In the art world, the dealer’s brand often becomes a substitute for aesthetic judgement. Mark Carrigan wonders if it the same could be said of academia; does inclusion in a prestigious journal become a substitute for, and act as a reinforcement of, intellectual judgement?
In a recent book economist Don Thompson explores the crucial role that branding has in the contemporary art market. With the market skewed by an influx of the ultra-rich seeking something to do with their money, a strange dynamic emerges. As the author was told by a former specialist at Sotheby’s auction house, you should;
“never underestimate how insecure buyers are about contemporary art, and how much they always need reassurance”.
This widely recognised, though little discussed, characteristic of the contemporary art world massively expands the power of brand name auction house, galleries and collectors. The obscenely wealthy but time-poor rely on such brands to guarantee the virtues of the art they invest in, assuaging the insecurities about their purchases which are only sustained because “they are not willing to spend the time required to educate themselves to the point of overcoming insecurity”.
For instance, as the author observes, “Larry Gagosian’s clients can simply substitute his judgement or that of his gallery for their own, and purchase whatever is being shown”.
How different is this from the prestige conferred upon an academic publication by its inclusion within a well-respected journal? Simply denigrating the lack of taste shown by ultra-wealthy art collectors misses the point. Unless one wishes to descend into facile subjectivism (or conversely argue that his corporate operation indelibly corrupts his aesthetic judgements) it stands to reason that Gagosian’s judgements do function, as well as pretty much anyone’s could, as a cypher for distinction. It’s perfectly possible some complete crap occasionally finds its way into his galleries but, in terms of the unavoidably intersubjective normative standards which prevail at a given point in time (and which everyone must engage with even if they reject them) his judgements will tend to point to high quality work. Similarly, rigorous blind peer-review, conducted by a pool of top academics, within the traditions of a long-standing and well respected journal will tend to identify high quality papers. In both cases the additional competition which prestige generates, as many try to occupy a space which can only hold a few, entrenches this capacity to bestow a perceived distinction.
In both cases the task of filtering, sorting a range of cultural products in terms of their quality, takes place through bureaucratic processes. Particular institutions become able to invest cultural products with the feel of quality, a process which sits elusively between genuine normativity and contingent power, tending towards success in its aims but also shaping the wider social context within which such ‘success’ can be judged. Within the art world ”the dealer brand often becomes a substitute for, and certainly is a reinforcement of, aesthetic judgement“.
Is it the case that within the academic world, inclusion in a prestigious journal becomes a substitute for, and certainly is a reinforcement of, intellectual judgement? As a thought-experiment: how would academic life differ if these status hierarchies weren’t available to help us navigate the knowledge system? How would we respond? I suspect that activities which are already everyday features of the academic world (particularly dialogue and debate within communities of practice) would take on a newfound importance. What else would be different? Answers on the back of a postcard please.
Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Impact of Social Sciences blog, nor of the London School of Economics.
This blog was originally posted on Mark Carrigan’s personal blog, Sociological Imagination. Readers can now find the first part of this discussion on the Sociology @Warwick blog.
I actually wonder whether, if the journal system didn’t exist, we might find a more “equitable” way of disseminating research. I would imagine that if the research world was created in the past five years, platforms like scoop.it and reddit would take the place of journals. Similarly, we might actually create a system where the views of those outside academia (the “communities of practice” the poster mentions) would take on far greater importance than they have now.
For me, the more important question is “what would happen if academics’ career progression and funding were decided on 50% publications and 50% public (ie non-academic) engagement?” Surely then, our ability to communicate outside the academic bubble would be seen as an asset and not as a possible sign of a lack of rigour.
In the branch of acdeme that I inhabit, the most prized way to operate is to be allowed to work on papers that will get into the highest IF journals to the exclusion of anything else. The people who are most prolific in this respect have the best career progression. It only occurred to me very recently that we were all going round in little self-referential circles of a few people with a limited number of arcane research questions being addressed by more and more complicated methods. The request to express what we were doing in language that would be accessible to anyone else would move me to white-knuckled fury and contempt. I would love to know more about what the sociologists of science and technology think about it?
Of course it makes scientists and administrators lazy, I don’t think this is even controversial. Which is why we are writing a review article at the moment summarizing the empirical data on the effects of journal rank. In its current state, the article rather unambiguously states that there is no empirical support for journal rank, meaning that high-ranking journals are not indicative of high-ranking articles. In other words, the evidence does not support the prestige of prestigious journals.