How incentives trickle down: Local use of a national bibliometric indicator system

The question of how the incentives of national performance-based research funding systems affect local management practices within the higher education sector has high empirical and theoretical importance, but has so far received limited attention. From a traditional organization theory perspective the Norwegian system represents a puzzle: it is of marginal economic importance and the external pressure to fully implement the system at local levels is weak. A loose coupling between the national system and the local implementation would therefore be expected. Yet, in many instances we document a quite tight coupling between system-level incentives and local practices. Based on a recent evaluation of the Norwegian model, which identifies a number of indirect mechanisms that contribute to the trickling down of incentives, this paper shows that traditional coupling perspectives are oversimplistic. A large variation across institutions, fields and departments is, however, also observed and possible explanations for this are discussed.