Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Handelsblatt Ranking

According to the The Lumpy Economist, who comments on the Boykott of the Handelsblatt ranking by business professors, three structural differences between Germany and the US tend to increase the importance of the Handelsblatt ranking:

1) Smallness of departments, which often leads to the situation that nobody in the field to be hired is there and can competently judge the papers of the candidates – the HB ranking is an easy way out;

2) lack of a general education in a PhD program, which means that faculty with a traditional German PhD eduaction often lack the background to talk about papers in other fields (of course, I would always defer to my theory or econometrics colleagues to judge such papers, but it’s also not true that I can be completely bamboozled in these areas);

3) I think the most important one is the lack of a department structure to begin with, which has two direct consequences: a) I honestly think that many German professors do not care as much as US professors about who is going to be a colleague – as I said, in the US senior hiring is one of the most important services one can provide to the department; and, rightfully so, as they run a chair, which is ultimately an isolated unit for which they are responsible on their own. [my emphasis]

Hear, hear!

(Working at a university, where the business departments are, according to some ranking, not the most prolific when it comes to publications in peer-reviewed journals.)

(Update: hear, hear!: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Nz846dDids&feature=fvwrel .)

No comments:

Post a Comment