Abstract: Various academic conferences play a self-evident and irreplaceable role in the entire knowledge and technology “generation-improvement-transfer-application” chain, and immensely encourage and support diverse thinking, disciplinary development, innovation and national development of science and technology. In recent years, China has witnessed a rapid growth in academic conferences in both number and scale. In 2016, there were 47,413 academic conferences sponsored by nationwide societies and associations at all levels, with 8,593,596 attendees and more than 833,563 papers discussed, making the cost of holding academic conferences the No.1 expense for most societies and associations with respect to academic activities. However, there is still a large gap between academic conferences in China and other world-class academic conferences in terms of content, quality and influence. Several studies have been conducted on evaluation of academic conferences. However, due to the lack of a comprehensive research framework that can effectively analyze features of academic conferences, the individual experience or the methods and tools directly derived from other fields are more often considered in related evaluation studies. An academic conference may be perceived as a temporary or long-term organization based on well-defined goals, specific group boundaries and definite management systems. The comprehensive structural characteristics of academic conferences can be analyzed from the perspective of organizational structure, to define the relationship between the organizational structure and internal performance characteristics of the academic conferences, as well as to assist organizers, sponsors and management in targeted conference performance evaluation using existing popular organization performance evaluation and management tools. Therefore, this paper attempts to comprehensively analyze the structural characteristics, performance significance and key evaluation elements of academic conferences by introducing theoretical perspectives of organizational structures and the analytical framework of organizational performance.The New Organization Structure School points that an organization consists of five fundamental division modules: High-level strategy, intermediate level, operating core, technical structure and support structure. Taking a typical academic conference organization for example, the High-level strategy mainly includes the conference congress, board of directors or organizing committee, which are responsible for defining the organization vision, top-level goals and key topics and agenda. The conference administrative department, working committee and special committee (both for certain large-scale conferences only), playing a role as the Intermediate Level, are responsible for reporting, issuing, decomposing and promoting the decisions of the High-level strategy. The operating core is generally made up of the academic participants and report presenters who directly contribute to realizing the organizational objectives by demonstrating research results, discussing on academic topics, and developing new academic viewpoints, scientific thoughts and cooperative study opportunities. In terms of organizational coordination, the above modules are integrated into an organic whole through automatic regulation, direct supervision, workflow standardization, output standardization and work skill standardization, based on the differences of modules in job duties and characteristics of the operating core. The primary coordination modes adopted by the organizations have a great impact on performance evaluation and management and are dependent on the module functions and the distribution of specialized knowledge and authorities in the modules. As the internal and external environments faced by normal organizations in the process of establishing structural characteristics are also applicable to academic conference organizations to a large extent, thus there is a significant corresponding relationship between current academic conferences and above mentioned types of organizational structure. Conference classification based on the organizational structure of conferences reflect the in-depth performance characteristics of conferences, thus enabling more targeted performance evaluation and management of academic conferences.From the perspective of evaluation tool diversity, the academic conference organizers should choose their performance management and evaluation tools in line with the organizational structure characteristics. For example, the Balanced Score Card (BSC) method may be used to clarify the evaluation dimensions, elements and indicators of conference performance for mechanical conferences, with a relatively fixed mode and process. For professional and innovative conferences with high level of innovation in terms of topics and low process standardization, the evaluation framework may be constructed by combining soft system methodology (SSM) and 3E method, and an appropriate evaluation index extracted.This study finds that it is difficult to systematically and deeply analyze the core elements of performance evaluation management for academic conferences from the perspectives of conference experience, exhibition service or scientific sociology analysis. It is suggested that more comprehensive and systematic research and analysis needs to be conducted within the framework of organizational structure analysis and performance evaluation management for academic conferences with core organizational elements. The analysis framework for academic conference organization proposed in this study provides new perspectives and ideas for effectively solving prominent problems that exist in current academic conference performance evaluation management, such as unclear performance results and performance goal achievement process, lack of specificity in classification evaluation, etc., and can help conference organizers and managers to carry out more comprehensive and targeted conference performance evaluation management activities, thereby improving overall performance of academic conferences.The main innovation in this study lies in that the organizational structure and performance analysis are introduced into the field of academic conference evaluation management, providing a new perspective and tool for solving difficult problems in current academic conference research and practice, and this study expands related research in academic conference evaluation management. The prospects for the next stage of the current study include: First, starting from the characteristics of organizational structure of conferences, focus on conference classification issues in current evaluation management of academic conferences, further conduct research on conference typology to overcome the shortcomings of surface layer classification labels including conference size, discipline and name, and current evaluation management; second, the main appeal of this paper is to adjust the evaluation management tools including BSC, performance prism and SSM+3E with respect to current conference evaluation management, so as to bring them closer to the demand characteristics in the context of academic conference evaluation management. Third, different types of academic conferences need to be selected to conduct in-depth case studies, and improve the performance evaluation methods and tools of various academic conferences within the framework of an action research, thereby effectively improving the evaluation management level and performance output of academic conferences.

Key words:  academic conference, organisational structure, performance evaluation, performance management