Change in higher education often progresses slowly. If scholars are serious about wanting to change disciplinary and institutional cultures and not merely to wait for Cultural Change to magically happen, Cameron Neylon argues we need to consider the differing approaches to how certain cultures operate, interact and eventually change. Ultimately, change in higher education requires a variety of levers (e.g. policy, technology, evidence, culture and storytelling). Are we engaging all of these?
It’s a common strand when we talk about improving data sharing or data management, or access to research, or public engagement…or…: “Cultural Change, its hard”. The capitals are deliberate. Cultural Change is seen as a thing, perhaps a process that we need to wait for, because we have internalised the Planck narrative that “science progresses one funeral at a time” ( of course, as always with popular quotes that’s not quite what he said). Yet we are also still waiting for the Google generation with their “culture of sharing” to change the world for us.
Some of us get bored waiting and look for hammers. We decide that policies, particularly funder policies, but also journal or institutional policies requiring data sharing, are the best way to drive changes in practice. And these work, to some extent, in some places, but then we (and I use the “we” seriously) are disappointed when changes in practice turn out to be the absolute minimum that has to be done; that the cultural change that we assumed would follow does not, even in some cases is hampered by an association of the policy with all those other administrative requirements that we (again, I use the word advisedly) researchers complain are burying us, preventing us from getting on with what we are supposed to be doing.
Image credit: By Miyagawa (Own work) CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
We (that word again) point at the successes. Look at the public genome project and the enormous return on investment! Look at particle physics! Mathematics and the ArXiv. The UK ESRC and the UK Data Archive, the ICPSR! Why is it that the other disciplines can’t be like them? It must be a difference in culture. In history. In context. And we make up stories about why bioinformatics is different to chemistry, why history isn’t more like economics. But the benefits are clear. Data sharing increases impact, promotes engagement, improves reproducibility, leads to more citations, enhances career prospects and improves skin tone. Some of these even have evidence to back them up. Good data management and sharing practice has real benefits that have been shown in specific contexts and specific places. So it’s good that we can blame issues in other places, and other contexts, on “differences of culture”. That makes the problem something that is separate from what we believe to be objectively best practice that will drive real measurable outcomes.
Then there are the cultural clashes. When the New England Journal of Medicine talked about the risk of communities of “research parasites” arising to steal people’s research productivity the social media storm was immense. Again, observers trying not to take sides might point to the gulf in cultures between the two camps. One side committed to the idea that data availability and critique is the bedrock of science, although not often thinking deeply about what is available to who, or for what or when. Just lots, for everyone, sooner! On the other a concern for the structure of the existing community, of the quality of engagement, albeit perhaps too concerned with the stability of one specific group of stakeholders. Should the research productivity of a tenured professor be valued above the productivity of those critiquing whether the drugs actually work?
DarwinPeacock, Maklaan [CC BY 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons
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In each of these cases we blame “culture” for things being hard to change. And in doing so we externalise it, make it something that we don’t really engage with. It probably doesn’t help that the study of culture, and the way it is approached is alien to most with a sciences background. But even those disciplines we might use to tackle these issues seem reticent to engage. Science and Technology studies appears to be focussed on questions of why we might want change, who is it for, what does the technology want? But seems to see cultures as a fixed background, focussing rather on power relations around research. Weirdly (and I can’t claim to have got far into this so I may be wrong) Cultural Studies doesn’t seem to deal with culture per se so much as seek to generalise stories that arise from the study of individuals and individual cases. Ethnography looks at individuals, sociology focusses on interactions, as does actor-network theory, rarely treating cultures or communities as more than categories to put things into or backgrounds to the real action.
It seems to me that if we’re serious about wanting to change cultures and not merely to wait for Cultural Change (with its distancing capitals) to magically happen then we need to take culture – and cultures – seriously. How do they interact and how do they change? What are the ways in which we might use all of the levers at our disposal: policy yes, but also evidence and analysis, new (and old) technology, and the shaping of the stories we tell ourselves and each other about why we do what we do. How can we use this to build positive change and coherent practice, while not damaging the differences in culture, and the consequent differences in approach, that enrich scholarship and its interaction with communities it is carried out within?
The question of who “we” is in any given context, what cultures are we a part of, what communities, is a challenging one. But I increasingly think if we don’t have frameworks for understanding the differing cultures amongst research disciplines and researchers and other stakeholders, how they interact, compete, clash and change, then we will only make limited progress. Working with an understanding of our own cultures is the lever we haven’t pulled, in large part because thinking about culture, let alone examining our own is so alien. We need to take culture seriously.
This piece originally appeared on Cameron Neylon’s personal blog as Taking Culture Seriously: The challenges of data sharing and is reposted under CC0
Note: This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of the Impact of Social Science blog, nor of the London School of Economics. Please review our Comments Policy if you have any concerns on posting a comment below.
Cameron Neylon is Professor of Research Communications and the Centre for Culture and Technology, Curtin University, and a well known agitator for opening up the process of research. He speaks regularly on issues of Open Science including Open Access publication, Open Data, and Open Source as well as the wider technical and social issues of applying the opportunities the internet brings to the practice of science. He was named as a SPARC Innovator in July 2010 for work on the Panton Principles was a co-author of the Altmetrics manifesto and is a proud recipient of the Blue Obelisk for contributions to open data. He writes regularly at his blog, Science in the Open.
There are none so blind (in the educational establishments) as those who WILL not see!
Usually, it is a good idea to define your subject matter before issuing comments about it, otherwise, what is the reader to believe that you are talking about, the reader’s own intuitions about culture? Culture is a term that has many references. Some people believe that the essence of culture is the law, or Law! Other believe culture to be the state. Some think of culture as the religion of a group which clearly means that there are multiple cultures. Similarly, cultural definitions of race and ethnicity, as contrasted with genetic descriptions!, implies there are a myriad of cultures especially in the US where immigrants from everywhere have come to live and stay. Perhaps, the more sensible definitions of culture pertain to descriptions of particular practices of groups which all groups share but practice differently. For example, language and communication habits could be said to describe one’s culture, similarly, taste and manners. Since all people everywhere as humans engage in sexual interactions, form sexual relationships, often channeled into marriage, and form families, culture could be said to be the ways that people marry and form family and socialize children. Here, education becomes the center of each group’s culture. I think I could go on and describe variations in practices, notions of formal culture like the Law and informal notions like sanctions against lying which most cultures implement. All toll, culture is about the rules that the people of a group or region follow and this notion of rules resonates with laws and therefore with the state. But, out intuitions about culture informs us that culture is not the state, it is different from the state but it does involve rules and therefore the learning of the rules, or the learning of knowledge, of language and ideas. Culture is both a practicing of certain rules and a body of knowledge which everyone who is culturally developed has acquired.
When we say we want to take culture seriously, we imply that the rules are important, learning the necessary rules to follow the rules is important, and therefore that breaking the rules is wrong, not simply in a moral sense, but in a practical and natural sense. People who don’t follow the ‘cultural rules’ do not achieve success, are unhappy and sad or angry, or perhaps full of sorrow because they just don’t understand what is happening. This means that cultural knowledge should supply each person with the understanding of their social environment in order to communicate successfully, to achieve success, and perhaps to create something for others, like artworks, inventions, new ideas, and even leadership service.
But the problem is that our culture is divided in many different ways and conflict is a problem. The interaction of people from different cultures, following different rules, changing each other during these interactions, sometimes for the better sometimes not, and too often causing conflicts. Our intuitions however attribute these conflicts over the “rules,” over rule-breaking for one person which is rule-following for another, to personality differences, even personality disorders. The State gets involved, officials are notified and efforts ae made to address the conflict over the rules. We often have the rules written down. Some are in our nation’s founding documents, like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, but some people continually invoke their traditional, er, anachronistic beliefs, or select particular statutes or precedents to break the rules officially, or even stage events that effectively eliminate certain rules from having any validity. Legal rules against sex discrimination, or legal principles announcing the rights and freedom of each individual are routinely contradicted by what some people think of when they invoke their “culture.”
If we are going to talk about cultural change, we should identify what culture is in an abstract or definitional way, we should describe the different cultures and the principles which sustain them, and we should propose a better more ideal culture that everyone should follow through the critique of the particular cultural principles which do not resonate with other cultures or with our ideal national culture. We have this new ideal in the form of the founding father’s documents, but, again, people like to invoke their subjective notion of traditions, rules and religions. The people often do not abide by the Constitution which defines our culture. The people make up new rules or break rules which they do not like to follow. There are also many instances where laws and policies of the government contradict the Constitution. So, if we are going to talk about cultural change, perhaps we need to identity those rules and laws which actually break the rules and laws. Too often, cultural change means breaking the rules where we are supposed to follow the rules.