despite perceived inequalities of prestige and influence across disci-
plines.^39 It also makes room for improvisation and hunches, as pan-
elists elaborate on their arguments in the heat of the moment.^40 This
system is to be contrasted with mechanized forms of evaluation that
attempt to remove all traces of the personal, the idiosyncratic, and
the inconsistent.^41 Funding agencies use peer review because they
can mobilize acknowledged experts, that is, an evaluative technology
that puts connoisseurship and judgments at the center of the evalua-
tion process.
Conclusion
As we will see, many applicants and panelists strongly support grant
peer review because it is perceived as guaranteeing a relatively clean
evaluation process. As such, it legitimizes the system of distribution
of resources for evaluators and applicants, and beyond that, affirms
the broader system of academic evaluation and promotion, includ-
ing tenure. To some extent peer review is where agreement on qual-
ity is accomplished and where the principle of meritocracy is un-
questioned. In contrast, to take only one example, in the French
workplace studied by sociologist François Dubet, several forces are
opposed to the meritocratic distribution of resources because it priv-
ileges the dominant and penalizes the subordinate groups.^42
As a technology producing relative “cleanliness,” peer review plays
an especially crucial role in the American context, at least as com-
pared to its role in “smaller” systems like those of Hungary, Finland,
or Portugal. The sheer demographic size of American higher educa-
tion, as well as the impersonal nature and level of social and geo-
graphic mobility that characterize it, generate uncertainty concern-
ing shared norms and rules of behavior, and threaten to undermine
organizational control.^43 Under these conditions, it is particu-
larly important that individuals who have never met know immedi-
How Panels Work / 51