As every respectable research institute, the HoF has its own publication: die hochschule (abbr. dhs), a journal that is published roughly twice per year. Roughly, as there have been times when dhs mustered only one issue every twelve months.
As every reputable scientific journal, dhs aims at getting first-class contributions from within the field of higher education research (HER), and usually shrugs at publishing texts by HoF-members or associates. It attempts to be a forum, not a showcase.
Still, sometimes the journal carries articles by reseachers working at the HoF — and quite often this seems to involve colleagues collaborating with me. I more or less started out my publishing in HER with a contribution in dhs in 2019, then I was involved in a mapping of the field which proved so extensive that we didn’t want to boil it down into a 20-odd pager and thus published it as an entire issue of dhs. And now it has happened again, albeit in a less extensive form: Colleagues and I have an article included in a guest-edited issue. Does that count as intellectual incest?
Be this as it may, the article I co-wrote addresses the question of relevancy of HER for some stakeholders (decision makers in policy and university administrations), based on a reconstruction of historical events surrounding the introduction of new forms of salary laws in Germany in the early 2000s.
The article forms part of the research project In Search of Relevancy: Expectations of Knowledge Transfer between Higher Education Research and its Practical Contexts, and it was great fun doing some historical research again. Although we only used material from desktop research and thus I couldn’t get my hands dirty in archives, it was relieving to realise that historical topics have some importance even in such an empirical-driven, present-time obsessed field like HER.
The German-language article, titled “Kaum gehört und kaum gefragt. Transfererfahrungen der Hochschulforschung am Beispiel der Besoldungsreform ab dem Jahr 2000” (Hardly ever heard, hardly ever asked: HER’s experiences of knowledge transfer with the salary law reform from the year 2000 onwards), unfortunately isn’t available for free (as in-house edited issues of the journal usually are), but can be requested here. Or, if you cannot spare the dime, get in touch with me, and we’ll find a way.
