can step outside of their own interests and out of their own interest
groups and look at something from another perspective.” A some-
what frequent outcome of group deliberation is a feeling of satisfac-
tion that the group has shared an appreciation of good work and has
come to a consensus regarding the evaluations.
Indeed, such heartfelt and personal aspects of academic life fea-
ture prominently in panelists’ talk about their experience as evalua-
tors. They enjoy deeply both seeing a brilliant mind at work and
reading a perfectly crafted proposal. As suggested in Chapter 2, their
commitment to the distinctive pleasures and virtues of academic life
cannot be overestimated as a factor that shapes how they think about
their responsibilities as panel members. The point here is that al-
though panelists’ beliefs in academic excellence and in the fairness of
the funding process do not come “naturally,” neither do they appear
to be expressions of false consciousness or ritualized covers for self-
interest.^2 Like all social actors, these academics rely on various, and
sometimes inconsistent or contradictory, frames to give meaning to
their actions.
In this chapter, I explore the social conditions that lead panelists
to understand their choices as fair and legitimate. This is quite differ-
ent from determining whether the process of peer review itself is fair.
There is already a large literature on that question.^3 Typically, such
studies have focused on those values and norms of the scientific in-
stitution that support fairness in evaluation by ensuring that no one
is excluded from scientific debates due to purely subjective social fac-
tors.^4 In contrast, my concern is with the frameworks or meaning
systems—the rules of the game—that panelists use to understand
their actions and the environment in which they are operating.^5 Al-
though the scholars I interviewed are almost unanimous in their be-
lief that “the process works,” they are not always sure how it works. A
panel chair, for instance, stressing that “the consensus candidates
were [agreed on] at a high level,” concludes, “I think the process
Pragmatic Fairness / 109