Text Sushi by Alf Rehn

1.
How much should an academic create, in the form of written contributions, to be seen as a productive member of the community? This is a question that has fascinated me for some time now. Living, as I do, between and betwixt many different academic cultures, I have tried to figure out how the different ways to look upon productivity creates different mindsets and also differing views on what “good” is. This is also something that I’ve thought long and hard about due to the fact that it interests me on the level of identity, namely my own. In a Scandinavian perspective, I think I’m considered fairly productive, since I do have some stuff going on. In a British perspective, I think I would be seen as something of an oddity, as I’ve never been trained in the “RAE Rules OK”-mindset and thus produce a lot of stuff that does not fit the mold. In the US perspective I would probably be looking for a job.

Let’s start by thinking about numbers. How much should one produce, per year or per number of years, to be productive?

One target would be the one given by the Research Assessment Exercise, which basically states that as long as you have four pieces published in “good” journals during the last five or six years, you’re RAE-able and therefore OK. This would mean that one doesn’t have to publish that much, nor that often, and in fact one doesn’t even need to publish good stuff — as long as it gets into the proper journals. This might, just to throw a name on it, be called the “sniper approach”. As long as one hits the appropriate target, one bullet is enough.

Another target would be to take more of a “shotgun approach” and set a number of publications per year as a target. One doesn’t need to be that picky about where they come out, for if one writes enough something is bound to be good and/or get into the good journals. For this to work, one would need to set the figure fairly high, like ten per year, and put in a few rules regarding variety (not just working papers, need to follow through, and so on). All in all, it might create both an RAE-able result and a lot of added bonuses (or chaff).

An old target, in what we could call the “musket approach”, was that a proper academic should produce a serious book every 5, 10 or 20 years. As long as one was working on a magnum opus, one was productive. This approach is rare these days (although one can occasionally find it in the humanities), as it clearly places quality over short-term results. It is also perfect for no longer active academics to hide behind a promise.

Which approach one chooses depends on both one’s context and what one believes is good, proper and true in academia.

2.
I was raised in an academic culture which appreciated and valued books. In fact, I was actively discouraged to write journal articles, since these were seen as truncated and intellectually limiting. Instead I was taught that a PhD-thesis was supposed to be a solid book, and that one after having finished that should start writing another one. If one wanted to be a full professor, one should aim for three books — serious and solid ones. Journal articles, book chapters and working papers were all acceptable and even laudable by-products of the process of writing a book, but were not to be seen as goals in themselves. If putting together a journal article was taking time away from a book manuscript, one should always prioritize the book. In fact, the first time I got an article accepted (with revisions), my mentor told me to tell the journal to go fuck themselves: “Tell them you’re not changing a single comma, and that they can either publish as-is or go to hell.”

In other words, when it came to journals and publishing in them, I was pretty much on my own. However, as I had picked up that a lot of people thought that journal were important, so I started engaging with them. I never cared about whether they were “important” or where they were indexed or abstracted, and I really did not care about how they were ranked in the RAE. Instead, I sent stuff to journals I though seemed fun or who happened to have a suitable special issue. In fact, I preferred the smaller, newer, edgier to the big ones — I still do.

At the same time I actively tried to do a lot of other stuff. Book chapters were always a lot more fun to write than journal articles. The former felt like scholarship, the latter like homework. I loved little essays, working papers, and the likes. I experimented, with small-press publishing, with internet-stuff, with video. A lot of this is not taken seriously in that odd little parochial institution known as the RAE, nor is it considered right and proper in the American system. Thankfully, the Scandinavian system is a little less uptight.

3.
When I talk with British colleagues, the talk very often strays to the RAE, a subject of almost endless fascination to some of them. I find it interesting, obviously, but also an exercise in anthropological reflection. From my perspective, the RAE is a provincial phenomenon, interesting in the same way cultural matters tend to be, but definitively not a central issue. It is understandable only in context, and meaningless outside of it. It is also a fantastic way to contemplate cultural bias.

Take, for instance, the notion of the “international” journal, a central part of the RAE-system. The sobriquet international seems to be synonymous with “English”, and for some enchanted reason most “international” journals seem to be based either in Britain or the US. Although we Scandos have decided to amusedly accept the odd fact that quite a number of Brits and Americans seem to be fluent in only one language (making them linguistically a lot less advanced than my seven-year old daughter, who is fluent in two and learning a third), it seems a little unfair that this handicap should afford the English-speaking academics the advantage to proclaim their language the international one (particularly when it isn’t even close to being the biggest language in the world). The fact that this forces the majority of academics to write in a foreign language, and in addition have to accept that this is “international” really isn’t addressed enough. Even though I’m all for affirmative action in the workplace, I am not sure this should be extended to the linguistically challenged.

I write quite a lot in Swedish, and will continue to do so, as it happens to be my language of choice. I also write some in Finnish. A lot of my best material (well, “best” is a tricky term…) is in fact done in Swedish. Obviously, this is not RAE-able, because a gang of Brits can’t read it, but all in all it seems odd that in order to be taken “seriously” I’m supposed to write in a foreign language, lessen the quality of my research, and make my texts worse. Hooray for academia. Now, this would not bug me if one of all British academics would demand that they publish at least a few texts in a foreign language, but for some reason not even the critical management scholars feel that this is a form of imperialism they want to do something about. Actually, I don’t think you should be allowed to become a chair or a journal editor if you’re monolingual.

Well, whatever. What all this highlights is a fact that most people know and understand, but which really cannot be stated often enough. The systems of research appraisal we are gravitating towards, with RAE as an almost archetypal example, represent a travesty. They do not care a whit about research quality, and seem more than happy to lessen everything down to senseless metrics. Provincial ones, to boot.

4.
What bugs me most about the whole thing is that the assumption is that research does not need to be read. One can be proclaimed a productive scholar simply because one publishes things in the “right” places, and the basic thinking behind this is that one can judge quality simply by glancing at the title of a journal (one doesn’t even need to know the title of a paper to know it’s good). Boggles the mind, doesn’t it? The fact that all the top journals (call them A-journals or “five stars” or whatever) have published absolute crap, and that there thus is a great likelihood that stuff that is rewarded in the system is just that — crap.

Similarly, since nothing is read, a piece of brilliant scholarship, a truly fantastic piece of research can be disregarded just because it is published in the wrong manner. As doctoral students have pointed out through the ages, none of the true greats of science would have stood a chance in the current system. They wrote to be read, not to be assessed, and would thus be hard pressed to snatch and hold onto a lecturer’s position. Granted, the selection mechanism and wide distribution of journals do give these an edge of sorts, but the value of this edge has become insanely overrated.

Now, what I find absolutely horrendous and directly unethical is that all this denigrates the scholarly book, the research monograph. The way I was raised into academia, this was what you meant by research, and now a bunch of foreign bureaucrats with language problems are saying that this does not count? Well, fuck you and the horse you rode in on. Writing a journal article, to me, is mainly an exercise in typing. There are rote formulas to get a journal article done (well known such, looking at the shite that gets published), and it frankly bores me a lot of the time. A book, however, is another matter. A book takes time to craft, and the sheer length thereof forces one to work in an altogether different manner. I was taught by my Doktorvater the following: If you haven’t written a serious monograph, you shouldn’t be made a PhD. If you haven’t written two, you’re not a serious scholar. “—And never let one who hasn’t written three serious books become a professor! It cheapens the title.” And damn good advice it was too.

5.
We need to talk about productivity, but we also need to discuss what this means. Just ranting on about the RAE or the need for publishing more solves very little. Content must still stand for something. Books need to be respected. Monolingualism cannot be seen as a virtue. Stupidity must be challenged. And no rejection rate or citation index helps there.