et al., 2018). Rintamäki and Alvesson (2023: 258) coined the term ‘resipliance’ to describe the paradoxical behaviour of academics who express resistance towards their university’s performance targets in principle, yet feel compelled to comply with them in their daily work.

Some studies focus on the behavioural consequences of performance measurement at universities (Adler and Harzing, 2009; Aguinis et al., 2020; Brooks and Schopohl, 2018), including activities such as ‘gaming’ (Biagioli et al., 2019; Gendron, 2008; Graf et al., 2019; Tourish and Craig, 2020). Gaming refers to strategic behaviours adopted by scholars to achieve performance targets, sometimes involving practices that may violate ethical norms and values. However, gaming is not a uniform concept, and various studies define it in different ways. For instance, Aboubichr and Conway (2023: 605) describe gaming as ‘deliberate, opportunistic and strategic behaviour’ aimed at achieving performance targets while breaching ethical values and codes of conduct. Graf et al. (2019: 754) view gaming as ‘deviant workplace behaviour’ that violates significant organisational norms. They argue that gaming can compromise the functioning of departments and universities as it may lead scholars to ignore other important aspects of their work, such as teaching or service tasks, which are not so easily measured (Järvinen and Mik-Meyer, 2024). Graf et al. (2019) identify three conditions that may invite gaming: performance goals are set (too) high; achievements are measured by outcome alone and not by the processes leading to the outcome; and performance measurement does not represent all work tasks, which, in turn, leads to a certain ‘tunnel vision’ (Graf et al., 2019: 756).

Some scholars distinguish gaming from cheating, defining gaming as ‘bending the rules’ and cheating as ‘breaking the rules’ (Pollitt, 2013). Others differentiate between fraud and gaming, with fraud involving plagiarism and fabrication or falsification of data and gaming referring to questionable research practices, such as salami slicing, data recycling, changing hypotheses after the fact and attributing false authorship (Butler et al., 2017). Furthermore, some scholars separate serious misconduct (equivalent to fraud) from gaming, describing the latter as ethically liminal practices that may raise concerns but are surrounded by disagreement regarding their acceptability (Biagioli et al., 2019). While extensive research has been conducted on fraud and cheating in academia, few studies have focused on the grey areas where scholars ‘bend the rules’ or engage in ethically liminal publication behaviours to meet the performance targets set by their managers (Aboubichr and Conway, 2023; Butler et al., 2017; Graf et al., 2019).

Our study addresses this gap in the literature, asking the questions: what types of gaming can be identified among Danish academics responding to performance measurement in the form of journal lists? How are these responses related to participants’ beliefs about the need for certain compliant behaviours, such as research adaptation and strategic networking in order to publish in designated journals? What is the relation between gaming and the academic ethos expressed by participants?

We focus on gaming for two reasons. First, we think it is crucial to highlight the unintended consequences of journal lists. These consequences have, to date, received little attention in sociological research – most existing studies have been conducted in the field of economics, especially in accounting research. Second, the ethically liminal status of gaming is intriguing in and of itself. On the one hand, gaming may have immediate positive outcomes for faculty members and management as it can help them achieve the goal of publishing in listed journals, which is a prerequisite for competitiveness at both individual and department/university level. Hence, it is not necessarily in the interests of management to prevent gaming (Aboubichr and Conway, 2023). On the other hand, gaming may be troublesome if it contradicts the classical academic values of research freedom and the pursuit of the highest possible quality goals. Publishing in a limited number of primarily US journals is not necessarily a guarantee for a sound development of the social sciences in European countries.

According to Espeland and Sauder (2007: 2), gaming is a form of ‘playing to the test’, meaning that academics focus on indicators rather than on the qualities that different types of performance measures are intended to assess. The type of gaming we analyse may create inequality among scholars, as some research areas, according to our interviewees, are more suitable for publication in the listed journals than others. Gaming feeds into hiring and promotion processes where academics are rewarded not only based on their research merits (and their teaching record, academic service work, etc.) but also, and increasingly so, based on their capacity and willingness to network strategically. A central focus of this article is to analyse the degree to which participants find gaming questionable: do they regard gaming as unethical behaviour or do they see it as a natural and unproblematic aspect of academia’s ‘new ethos’ (Kallio et al., 2016)?

Previous Research on Journal Networks and Research Adaptation

In the following sections, we focus on two topics in extant research that are pertinent to this article. First, we review studies examining social communities formed around leading academic journals and how they may impact the chances of getting articles published. Second, we discuss studies investigating the implications of performance measurement in academia, including research on how scholars may adjust their research topics and methods to better match the preferences of top US journals.

Social communities surrounding academic publishing have been investigated extensively (e.g. Baccini et al., 2020; Goyanes and De-Marcos, 2020; Santos and Mendonça, 2022; Tight, 2014). This body of research sheds light on the concentration of power within a limited circle of individuals who simultaneously hold positions as editors, editorial board members and authors in the same or related journals. This phenomenon is known as ‘interlocking editorship’ (Santos and Mendonça, 2022), ‘interlocking authorship’ (Baccini et al., 2020) and ‘editorial board interlocking’ (Goyanes and De-Marcos, 2020). The key point here is that the researchers’ roles as authors, editorial board members and editors overlap within small groups of journals. A study by Colussi (2018) examining publication patterns in top US journals in economics reveals that nearly half of the published articles were authored by scholars who had pre-existing affiliations with journal editors at the time of publication, for instance as (former) PhD students or colleagues. Scholars disagree as to whether this is problematic. Brogaard et al. (2014), for instance, show that articles written by editor-connected scholars receive more citations than other articles, concluding that these articles are generally published because of their high quality and not as a result of personal favours. Heckman and Moktan (2020) state that research on the mechanisms behind network effects is inconclusive. Network-based publishing may be tied to favouritism/nepotism, as well as to quality differences, for example, caused by inside information – editors being able to identify the best authors, and authors using their knowledge of journal standards and procedures to improve the quality of their work. Regardless of the background of editor-connected publishing, Heckman and Moktan (2020: 422) conclude that it is problematic because it penalises authors without connections to editors.

Importantly, studies show that publishing in renowned US journals substantially influences the stratification of higher education in many countries (Heckman and Moktan, 2020; Helgesson and Sjögren, 2019; Hussain, 2011; Kwiek, 2019; Nygaard et al., 2022; Orupabo and Mangset, 2022). For instance, it has been demonstrated that scholars from non-English-speaking countries in Europe publish increasingly in US- or UK-based outlets and less in their own language and that international publications are a prerequisite for their hiring/promotion (Orupabo and Mangset, 2022; Pelger and Grottge, 2015; Vanderstraeten, 2020). A major issue in the literature is that journal rankings may affect research diversity and innovation (Gendron, 2008; Gendron and Rodrigue, 2021; Heckman and Moktan, 2020; Meyer et al., 2018). Related to this, scholars have investigated a possible ‘identity shift’ in academia, worrying that faculty substitute their traditional ethos of intellectual progress and scientific curiosity with a short-term focus on merely publishing in the ‘right’ outlets (Argento and van Helden, 2022; Ramassa et al., 2023).

The degree of research adaptation to specific journals varies across disciplines and research fields. In a recent survey conducted among UK business academics from 22 research fields, Brooks et al. (2023) found that scholars in economics and finance were more inclined than others to customise their research for publication. By contrast, scholars in organisational studies were sceptical of this practice and expressed concerns about future resource allocation to subfields that do not align with the dominant understanding of what constitutes relevant research. In other studies as well, scholars call for more receptive attitudes towards research topics defined as ‘peripheral’ and a commitment to conducting research in a broader variety of areas (Argento and van Helden, 2022; Gendron, 2008; Gendron and Rodrigue, 2021).

Taken together, the reviewed studies highlight the unintended consequences of journal lists, especially the prevailing emphasis on publishing in top US journals. This singular pursuit fosters an ‘obsession’ among scholars with a limited number of journals and a problematic relationship between publication success and belonging to journal communities (Heckman and Moktan, 2020: 419). Most studies in this field are quantitative, demonstrating ties between authors and editors and examining scholars’ attitudes towards journal rankings and other metrics. A small number of studies investigate the mechanisms behind these connections and the behaviours of faculty responding to the demands specified by journal lists (Argento and van Helden, 2022; Brooks et al., 2023; Butler et al., 2017; Graf et al., 2019; Ramassa et al., 2023).

Our study contributes to this emerging research strand by focusing on two hitherto understudied forms of gaming explored through a qualitative lens: adapting scholarly practices to alleged journal preferences and building strategic relationships with editors and reviewers. These practices do not correspond to fraud or serious misconduct but should rather be regarded as ethically liminal behaviours (Biagioli et al., 2019) or, to use an expression of Macdonald and Kam (2007: 641) as enactments of ‘gamesmanship’, understood as instrumental behaviour aimed at winning games without actually cheating.

Analytical Frame

We use scripting theory to structure our analysis. Simon and Gagnon (1986) employ the concept ‘script’ as a metaphor for ‘the production of behaviour in social life’ or ‘the operating syntax under which social life happens’ (Simon and Gagnon, 1986: 98). They differentiate between three levels of scripting: cultural, interpersonal and intrapsychic. Cultural scripts exist at the institutional and societal levels; they are the overarching scenarios defining the frames for practices associated with specific roles. Interpersonal scripts refer to ‘the application of cultural scenarios by participants acting in particular social contexts’ (Simon and Gagnon, 1986: 97). Intrapsychic scripts concern participants’ reflections about the other levels of scripting and their ‘bargaining’ with themselves about the role they enact (e.g. ‘What kind of I am I? What kind of I do I want to be?’) (Simon and Gagnon, 1986: 100).

We employ a slightly modified version of scripting theory to analyse academics’ responses to journal lists. Although Simon and Gagnon (1986: 99) mention that interpersonal and intrapsychic scripting should be seen as applications of cultural scripts as well as ‘new scriptwriting’, their focus is on interpersonal scripting as enactments of cultural scripts, and on intrapsychic scripting as personal inclinations/wishes. By contrast, we accentuate that scripting, or the creation of ‘operating syntaxes’ (Simon and Gagnon, 1986: 98) occurs at all three levels: the cultural, where the overarching goals for participants’ behaviour are set; the interpersonal/interactional, where participants enact and redefine these scripts (sometimes in ways that conflict with the initial cultural scripts); and the intrapsychic, where participants engage in self-scripting.

In our study, cultural scripts are conceptualised as the instructional guidelines operating at departmental level, where journal lists inform faculty about how they should behave if they are to meet the demands of ideal scholarship. The central dimension of these scripts is that faculty should publish in prestigious journals but the scripts are also characterised by a general tribute to international networking. Interactional scripts are analysed as the enactments and redefinitions of cultural scripts by participants striving to improve their chances of getting published in listed journals. We identify two main forms of enactments/redefinitions: participants adapting their research topics and methods to the alleged preferences of top US journals, and participants building relationships with editors and potential reviewers before submitting their articles. In order to stress that this level of scripting concerns behaviours by agents interacting with other agents as well as the relationship between cultural scripts and agency, we use the term ‘interactional scripts’ rather than Simon and Gagnon’s (1986, 2003) ‘interpersonal scripts’. Finally, we deploy the concept of intrapsychic scripts when investigating participants’ reflections on the two other levels of scripting, including their own self-scripting. In combination, our analysis of the three levels of scripting among faculty shows that scripting at the interactional level generates beliefs about how scripts at the cultural level should be enacted most efficiently; that these beliefs (whatever their relationship is to the facts of publishing) take the form of paradigmatic truths for a considerable number of faculty; and that these ‘truths’ have severe consequences for participants’ behaviour and for their self-scripting.

That beliefs have consequences for behaviour and, in the process, create ‘truths’ about the social world is a well-established fact within sociology, famously summarised in the Thomas theorem (Thomas and Thomas, 1928). People respond not only to the objective attributes of a situation when choosing how to act but also to the subjective meaning that this situation carries for them. When acts are performed in accordance with this subjective meaning, they become an integral part of the situation, gradually influencing its actual features (Thomas, 1923; Thomas and Thomas, 1928). Goffman (1956) later showed how people collaborate in ‘defining the situation’ under which they act. This does not mean that they are in complete agreement but rather that they form a working consensus regarding the conditions they find themselves in and tend to adapt their behaviour accordingly. Scripting theory is anchored in symbolic interactionism (Blumer, 1969; Goffman, 1956) but offers an analytical structure that distinguishes between levels of meaning making. Cultural scripts do not determine interactional and intrapsychic scripts; they are interpreted and acted upon within specific social contexts and under individual motivational structures. Simon and Gagnon (1986, 2003) make it clear that scripting theory is preoccupied with the interactional and individual levels as much as with cultural prescriptions. In our view, this is the strength of the theory: it facilitates an analysis of similarities and differences between levels of scripting and of the ambivalence that may characterise the relationship between cultural scripts, collective enactments/redefinitions of them and individual stances on these enactments/definitions.

Data and Methods

The study is based on 173 qualitative interviews with social science professors and associate professors at three universities in Denmark. The universities are publicly funded (as are all universities in Denmark) and have an international orientation with a notable number of faculty members from other countries. From associate professorship level onward, all positions are tenured.

The sample comprises 96 associate professors (55 men, 41 women) and 77 full professors (46 men, 31 women) working in the wider fields of economics (61), political science (67) and sociology (45). The average age of the associate professors was 42 years at the time of the interviews, whereas the full professors had an average age of 50.3. The response rate was exceptionally high: 82% among invited associate professors and 87% among full professors. Most interviews lasted between one and one-and-a-half hours, with an average duration of 70 minutes. All interviews were fully recorded and transcribed.

All 173 interviews were conducted by the two authors of this article who are full professors in sociology. Hence, the study is based on ‘peer interviews’ or ‘insider interviews’ referring to research in which the interviewers and interviewees belong to the same group and share experiences related to the subject matter under discussion (Bryman and Cassell, 2006; Gunasekara, 2007). The interview questions concerned a wide range of topics related to academic careers (mentorship, networks, promotion criteria, conferences, balancing research, teaching, administration, etc.) not analysed here. From our first reading of the interviews, we noticed the participants’ preoccupation with their department’s journal lists and strategies aimed at improving their chances of getting published in listed journals. Initially, NVivo11 coding was used to identify all sections of the interviews concerning journal lists and publication strategies. This dataset was then analysed, first by applying initial codes and later developing these codes into analytic themes to examine the behaviours associated with journal lists.

The two themes in focus of this article – research adaptation and strategic networking – emerged from the dataset and were not chosen beforehand. They were the most frequently mentioned strategies when participants described what they regarded as common, or even necessary responses to the journal lists. When beginning the interviews, we were only partly aware of these behaviours and were surprised by the interviewees’ consequent focus on them (see Table 1 in the Online Appendix). When discussing publication practices in the interviews, we made an effort to stay neutral, neither endorsing nor criticising research adaptation and strategic networking. We did not use the word ‘gaming’ in the interviews, although some interviewees used it, especially those who were strategic networkers themselves. It was only after we had analysed the interviews that we decided to consult the literature on gaming, which led us to define research adaptation and strategic networking as ‘ethically liminal practices’ (Biagioli et al., 2019).

A notable pattern in the interviews was that participants talked about their ‘beliefs’ concerning publication successes, often stating that they ‘thought’, they ‘had heard’ or they ‘had been told’ that listed journals only accept some types of articles and that it is important to be acquainted with the editors and reviewers if one wishes to publish there. Approximately 80% of the participants subscribed to these beliefs, while two-thirds said that they (to varying degrees) acted in accordance with them.

The project follows the American Sociological Association’s Code of Ethics (ASA, 2018) and the Danish Code of Conduct for Research Integrity (Ministry of Higher Education and Science, 2021) for informed consent, participant anonymity and secure handling and storage of data. Participants were guaranteed full confidentiality and all personal information, anecdotes or events that could be traced back to specific individuals or departments have been withheld to maintain anonymity. All participant names mentioned in the analysis are pseudonyms.

Cultural Scripting

‘Cultural scripts’ are, in our adaptation of Simon and Gagnon’s (1986) concept, organisational scripts stipulating that faculty should publish in prestigious journals if they are to fulfil their department’s requirements. Most of the participating departments have explicit journal lists defining (predominantly) US-based ‘top journals’, whereas two departments have somewhat broader publication criteria, including some European generalist journals and field journals. However, also in these departments, publications in top US journals tend to be valued more highly than those in prestigious European journals.

In all the departments included, publishing in top journals is a central criterion when assessing faculty’s qualifications for hiring and promotion, although some variations exist among disciplines. According to the interviewees, top publications are a more or less mandatory criterion for hiring/promotion in economics and in some political science departments. In sociology departments and some interdisciplinary departments in which the faculty comprises sociologists, political scientists and others, the link between top publications and career progress is less straightforward. In these departments too, publications in top journals are the central qualification criterion, which, however, can be combined with other criteria (e.g. monographs with prestigious international publishers). Furthermore, quantitative researchers in the included departments are more oriented towards publishing in US journals than qualitative researchers, a difference that has also been found in other studies (Erola et al., 2015; Schwemmer and Wieczorek, 2020).

Interactional Scripting

Intrapsychic Scripting

According to Goffman (1956), a definition of the situation also includes performers’ attempts to project a certain image of themselves. Hence, in social interaction, such as in an interview context, performers are not only concerned with the topics discussed but also with impression management. In Goffman’s (1956: 162) words, ‘as performers, we are merchants of morality’, striving to control the impression others form of us. This morality concerns the performers’ self but also their responsibility for the ‘team’ they are part of. When defining a situation, performers should not denounce their team because team members hold a certain loyalty towards each other and discrediting the team also weakens the image of the self that the performer is attempting to project. As Simon and Gagnon (1986: 100) state when describing the challenges of intrapsychic scripting: ‘Questioning the sincerity of others ultimately becomes the condition for the questioning of the self by the self.’ Intrapsychic scripting concerns the relationship between participants’ self-conceptions/presentations and the other two levels of scripting, with reference to questions such as, ‘what kind of I am I? What kind of I do I want to be?’ (Simon and Gagnon, 1986: 100) and we may add: ‘What kind of team am I a member of?’

Although most participants believe in the interactional scripts of research adaptation and strategic networking and about two-thirds say that they follow these scripts to varying degrees, there is considerable ambivalence regarding their personal identification with them. Samuel, an associate professor, is an active practitioner of research adaptation and strategic networking. Throughout the interview, he alternates between defending and criticising these behaviours. On the one hand, he says ‘There are some, you could call them old gnomes, at the department who wail over the fact that our discipline is now defined by top US journals. The answer to them is that our focus on these journals guarantees research excellence’.

On the other hand, he states, ‘I am not completely fine with these journal lists [. . .] because they bend our research questions away from things that may have more relevance for our society’ (Samuel).

Another example of ambivalent interviewees is Evelyn, a professor describing how she has benefitted from her international network and not least from her co-authorship with a well-connected US scholar. She relates a review process that was ‘smoothened’ because her co-author ‘knew the editor extremely well’, adding: ‘I am not sure about this of course but it seemed like some kind of friend service.’ She goes on by saying that she discussed the situation with colleagues who ‘agreed that this was unusual but not unethical’ and that ‘it was difficult for her to raise objections about something that was to her own advantage’ (Evelyn). In the interview, however, Evelyn calls the process ‘outrageous’, also criticising the journal lists for leading to ‘all kinds of strange behaviours’.

As shown in these examples, some participants perform a difficult balancing act: they legitimise participation in gaming while simultaneously acknowledging that it may be problematic. As Goffman (1956: 162) points out, impression management is a question of presenting a self that lives up to ‘the standards by which the self is judged by others’, including the standards the performer expects their audience to represent. In our interviews, participants did not know our opinions on research adaptation and strategic networking (as mentioned in the methods section, we tried to keep a neutral stance on this). Hence, they may have thought that we share their commitment to strategic networking and value their achievements in this regard, or they may have suspected the opposite and feared our judgement of their behaviour. Furthermore, many interviewees were well acquainted with extant debates on the intensified goals of performance measurement in academia, and sometimes with critical research on the matter. This awareness of ongoing debates and insecurity about our stance may have contributed to the ambivalent and sometimes contradictory statements in the interviews.

Ambivalence also characterises the accounts of interviewees who do not practise research adaptation or strategic networking. Some participants express criticism of the journal lists, typically along the lines already mentioned: journal lists are said to disfavour qualitative, interdisciplinary and theoretical research; they are criticised for leading to standardisation and homogenisation of disciplines and for neglecting research topics relevant to Danish (but not US) society. As one of the male professors puts it: ‘We work on Danish taxpayers’ money but are in the grotesque situation that the less we mention Denmark in our publications, the more successful is our research’ (Tobias). Although these participants problematise the journal lists, they do not criticise their colleagues for adapting their research and/or engaging in strategic networking. One of the female associate professors says, ‘I have no problems at all with colleagues betting the whole store on top publications. They are fortunate to pursue research topics that match these top journals’ profiles, or else they have made them match. That’s fine with me, although I haven’t been able to change my research profile’ (Lillian). A male associate professor says,

‘I feel like this is something I have missed out on a bit, networking with US scholars, for instance. I am impressed and slightly envious [laughs] watching how my colleagues handle our performance demands. I have never been good at strategic behaviour’ (James).

In these interviews and several others, gaming is not condemned but rather presented as a natural consequence of performance measurement. As two other interviewees say about strategic networking, ‘It’s a necessity to be instrumental, I don’t say it is good but it is wise’ (Charlie, associate professor); ‘It’s natural, it’s naive to think that you can do this in other ways’ (Frank, professor). Accounts like these may be signs of collegial loyalty and an unwillingness to ‘denounce one’s team’ (Goffman, 1956: 135). When individuals appear before others, they intentionally or unintentionally project a ‘moral truth’ about the situation, a truth of which an acceptable conception of themselves and their team is an important part (Goffman, 1956: 155). The overall ‘truth’ emanating from our interviews is that scholars cannot be blamed for gaming because management’s decision to reward publications in listed journals compels them to adopt strategic behaviours. The fact that faculty are positioned unequally when it comes to research adaptation and networking is acknowledged but regarded as an individual rather than a collective problem – ‘I haven’t been able to change my research profile’, ‘I have never been good at strategic behaviour’, as Lillian and James said above, tying their publication challenges to personal shortcomings.

Discussion

This article used scripting theory (Simon and Gagnon, 1986) to structure a three-level analysis of gaming in academia. While the first level defines performance goals (publishing in listed journals), the second level creates beliefs about how these goals should be reached (research adaptation and strategic networking) – beliefs that are related to participants’ self-scripting in varying ways. Some participants do practise research adaptation and strategic networking and see no problems with that or the journal lists. Others do not engage in these behaviours themselves (for various reasons) but find their colleagues’ gaming and the journal lists to be legitimate. Others again criticise the journal lists but not the practices with which these lists are associated.

In the analysis, we focused on beliefs and their consequences. Our findings do not prove that successful publishing is dependent on research adaptation or relationships between authors, reviewers and editors. We have not analysed the actual behaviour of editors receiving manuscripts from known versus unknown authors, nor have we investigated the numerical article profiles (qualitative or quantitative, theoretical or empirical, disciplinary or interdisciplinary) of the listed journals. What is clear, however, is that most of the interviewees believe in the necessity of research adaptation and strategic networking and that many act in accordance with these beliefs.

As described in the introduction, previous research defines gaming as ‘workplace deviance’ violating organisational norms (Graf et al., 2019: 754) or as ‘opportunistic’ behaviour breaching rules and codes of conduct (Aboubichr and Conway, 2023: 605). The behaviours we focused on in this article are typically not conceptualised as deviant, opportunistic or rule violations. Furthermore, there are no ‘codes of conduct’ condemning networking with reviewers and editors or adapting one’s research topics and methods to supposed journal preferences. Hence, although these behaviours are not authorised by the involved departments, none of the participants practising them describe sanctions or critiques from management or colleagues.

Many interviews were permeated with ambivalence. While the scripting processes at interactional level define research adaptation and strategic networking as ‘natural’ and relatively innocent ‘tricks of the trade’, the relationship between gaming and participants’ self-scripting is more complicated. At this level, several interviewees hesitate when it comes to identifying themselves with (the behaviours we call) gaming, wavering between describing their own research adaptation and strategic networking as problematic and unproblematic. A similar ambivalence is seen among non-practitioners of these behaviours who sometimes criticise the journal lists and their consequences in principle, yet avoid condemning their colleagues who engage in research adaptation and strategic networking. Following previous research (Kalfa et al., 2018; Rintamäki and Alvesson, 2023), this shows that the new ‘academic ethos’ of performance measurement may be ideologically resisted yet accepted as inevitable in practice.

Besides ambivalence, there are clear signs of resignation in the interview accounts. The participants work at universities governed by the market logic of neoliberalism where performance metrics facilitate the manageability of their research and where alignment with their department’s definitions of ‘publication successes’ is a requirement for promotion. Seen from this perspective, it may be wiser for individual researchers to comply with the demands represented by journal lists than resist them. Furthermore, managerial reasoning at all the departments involved reflects the idea that US scholarship should also be the precedent for social scientists in Denmark. Extant studies describe the expansion of US research and publication standards as ‘epistemic domination’ or ‘epistemic imperialism’ (Boulianne, 2019; Gonzales et al., 2024). Epistemic domination/imperialism refers to situations where some knowledge claims are given superior status because they are seen as representing universal truths while others are dismissed and regarded as reflecting specific interests and contexts (here: national). Epistemic domination is built on rules, seemingly neutral but in fact contingent, for how research should be framed, conducted and presented in different fields (Gonzales et al., 2024). This mechanism is at play when the interviewees talk about finding the ‘microscale points Americans find worthy of quoting’ (Kurt) or state ‘the less we mention Denmark, the more successful is our research’ (Tobias). Such accounts are presented matter-of-factly, and often with resignation: opposing US definitions of how social research should be conducted and what constitutes relevant research is something few interviewees engage in.

Graf et al.’s (2019) three conditions for the development of gaming were mentioned in the introduction: performance goals are set (too) high, attainment is measured by outcome alone and performance criteria concern some work tasks and not others. The journal lists in the involved departments meet all these criteria. First, publishing in top US journals is an ambitious goal, as all listed journals have immensely high rejection rates. Many participants, especially those without US co-authors, describe the long and strenuous processes of paper presentations and repeated rewriting before their papers are even considered for publication in these journals. Second, the cultural scripts of high-status publishing centre on results rather than processes. Hence, when our participants are evaluated, for instance, in hiring and promotion processes, the dominant focus is on their publication ‘hits’ and not on the behaviours – be they legitimate or illegitimate – lying behind them. Finally, the ‘tunnel vision’ described by Graf et al. (2019) is evident in our data: journal lists create a narrow concern with publishing in accredited outlets and disinterest in other journals and other publication forms (such as monographs and anthologies or publications in Danish).

Successful research requires continuous performance at a high level in an extremely competitive environment. Journal lists insert this competition into a formula based on US publication standards. Many of the participants in our study describe research as a means of achieving publication and not primarily as a means to advance knowledge (compare Becker and Lukka, 2023). They design their studies in a way that they believe enhances their chances of publication success and not necessarily following what they regard as the most intriguing research questions. Hence, being a well-performing scholar today is not necessarily equal to being a scholar in search of ‘the truth’ or doing research for the ‘common good’, for example by studying topics relevant to Denmark. In this sense, journal lists have severe consequences for the development of the social sciences. They incite scholars to conform to the specific interests of a small group of journals instead of seeking the best possible understanding of issues of importance for science and/or society at large.

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