When Evaluation Becomes Strategy: Academic Productivism, Planning, and the Publishing Market in Graduate Education

Objective

To critically analyze/interpret the incorporation of strategic planning by Brazilian graduate programs, situating it within the historical process through which management practices developed in private organizations have spread to the public sector, and relating it to the CAPES evaluation system, academic productivism, and the growing influence of the international scientific publishing market. The text draws on the contributions of Henry Mintzberg, Ralph Stacey, Edgar Morin, and Alberto Guerreiro Ramos to discuss the possibilities and limitations of strategic planning in universities and to distinguish its use as an instrument of institutional reflexivity from its use as a mechanism for internalizing external evaluation pressures.

Abstract

Strategic planning initially became established within the world of large private corporations and subsequently spread to public organizations and universities. Although it can help clarify priorities, coordinate actions, and evaluate results, its use in academic institutions requires recontextualization, since universities and corporations pursue different purposes. This issue is particularly relevant to Brazilian graduate programs, which operate within an evaluation system in which ratings, research output indicators, internationalization criteria, and institutional performance influence recognition, funding, and the allocation of scholarships and resources. In this context, strategic planning can strengthen programs’ reflexivity and autonomy, but it can also become an instrument for internalizing productivist pressures. Lourenço Kawakami Tristão’s doctoral dissertation on academic productivism provides empirical evidence of how evaluation-related pressures are reproduced within graduate programs and extend to faculty members and students. At the same time, the emphasis placed on certain international bibliometric indicators embeds science policy within a scholarly communication system that is highly concentrated in the hands of major publishing groups and commercial indexing services. The argument advanced here is that the problem does not lie in planning, evaluation, scientific publishing, or internationalization per se, but rather in the inversion of means and ends: indicators, publications, and ranking positions may come to guide scientific activity instead of remaining subordinate to the purposes of research, academic education, and social contribution.

1. Introduction: When Planning Comes to Mean Competing

Planning is an inherent organizational activity. Universities, departments, laboratories, and graduate programs have always made choices regarding priorities, resources, education, research, expansion, and their institutional future. However, planning and strategic planning are not exactly the same thing. The latter constitutes a specific tradition within management thought, consolidated primarily in the world of large corporations during the twentieth century and subsequently disseminated across public organizations and universities.

Concepts such as mission, vision, strategic objectives, indicators, targets, SWOT analysis, the Balanced Scorecard, and performance management have progressively crossed the boundaries between private and public organizations. Brazil’s National School of Public Administration (ENAP) acknowledges the historical connection between contemporary strategic planning and the development of industrial and market organizations, as well as the expansion of multinational corporations (1). In adapting the Balanced Scorecard to public organizations, however, ENAP gives prominence to outcomes for society and for citizens, users, beneficiaries, and other stakeholders, implicitly recognizing that a public organization cannot be evaluated according to the same criteria used for a private corporation (1).

This distinction becomes particularly important when strategic planning is introduced into Brazilian graduate programs. Graduate programs do not plan in an institutional vacuum. They participate in a national evaluation system coordinated by CAPES, in which academic performance, education and training, scientific output, broader engagement, and internationalization influence institutional recognition and, through different mechanisms, opportunities for funding and scholarships. Competition for higher evaluation ratings may therefore affect decisions made within graduate programs.

This raises a question that guides this article: Does strategic planning help graduate programs critically reflect on their scientific, educational, and social mission, or does it tend to transform external evaluation criteria into internal performance objectives?

Answering this question requires briefly reconstructing the trajectory of strategic planning, examining the criticisms formulated by authors such as Mintzberg and Stacey, and relating them to the perspectives of Morin and Guerreiro Ramos. Above all, it requires situating planning within the broader context of academic productivism and the international scholarly publishing market.

2. From Corporations to the Public Sector: The Expansion of a Management Technology

The classical conception of strategic planning is strongly associated with the development of large corporations and with authors such as Igor Ansoff. Broadly speaking, it assumes that managers can systematically analyze an organization and its environment, establish objectives, choose strategies, plan their implementation, and monitor results. Stacey and Griffin critically revisit this tradition, observing that it embodies an expectation that organizations can be rationally positioned in relation to their environment and that surprises can be reduced through anticipation and control (2).

This perspective made sense in light of the problems faced by large corporations: geographical expansion, product diversification, competition, long-term investment, resource allocation, and the need to coordinate increasingly complex administrative structures. Strategic planning provided a language capable of connecting diagnosis, objectives, resources, implementation, and evaluation.

From the final decades of the twentieth century onward, particularly under the influence of reforms associated with New Public Management, a significant part of this vocabulary also became incorporated into public administration. Efficiency, performance, targets, indicators, results-based management, and accountability acquired increasing importance. This transfer need not be interpreted one-sidedly. Public organizations also need to establish priorities, use resources appropriately, evaluate policies, and remain accountable to society. The problem arises when instruments conceived within a particular institutional context are treated as universal technologies, regardless of the different purposes of the organizations in which they are applied.

It is in this respect that Jean-François Chanlat’s critique becomes particularly relevant. A study relating his contributions to those of Morin and institutionalist authors highlights Chanlat’s critique of a “triple hegemony”: the hegemony of the economic domain, of the corporation as the privileged organizational model, and of the categories of managerial thought itself (3). Strategic planning thus forms part of a broader cultural transformation in which categories originating in management come to provide an apparently common language for corporations, hospitals, governments, universities, and social organizations.

The circulation of knowledge among different types of organizations can be fruitful. Yet it requires us to ask not merely whether a particular technique works, but according to which purposes, values, and conceptions of organization it works.

3. Mintzberg: Strategy Is Not Synonymous with Planning

Henry Mintzberg was one of the authors who contributed most significantly to challenging the identification of strategy with formal planning. In Strategy Safari, written with Bruce Ahlstrand and Joseph Lampel, the field of strategy is presented as encompassing a genuine plurality of perspectives, organized into schools such as design, planning, positioning, entrepreneurial, cognitive, learning, power, cultural, environmental, and configuration (4).

The distinction between deliberate and emergent strategies is particularly important. Organizations formulate intentions and establish plans, but what they actually accomplish also results from learning, contingencies, conflicts, opportunities, and initially unforeseen events. A strategy may therefore be recognized retrospectively as a pattern of action without having been fully conceived in advance.

This perspective does not eliminate the usefulness of planning. It simply establishes that strategic planning and strategic thinking are not equivalent. A plan can organize intentions and actions, but the strategy actually realized also emerges from experience.

This distinction is particularly relevant to universities. A graduate program may plan a particular form of international cooperation, yet a decisive scientific partnership may arise unexpectedly from an encounter between researchers. It may establish priority research areas and, in the course of an investigation, discover entirely unforeseen scientific problems. It may define social-impact objectives whose most significant effects become apparent only years later.

Science requires planning, but its creativity cannot be entirely programmed in advance. Mintzberg’s contribution lies precisely in restoring the dimensions of learning, experience, and emergence to strategy.

4. Stacey: From Prediction to the Recognition of Uncertainty

Ralph Stacey’s intellectual trajectory is particularly illuminating because his critique of planning did not arise from an external rejection of management. Stacey initially worked with econometrics, economic forecasting, corporate planning, investment, and consulting. Over the course of this experience, he became increasingly frustrated by the inability of economists and managers to adequately predict the consequences of their decisions, even as they continued to rely on formally sophisticated models (5).

His approach evolved through chaos theory and complex adaptive systems before arriving at what became known as complex responsive processes. In this trajectory, he moved away from the idea that an organization could adequately be understood as a system existing above individuals. Stacey and his collaborators came instead to conceive organizations as patterns continuously produced through human interactions (5).

This shift has important implications for planning. A strategic plan may formally exist as an approved document, but it produces organizational consequences only when it enters into interactions among people. Missions, values, targets, and indicators are interpreted, negotiated, contested, and modified. Even managers with greater power can determine their own actions but cannot fully control the responses those actions will generate among other participants (5).

The book edited by Stacey and Douglas Griffin on public-sector organizations provides a particularly relevant case for this discussion. Séamus Cannon examines the experience of strategic planning and performance management in the education sector. The organization studied employed mission statements, high-level objectives, expected outcomes, and indicators, linking planning to performance and even adopting the corporate expression “Business Units” (2).

Yet some of the educational innovations examined had emerged precisely from interactions and conversations that had not been anticipated in the original planning process. Outcomes were constructed during the process itself, through relationships among professionals and institutions. Cannon draws on this experience to demonstrate the possible distance between the formal rationality of plans and the emergence of innovation through local interactions (2).

For universities, the implication is significant. Planning can create conditions for innovation, but it cannot determine scientific creativity in advance. The more an organization depends on knowledge, learning, and professional autonomy, the greater the need to recognize the limits of prediction and control.

5. Morin: Planning Without Eliminating Uncertainty

Edgar Morin allows us to shift this discussion from the administrative to the epistemological level. An article comparing the contributions of Stacey and Morin observes that Stacey progressively moved away from a restricted conception of complexity and came to emphasize relational, political, and emergent processes, bringing his approach, in some respects, closer to the broader perspective developed by Morin (6).

Morin criticizes a paradigm of simplification grounded in rigid separations between subject and object, quality and quantity, reason and emotion, purpose and causality. This critique helps illuminate the limitations of an academic management system that relies excessively on what can be quantified.

The problem does not lie in the existence of indicators. Every organization needs to select information that allows it to monitor its activities. The problem arises when what can be measured is confused with what is relevant. The number of articles can be counted, but the originality of an intellectual contribution is more difficult to quantify. Citations can be measured, but their number does not necessarily reflect the social relevance of a study. Average time to degree is an important administrative indicator, but by itself it does not express the quality of a researcher’s education and training.

A complex perspective does not recommend replacing indicators with subjective impressions. Rather, it seeks to reconnect quantity and quality, outcomes and processes, planning and uncertainty. In this sense, the challenge is not to abandon planning, but to plan while recognizing that the reality in which one intervenes will continue to produce unforeseen events.

6. From Planning to Academic Productivism

It is at this point that Lourenço Kawakami Tristão’s doctoral dissertation, Academic Productivism, the Publishing Market, and the Dilemmas of Universities in a Context of Paradigmatic Crisis, defended in 2024 in the Graduate Program in Administration at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), becomes a central reference for this discussion (7).

The dissertation situates academic productivism within the historical process of the expansion of science after World War II. As science and technology acquired greater economic and geopolitical importance and investment in research increased, so did the demand for instruments designed to evaluate the use of resources and the performance of researchers and institutions. Quantitative indicators progressively acquired greater importance.

In Brazil, CAPES has played a decisive role in organizing, expanding, and improving the quality of graduate education. The consolidation of the national graduate education system cannot be understood without acknowledging this contribution. However, the centrality of evaluation also means that its criteria exert a strong capacity to shape the behavior of graduate programs. Tristão’s dissertation highlights precisely the dissemination of productivity indicators and the ways in which institutional pressures extend to graduate programs, faculty members, and students (7).

It is necessary, however, to distinguish productivity from productivism. The participants in the study themselves make this distinction. Conducting rigorous research and publishing its results are normal parts of scientific activity. Productivism emerges when publication becomes detached from the research process and is pursued primarily for the points or scores it generates.

The inversion may appear subtle, but its consequences are profound. Under a substantive academic logic, research and reflection produce knowledge that, among other outcomes, generates publications. Under a productivist logic, publication tends to become the expected product in advance, and the research process itself is increasingly organized around the need to continuously generate this measurable output.

7. From External Evaluation to Internal Competition

The evaluation system does not produce effects only when CAPES assigns ratings to graduate programs. Its criteria can become incorporated into the everyday practices of the organizations being evaluated. The dissertation characterizes the regulatory evaluation model as marked by technical interests, instrumental rationality, performance indicators, accountability, control, and a competitive ethos, while observing that external demands tend to be reproduced internally by institutions (7).

This process helps explain why academic productivism does not require CAPES to issue direct instructions to each researcher or student. Graduate programs interpret evaluation criteria and translate them into accreditation and reaccreditation policies, expectations regarding scholarly output, institutional priorities, and internal mechanisms for allocating opportunities. Faculty members must respond to these requirements, while students quickly realize that the academic record they build during their master’s studies and, especially, during their doctoral training will influence their future prospects for entering academic careers.

The testimonies analyzed by Tristão make this mechanism visible. One participant explicitly associates academic productivism with graduate programs’ interest in improving their standing in CAPES evaluations; the focus groups also include references to publication driven by scoring requirements, short-term results, and the pursuit of higher program ratings.

Institutional competition thus tends to move downward through the organizational structure. Graduate programs seek better evaluations; faculty members need to maintain the conditions required for participation and recognition; and students anticipate future professional competition by accumulating publications and other academic credentials. A doctoral student may produce an intellectually significant dissertation and yet realize that completing a doctorate with only a few published articles places them at a disadvantage compared with candidates who have quantitatively stronger publication records when competing for faculty positions, scholarships, and other academic opportunities.

This does not mean attributing direct responsibility to CAPES for each of these decisions. The phenomenon is organizationally more complex: external criteria are interpreted, internalized, and reproduced by multiple actors, acquiring a life of their own within institutions.

8. When Evaluation Becomes Strategy

It is within this context that the current emphasis on strategic planning in graduate programs needs to be examined. Planning can provide an opportunity for faculty members, students, and administrative staff to discuss the program’s identity, academic education and training, research quality, relationships with undergraduate education and extension activities, interdisciplinarity, scientific cooperation, social engagement, and long-term priorities. Used in this way, it can enhance the academic community’s capacity for institutional reflexivity.

However, the same instrument can perform a different function. Criteria originating in external evaluation may be converted into internal objectives, targets, and indicators: increasing publications in particular journals, improving bibliometric impact, raising internationalization indicators, reducing time to degree, or achieving other outcomes capable of strengthening the program’s position in the evaluation system. None of these goals is necessarily inappropriate. The problem arises when they begin to organize academic life to such an extent that the question “What kind of science do we want to produce, and what kind of researchers do we want to educate?” gives way to “What do we need to do to improve our evaluation?”

At that point, planning ceases to be merely a reflection on the future and also begins to operate as a mechanism for the organizational internalization of external evaluation.

It is important to recognize this ambivalence. Strategic planning can help a graduate program resist academic productivism if it enables the academic community to articulate its purposes and subordinate indicators to them. But it can also rationalize and enhance productivism itself by converting diffuse pressures into formalized targets, monitored indicators, and assigned responsibilities.

This ambivalence is probably more important than an abstract debate over whether one is “for” or “against” strategic planning.

9. Evaluation, Resources, and the Capacity to Shape Institutional Behavior

The issue becomes more sensitive because evaluation involves more than symbolic recognition. The results achieved by graduate programs affect their prestige and their eligibility or positioning within different mechanisms for research funding and scholarship allocation. There are therefore concrete institutional incentives for graduate programs to preserve or improve their standing.

This is not, in itself, a distortion. A public agency responsible for a national graduate education system needs to assess quality and establish criteria for allocating scarce resources. The relevant problem lies in the effects that the chosen criteria produce on the behavior of institutional actors.

The greater the weight assigned to particular indicators, the greater the effort graduate programs are likely to devote to improving them. Strategic planning can therefore operate as an intermediary mechanism between the evaluation system and everyday academic life: what appears externally as an evaluation criterion reappears internally as a management objective.

This gives rise to a classic problem in evaluation policy: an indicator created to represent a particular phenomenon may progressively begin to reorganize the very phenomenon it was intended merely to represent. Rather than simply measuring scientific activity, the metric begins to influence the selection of research topics, publication venues, forms of collaboration, and professional strategies.

10. The International Publishing Market Enters the Circuit

Any analysis of academic productivism would remain incomplete if it considered only the relationship between CAPES and universities. There is a third group of actors: the large corporations that occupy central positions in international scholarly communication.

Tristão’s dissertation shows that scientific journals, historically associated with scientific societies and academic institutions, have progressively become part of a highly profitable and concentrated market. Drawing on Nishikawa-Pacher’s study, the dissertation highlights five major publishers—Springer, Taylor & Francis, Elsevier, Wiley, and SAGE—which together controlled approximately 44% of the journals included in the sample examined (13).

In addition to publishers, it is necessary to consider the companies responsible for major indexing databases and bibliometric indicators. Web of Science belongs to Clarivate, while Scopus belongs to Elsevier. The dissertation relates these systems to indicators such as the Journal Impact Factor, CiteScore, and SCImago Journal Rank. It is therefore more accurate to speak of a concentrated ecosystem of commercial publishers, indexing services, and metrics than simply of a small number of publishing companies.

The economics of this system has a well-known peculiarity. Researchers, many of whom are employed by public universities and work on projects funded with public resources, produce the articles. Other researchers perform much of the peer-review work without specific remuneration. The articles then become part of publishing products and commercial databases that are subsequently purchased by universities, libraries, and research institutions. Drawing on Haro, Tristão’s dissertation observes that universities and research centers themselves are among the main purchasers of this knowledge and that productivity, international visibility, and positions in rankings come to be interpreted as returns on scientific investment (12).

It would not be accurate to conclude that all public resources invested in research are directly transferred to publishers. There are multiple forms of mediation, different access models, and numerous public, university-based, and open-access journals. Nevertheless, it is legitimate to ask to what extent public resources allocated to science ultimately provide economic support to private corporations that occupy privileged positions in the publication, indexing, and measurement of science itself.

11. Substantive Internationalization and Metric-Based Internationalization

Internationalization is an indispensable dimension of contemporary science. Problems such as the climate emergency, pandemics, artificial intelligence, inequality, and the energy transition cannot be adequately understood within rigid national boundaries. International cooperation, academic mobility, joint projects, student exchanges, and dialogue among different scientific traditions can enhance the quality of research.

The problem arises when internationalization becomes too closely identified with particular bibliometric indicators or with publication in journals belonging to dominant publishing circuits. Tristão’s dissertation observes that, within a productivist context, publication in international journals may be used as a privileged indicator of internationalization, even placing pressure on researchers from peripheral countries to adapt their topics and references to the interests and standards of foreign journals.

It is therefore useful to distinguish substantive internationalization from metric-based internationalization. The former concerns the effective international circulation of knowledge, people, problems, and research networks. The latter privileges the translation of such circulation into publications, indexing, citations, and other comparable indicators. The two may reinforce one another, but they are not equivalent.

A graduate program may have intellectually substantial international scientific relationships without necessarily maximizing particular indicators. Conversely, it may achieve strong international bibliometric performance without this necessarily reflecting an equivalent depth of scientific cooperation or social relevance.

In the humanities and social sciences, this issue is particularly sensitive. The dissertation itself points out that books and book chapters remain fundamental in fields where scientific contributions frequently involve understanding historical, social, and cultural phenomena that resist immediate quantification.

12. Guerreiro Ramos: The Alternative Between Copying and Rejecting

It is at this point that The Sociological Reduction, originally published in 1958, proves remarkably relevant. Guerreiro Ramos does not advocate intellectual isolation or the rejection of science produced abroad. On the contrary, he acknowledges the international circulation of knowledge. His critique is directed at the mechanical assimilation of concepts produced under different historical circumstances.

In discussing the first formulation of his proposal, Guerreiro defines sociological reduction as a method for the critical assimilation of the foreign sociological heritage (8). For him, the question is not whether a country should import science. All countries do. The fundamental question is how to import it, replacing literal reproduction with a critically assimilative attitude capable of understanding both the reasoning and the conditions underlying knowledge produced under different circumstances.

This formulation offers a particularly appropriate alternative for thinking about strategic planning in universities. There is no need to reject SWOT analysis, the Balanced Scorecard, indicators, targets, or other management technologies simply because they were developed predominantly in business environments. Nor, however, is it appropriate to treat them as neutral instruments that can be applied identically to any organization.

The question inspired by Guerreiro Ramos would be different: What kind of critical reduction must take place for a technology created in one organizational context to become pertinent in another?

A tool designed to help corporations position themselves in competitive markets must be recontextualized when introduced into an institution whose legitimacy is associated with education, knowledge production, scientific autonomy, and the public interest. The same reasoning can be applied to internationalization. Participating in international science does not necessarily mean adopting as universal all the criteria constructed by the dominant centers of scientific publishing and evaluation.

13. Instrumental Rationality, Substantive Rationality, and Academic Productivism

Tristão’s dissertation also engages with another dimension of Guerreiro Ramos’s thought, developed particularly in The New Science of Organizations. Its theoretical framework includes a specific discussion of the “depletion of modern reason” and of the distinctions concerning rationality in Weber and Guerreiro Ramos.

This contribution allows us to deepen the analysis of planning. Instrumental rationality focuses on the relationship between means and ends: once a particular objective has been established, it seeks to identify the most efficient procedures for achieving it. Substantive rationality requires us also to interrogate the ends themselves, asking about their legitimacy and their relationship to human and social values.

Strategic planning naturally tends to operate within the first dimension. If a graduate program decides to improve a particular indicator, planning can establish targets, responsibilities, deadlines, and monitoring mechanisms. Yet a prior question remains: Why should this indicator be improved, and what substantive academic purpose will such an improvement serve?

Asking how to publish more is different from asking what knowledge deserves to be produced. Asking how to improve internationalization indicators is different from asking which international relationships are relevant to the program’s scientific mission. Asking how to reduce time to degree is different from asking how much time is necessary to adequately educate and train a researcher.

This does not mean eliminating instrumental rationality. The dissertation itself avoids such a conclusion and emphasizes the need for balance, criticizing above all the short-termism that can undermine long-term objectives such as researcher education and the development of institutional conditions conducive to high-quality science.

14. Reflexive Planning and Productivist Planning

The preceding discussion allows us to analytically distinguish two tendencies that may coexist within graduate programs:

Reflexive Planning	Productivist Planning
Starts from the scientific and social mission	Starts primarily from the program’s evaluation standing
Regards research as a process	Prioritizes the article as a product
Uses indicators as means	Tends to transform indicators into ends
Combines quality and quantity	Prioritizes comparable results
Considers long-term objectives	Favors results that can be evaluated within the assessment cycle
Encourages cooperation	May intensify competition
Recognizes emergence and learning	Emphasizes programming and control
Promotes substantive internationalization	Promotes predominantly metric-based internationalization
May strengthen autonomy	May internalize heteronomy

This distinction is not intended to classify actual graduate programs into two closed categories. The same graduate program may display characteristics of both tendencies. It may, for example, develop a broadly participatory process while simultaneously establishing targets that are strongly influenced by external evaluation. The value of the comparison lies in making visible the tension between two possible rationalities of planning.

15. The Role of Specialized Consulting

The hiring of consulting firms or consultants to assist graduate programs in developing their strategic plans should be examined within this same framework, avoiding both prior condemnation and uncritical acceptance.

Consulting can make a significant contribution to organizing the process. It can systematize information, facilitate meetings, present different methodologies, structure diagnoses, and help faculty members, students, and administrative staff articulate problems that had previously remained dispersed. In this case, its function is to enhance the program’s capacity for reflexivity, not to replace it.

The problem arises when pressure from evaluation deadlines encourages planning to be transformed into a deliverable. Specialized consultants may then be hired not so much to help the academic community reflect on its trajectory and future, but to provide a methodology capable of rapidly translating evaluation criteria into diagnoses, objectives, indicators, and targets.

The relevant question, therefore, is not whether the consulting service is private. It is what kind of rationality it introduces and what kind of participation it generates. A private consulting firm may facilitate a deeply participatory and substantively oriented process; conversely, an internal university committee may mechanically reproduce managerial models. The decisive boundary does not simply lie between public and private, but between reflexivity and conformity.

16. A Recursive Circuit of Evaluation and Productivism

Taken together, these elements reveal a broader circuit. The international scholarly communication system provides journals, databases, and metrics that generate hierarchies of visibility and prestige. National evaluation policies incorporate, to varying degrees, bibliometric references and internationalization criteria. Graduate programs, seeking to preserve or improve their positions, translate these signals into internal decisions. Faculty members adjust their publication strategies, while students learn early which credentials will be valued in their future careers.

The process, however, does not end there. The more researchers seek to publish in particular journals because those journals are valued in evaluation processes, the more prestigious those journals tend to become; the greater their prestige, the more plausible it appears to use them as benchmarks of quality; and the more they are used as benchmarks, the stronger the incentive to publish in them. The outcome feeds back into the process that produced it. This recursivity, in a sense close to Morin’s thought, helps explain why academic productivism cannot be attributed to any single actor. CAPES, universities, graduate programs, researchers, students, publishers, and indexing services participate in relationships in which decisions made at one level modify the behavior of actors at other levels (6).

This also means that the system can change. Tristão’s dissertation acknowledges the historical advances brought about by graduate education evaluation and identifies signs of a shift toward more qualitative and institutional dimensions. Participants within graduate programs themselves can reinforce or mitigate productivist pressures.

In this sense, the introduction of strategic planning can produce contradictory outcomes. It may become a new technology for managing the race for indicators more efficiently, or an opportunity for graduate programs to critically interrogate the race itself.

17. Final Considerations: Planning for What?

The trajectory of strategic planning, from its consolidation in the corporate world to its incorporation into public organizations and universities, demonstrates that management technologies do not circulate among institutions without raising questions about their purposes and underlying assumptions.

Instruments developed to assist corporations operating in competitive environments can be useful to public organizations, but they need to be recontextualized in light of criteria such as the public interest, participation, autonomy, education and training, and social relevance.

In graduate programs, this need becomes particularly important because strategic planning is introduced into an environment already shaped by institutional evaluation and academic productivism. CAPES has played, and continues to play, a fundamental role in the consolidation of Brazil’s National Graduate Education System. Precisely because it occupies such an important position, its criteria have considerable capacity to shape institutional behavior. They do not remain confined to the evaluating agency: they are interpreted by graduate programs, incorporated into internal decisions, and have repercussions for faculty members and students.

The problem does not lie in evaluation. Nor does it lie in scientific publishing, internationalization, or the use of indicators. The problem arises when means and ends become inverted. Publishing ceases to be primarily a consequence of research and begins to guide the research itself; internationalization ceases primarily to mean expanding scientific cooperation and becomes conflated with bibliometric performance; evaluation ceases to serve the improvement of graduate education and begins to organize behaviors aimed at improving the evaluation itself.

In this context, the concentration of the scientific publishing market adds a political-economic dimension to the problem. A considerable share of research is produced with public resources and academic labor, while large private corporations occupy privileged positions in publishing, indexing, and measuring its results. When science policies place strong emphasis on indicators produced within this ecosystem, a relationship emerges that deserves critical examination, particularly in peripheral countries whose science cannot reduce internationalization to adapting itself to the thematic, linguistic, and editorial interests of dominant centers.

Mintzberg helps us understand that strategy cannot be reduced to planning and that part of it emerges through learning. Stacey shows that organizations are processes of interaction that cannot be fully controlled through plans. Morin allows us to recognize uncertainty, recursivity, and the need to reconnect dimensions that management frequently separates. Guerreiro Ramos, in turn, offers a particularly pertinent contribution to the Brazilian context: knowledge and techniques produced in other environments need not be rejected, but they must undergo a process of critical assimilation capable of recontextualizing them.

The decisive question for graduate programs, therefore, is not whether they should plan. Naturally, they should. The question is what they are planning for, according to which criteria, and with what forms of participation.

If planning enables the academic community to reflect on its identity, its scientific and social responsibilities, the education and training it intends to provide, the problems it considers relevant, and the relationships it seeks to build with society and the international scientific community, it can strengthen its autonomy.

If, on the other hand, its predominant function is to translate external criteria into internal targets in order to maximize performance in the next evaluation cycle, strategic planning may become merely a more sophisticated form of institutionalizing academic productivism.

Perhaps, therefore, the greatest risk is not a university that plans too little. It is a university capable of planning ever more efficiently what it is no longer able to critically question.

References

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P.S.: I used GPT-5.6 AI to search for and organize information and to create the illustration for this article, which was conceived, edited, and revised by me.