In the eye of beholder? The notions of quality in the humanities

In this article we attempt to reconstruct the tacit and implicit notions of quality in the humanities. This reconstruction is based on a series of semi-structured qualitative interviews with 33 humanities scholars. Applying Max Weber’s theory of authority, we argue the quality notions have two different sources—external and internal. External sources correspond to the Weber’s types of authority: traditional authorities (academic tradition, professors, PhD advisors), rational-legal authorities (research administrators, policy makers) and charismatic authorities (‘the great minds’, ‘the founding fathers’ in a given academic field). Internal sources providing the quality notion do not fit into Weberian classification. These sources are based on the personal experience of a humanities researcher’s evaluation practices, which cannot be reduced to either type of authority above. Combining the interview data and Max Weber’s theory of authority, we try to demonstrate the existence of four different and sometimes incompatible notions of quality in the humanities: administrative; individual; semi-administrative, semi-individual; moderate individual. These notions are interpreted as ideal types, which serve as a regulative ideas rather than objective representations of research evaluation reality. The manuscript is important to Research Evaluation for the following reasons: first, it reconstructs the different types of notions of quality, which are crucial in better understanding peer review and other qualitative research evaluation practices; second, it provides better understanding of individual evaluator’s premises; third, it provides opportunity to have a glimpse beyond dominant administrative quality notions and criteria as usually the perspectives of the humanities researchers are neglected.