This article by John Holmwood is worth reading:
There are few national systems of higher education that are immune from their effects, though their use is more extensive and systematic in some places, rather than others. They seem to have gone furthest in national systems with a high proportion of public universities, especially in countries with strong neo-liberal public policy regimes – for example, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. They are less extensive where national systems of governance are weaker – for example, the United States and Germany.
My purpose is not to describe the myriad forms of audit-by-metrics, or the national differences in ‘metric regimes’. Rather, I shall draw out two aspects in the development of ‘metric regimes’, which have particular significance for the discipline of sociology. The first is how the form of metric measurement favours particular disciplines over others. The second is the move from ‘co-production’ to ‘commercialisation’ in the construction of metric regimes.
Mark Carrigan 