Burnout as evaluative imbalance: pluralising worth in performance management systems

Performance management systems (PMS) have become central infrastructures for governing academic work, yet research on their relationship with burnout has focused predominantly on workload, job demands, and managerial pressures, leaving the evaluative principles institutionalized through performance systems comparatively undertheorized. This article advances an evaluative perspective by conceptualizing PMS as justificatory infrastructures that institutionalize specific principles of worth. Drawing on Boltanski and Thévenot's (2006) Orders of Worth framework, it theorizes burnout as evaluative imbalance arising when market and industrial orders of worth, often intertwined with fame-based recognition and visibility, are strongly institutionalized, while domestic, civic, inspired, and green orders remain comparatively weakly formalized.Empirically, the study employs analytical autoethnography based on a longitudinal corpus spanning 2021-2024. The analysis traces how university PMS stabilize market and industrial orders through documentation and comparative metrics, intertwining these with fame-based recognition through rankings, citations, and scholarly visibility; how these evaluative principles are internalized through self-monitoring, generating evaluative overextension in which continuous proof becomes bodily and temporally untenable; and how recovery re-legitimates comparatively marginalized domestic, civic, inspired, and green orders of worth, making evaluative plurality practically available again.The paper contributes to accounting scholarship by shifting attention from what PMS measure to the evaluative principles they institutionalize, and to burnout research by conceptualizing exhaustion as evaluative imbalance arising from the unequal institutionalization of competing principles of worth. It develops implications for pluralizing PMS by highlighting how recognizing multiple legitimate forms of worth may sustain accountability while mitigating evaluative monoculture.