Welfare reform on the Web (April 2007): Education - UK - higher

The Research Assessment Exercise, the state and the dominance of mainstream economics in British universities

F.S. Lee

Cambridge Journal of Economics, vol. 31, 2007, p. 309-325

In previous research on the impact of the Research Assessment Exercise on heterodox economics and economists in the UK, the author concluded that reliance on staff publishing in Diamond List journals to rank departments would lead to their hiring and promoting mainstream economists in order to improve their ranking. The author predicted that, as a consequence, heterodox economists would be driven out or maintain only a token presence. This paper argues that these predictions were correct and that mainstream or neoclassical theory and discourse dominate UK economics departments in terms of undergraduate teaching, postgraduate research and publications.