Metric governance does more than measure research; it governs recognition, and in doing so it reorders the relations through which knowledge is produced. This paper argues that the commensuration of academic standing onto a single scale makes recognition scarce, and that the scarcity produces two pathologies at once. Horizontally it adversarialises researchers, turning colleagues into rivals for a positional good. Vertically it produces ‘epistemic clientelism’, the moderation of independent judgement to remain legible to the patrons who control advancement. These compose one ‘recognition game’ rather than two separate complaints. Through ‘evaluative-layer capping’, the game rewards work that extends inherited standards and misrecognises the generative work that would reopen them, while the use of a metric as a verdict launders the answerability for the misrecognition. A simple assurance game shows why the degraded order is stable although few would choose it and no one need act in bad faith, with the better culture held out of reach by the risk of pursuing it alone. Because metrics were themselves a reform against unaccountable discretion, the corrective cannot be a return to discretion. The prescription that judgement should govern indicators already belongs to the responsible-metrics reforms; what they lack, and what the paper supplies as ‘epistemic governance’, is the coordinating device that makes the better equilibrium safe to reach, an arrangement that restores answerable, owned judgement while keeping the metric as a check rather than a verdict.
Peter Kahl (Sat,) studied this question.