Category: political economy

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Out now > Bernard Stiegler – States of Shock: stupidity and knowledge in the 21st century

Those of you vaguely interested in the work of Bernard Stiegler, and perhaps those of you who are not (yet!) will I hope take note of the publication of an important work by Stiegler: States of Shock: stupidity and knowledge in the 21st century [a translation by Daniel Ross of États de choc:  betise et savoir dans XXIe siecle].

Here’s the blurb from the publisher Polity:

In 1944 Horkheimer and Adorno warned that industrial society turns reason into rationalization, and Polanyi warned of the dangers of the self-regulating market, but today, argues Stiegler, this regression of reason has led to societies dominated by unreason, stupidity and madness. However, philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century abandoned the critique of political economy, and poststructuralism left its heirs helpless and disarmed in face of the reign of stupidity and an economic crisis of global proportions.

New theories and concepts are required today to think through these issues. The thinkers of poststructuralism Lyotard, Deleuze, Derrida must be re-read, as must the sources of their thought, Hegel and Marx. But we must also take account of Naomi Klein’s critique of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School and her account of the ‘shock doctrine’. In fact, argues Stiegler, a permanent ‘state of shock’ has prevailed since the beginning of the industrial revolution, intensified by the creative destruction brought about by the consumerist model. The result has been a capitalism that destroys desire and reason and in which every institution is undermined, above all those institutions that are the products par excellence of the Enlightenment the education system and universities.

Through a powerful critique of thinkers from Marx to Derrida, Stiegler develops new conceptual weapons to fight this destruction. He argues that schools and universities must themselves be transformed: new educational institutions must be developed both to take account of the dangers of digitization and the internet and to enable us to take advantage of the new opportunities they make available.

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A political economy of Twitter data – revised and published on LSE Impact blog

Last year I wrote a blog post for the Contagion project website, building from the experience of attempting to do research with Twitter data as relative novices. Putting the pragmatic techniques of doing such to one side, it became striking that doing this kind of research with Twitter’s apparatus is neither easy, nor, when one delves a bit deeper, is it ‘free’.

The post was been picked up by the LSE Impact blog, who asked to re-blog it, which was very nice of them. So, you can find a slightly updated (numbers, sources and bit more nuance in the argument) version of the blog post there.

The question I end up posing is: “Should researchers be using data sources (however potentially interesting/valuable) that restrict the capability of reproducing our research results?” This is not easily answered, not least when so many ‘non-academic’ researchers are merrily plugging away producing social scientific research, increasingly consumed by the general public, which is gaining influence, and which, perhaps, could benefit from some critical engagement…

Please do read the post and get in touch if you’d like to discuss this, and any of our research, further.

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Your email address is worth 100 tea lights…

Ikea Family mailshot: 100 tea lights for your email address

How much is personal data worth? How might that be calculated? These are hard questions. Nevertheless, personal data does attract particular kinds of value, often determined by those harvesting and selling it on, such as Facebook, Google and so on.

These are rarely visible calculations, probably necessarily so – data is sometimes only worth something when it is part of a larger set. We are both an individual and part of one or more populations (which can be variously defined and derived in data). When you make up a ‘segment’ of a given population, your data, and what can thereby be inferred, has a particular value.

For example, the email marketing company Topspin apparently calculate the pecuniary value of a person’s email address to a band harvesting it based upon the amount of money that person (fan) will, on average, go on to spend on their music.

In a recent piece for the New York Times website, Rebecca Lieb, a digital advertising and media analyst at the Altimeter Group, offers an example:

“Facebook has deep, deep data on its users. You can slice and dice markets, like women 25 to 35 who live in the Southeast and are fans of ‘Breaking Bad,’ … The new Atlas platform, she said, “can track people across devices, weave together online and offline.”

The data collected by various market research companies carries a notional value that is sometimes rendered visible in stark ways. Another example illustrates this: In a 2011 article for Huffington Post the price list for marketing data company Rapleaf shows for how much particular pieces of data were sold.  Age and gender are given away free, whereas ‘Likely smart phone user’ is $0.03.

We are thus worth something insofar as we are represented (accurately or otherwise) as a collection of data in one or more databases. We individually value our own data variously, depending on its use, context and so on. An email address, then, may be valuable if it is private, or not valuable if it is used for any old competition entry – this is often contextual and that can, of course, be missed by the marketing data companies (perhaps this is a good thing).

Nevertheless, we, or, more accurately, the data that are used to variously represent us, are commodified – our data-selves are products. Any sense of a unified ‘self’ is possibly too neat, our physically bodied selves rendered endlessly divisible and reducible to data representations, what Deleuze referred to as ‘dividuals’ in his excellent ‘Postscript on Societies of Control‘. There is a real sense in which, thought in this way, we are variously rendered separate from and without control of our representations in data.

The Ikea flyer, pictured above, soliciting an email address for a notional inducement of 100 tea lights made me think through the above and back to the excellent Paying Attention conference of 2010, concerning the idea of attention economies. At the conference, and in other contexts, the redoubtable Tim Kindberg formulated his ‘Facebook data provocations‘ – encouraging others to speculate about what would happen if we (the users) charged Facebook for our data. Thinking back over the academic moment of worry over privacy it seems necessary to continue to think about these things. While the horse has bolted and the stable door has long since been the portal to an upmarket barn conversion, I argue that these  questions remain pertinent.

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Translation> Bernard Stiegler on holidays and the need to ‘deprogram’

Following on from the interview with the philosopher Bernard Stiegler about what he perceives to be the coming end of salaried employment, I spent some of the early hours of this morning (more baby-induced sleeplessness) reading and then translating a short interview with Stiegler about holidays and the need to deprogram. The interview appears on the website for Philosophie magazine.

In the interview, Stiegler argues (as he has elsewhere) that we are increasingly under pressure to ‘synchronise’ – to conform to particular patterns of thought and behaviour–especially consumerism – in the ongoing struggle of capitalism to find ever-more profit. This synchronisation, he says, is led by the ‘programme industries’ – mass media and so on – that want us to mindlessly submit to consumerism and commodification (through systems like Facebook). What is engendered is a form of ‘programming’, as an exercise of ‘psychopower’, which is something like the forms of ‘control’ envisaged by Deleuze (and drawn upon by Stiegler previously).

Stiegler’s answer to this is to identify the need to ‘deprogram’, using techniques of the self (following Foucault). He goes on to provide an example of what he does on holiday–which sounds suspiciously like work to me, but then its all about the otium, the pursuit of knowledge while free from the pressures of subsistence.

This is a fairly quick translation, so please read it as such. As usual clarifications and original French terms are in square brackets. All emphasis follows the original text.

Bernard Stiegler: “On holiday we attempt to rediscover the consistence in our existence”

The question of time extends throughout his body of work and through book after book, this philosopher sketches a picture of a society under the growing infleunce of the programme industries. The final stage of capitalism is the control and snychronisation of “available brain time”. This process in which the individual is standardised may cause a depression and violence without precedent, but philosophy can help to establish responses.

 

PM. What characterises the experience of time today?

B.S. Our era is characterised by synchronisation. The programme industries are attempting to synchronise all of our consciousnesses; a control over the life of the soul through television which establishes a pyschopower characteristic of our times. This process of synchronisation has its roots in the late 18th century, with the mechanical reproduction of the workers’ gestures through automation, in the service of what Michel Foucault described as biopower. Spread by the grand industrial revolution of the 19th century, synchronisation led to what Karl Marx describes as proletarianisation, the worker becomes proletarian. If a worker contributes to the creation of new forms of production, industrialisation makes work a form of slavery and establishes, instead, what Gilbert Simondon calls a loss of individuation for the worker. The movement that is individuation is no longer in the worker, Simondon says, but in the machine that replaces him as a “technical individual“. Wherever you go now, you have the same models of production and distribution. This globalisation comes at the price of a synchronisation of modes of life and thought. Today, this becoming is extended throughout all aspects of life and destroys the singularity of existence through consumerism, which liquidates life skills [savoir-vivre]. Within a decade, with a catastrophic evolution of television, the symbolic itself became an object of consumption and became un-symbolic: we no longer participate in the diachronisation of languages; we parrot Newspeak. The programme industries proletarianised symbolic production, and they destroyed singular and collective time.

PM. In this context, are holidays still possible?

BS. The latin term otium is often translated as “leisure”, it is what the Greeks called skholè, from which we get the work skoleion, which becomes “school”. School is for those who have been released from the obligation of providing for themselves and who can spend free time, without which no real expertise [connaissance véritable] is possible. Otium in Latin and skholè in Greek describe free-time for contemplation, through which we learn to live through a desire for truth: the possibility of reaching a time that is not given to subsistence (the time of slaves and proletarians), but which also is not given to existence (the time of the agora, of political debate). However, to establish lives [des existences], we must reach for what exceeds them and what I live to call consistencies [les consistances] – which the Greeks called idealities.

In this context, holidays must become an otium for the people. During a holiday, and holidays are a special case, we primarily try to deprogram – and to rediscover the consistency in our existence [la consistance dans son existence], for example through a change of scenery. However, human life is always programmed [programmée]. There are cosmic programmes, vital programmes, and socio-ethnic and symbolic programmes. These programmes are a condition of the social. But, these programmes can and should be reprogrammed, or suspended. Trigano, Disney and others have understood that this is a huge market, it is accordingly becoming more and more difficult to deprogram.

PM. How do you deprogram yourself?

BS. To deprogram oneself necessitates keeping to very specific schedules, which are what Foucault, once again, described as techniques of the self, echoing Seneca. Holidays are a moment to practice such programmes. Myself, I use relaxation as a form of deprogramming. When I go on holiday, I work early and write all morning. Then, I swim, a lot, until that state when physical exertion stimulates a rush–because the brain produces a lot of endorphins. Swimming thus becomes a journey within oneself, during the course of which I run back through my memory of everything I wrote several hours earlier. Then I lie in the sun, drained, and I let my mind empty, since this is how unlikely thoughts can arise: something un-programmed emerges from all of this. Then I return to writing: I note all that has arisen – first in the water, then in the sun – all through rereading and annotating what I wrote in the morning.

Under the sun, I sense that this mass of hydrogen that has been combusting for several billion years is a cosmic programme that intervenes in my physiological programmes – muscles, brain, various organs – and which, in this intervention, produces a difference, a change of programme which allows me to write another kind of programme: a book in which I comment generally on other books.

Books, when they are good, are thus deprogramming programmes, unlikely programmes, like poems, in which there must be, wrote Paul Claudel, “a number that prevents counting”.

Interview by Michel Eltchaninoff
Notes

SK–The sense in which ‘programme’ is used here plays on the double meaning of scheduling (of time, performance etc.) and codified instructions (for computers), but both have a sense of the rendering discrete the phenomena being programmed.

 

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Translation> “Bernard Stiegler: ‘Salaried employment will become uncommon'”

Bernard Stiegler has been very active over the last year and there are a number of interviews in the French press and on francophone websites with him on a range of issues, especially the future of work and of the economy and the (continuing) rise of the far-right (particularly the Front National in France).

With a bit of infant-and-weather-induced sleeplessness I busied myself with a quick translation of one of the recent and quite interesting interviews, undertaken at the OuiShare festival (deliberate pun), with a theme of ‘age of communities‘ which aims to provoke discussion about the ‘collaborative economy’ (lots of peer-to-peer and suchlike).

There’s some familiar themes in relation to contribution, but also some more direct criticism of contemporary political policy — not least directed at Arnaud Montebourg, the French ‘Minister for the Economy, Economic Renewal and the Digital‘. The interview can probably  be read in tandem with an earlier interview (I’ve translated) for Rue89 that advances Stiegler’s argument for an ‘economy of contribution‘.

In these brief interviews there is a danger that Stiegler can be read as having an argument that is too ‘meta’, over-arching and so potentially glib, but if we turn to his more considered writings (books and so on) and the activities of IRI I think we can see the substance.

As usual clarifications or questions over the translation of a particular word are in square brackets and all emphasis is in the original text.

Bernard Stiegler: “Salaried employment will become uncommon”

While digital technologies demolish the paradigms of the 20th century, philosopher Bernard Stiegler calls for a push towards an economic model founded on voluntary contribution and co-creation.

Interview conducted at OuiShare Fest, a festival for the collaborative economy, Paris, 5-7 May 2014.

Do politicians understand the impact of the digital on our economies?

Absolutely not. They think in terms of the software of the 1950s. I recently attended a brilliant presentation by an industrial foresight specialist for ARCEP (Autorité de régulation des communications électroniques et des postes [The Postal and Electronic Communications Regulation Authority]). He demonstrated how the American car is bouncing back because manufacturers understand that the car of tomorrow is a connected car. In the Gallois report[1] on French competitiveness, commissioned by the President of the Republic 18 months ago, there is not a word on such issues!

You regularly call the digital an industry. So, do you share the opinion of Arnaud Montebourg?

Montebourg is smart but he is too much of a butterfly. He must temper his ambitions and take an interest in the major project of the publishing industry becoming digital. One must understand that what is happening at Libération [2] will extend across all of the cultural industries. There is an urgent need to reinvent the publishing industry through what Ars Industrialis calls an “industrial politics for technologies of spirit”, in the context of the convergence of the audiovisual broadcasting, telecommunications and information technology – but also and above all the industries of text, notably scientific texts, which is a strategic sector for France and for Europe.

Furthermore, Arnaud Montebourg has begun a strategy of roboticisation that we must situate in the context of widespread automation that will lead to the liquidation of the Keynesian model, i.e. the end of “growth” conceived as the base for the redistribution of spending power via earnings and employment.

It is useless to cling to these old models.

The salary model as we know it today and which has been defended by the trade unions is that of Keynes and Ford. A rational model that says for the economy to work, we must redistribute some of wealth made by gains in productivity through technology through salaries, creating purchasing power. It is through this paradigm that the welfare state and its corollary of an economic policy of growth appeared, with its economic indicators such as the famous GDP. This model began to crumble with the first oil crisis and finally cracked in 2008. But it did not die because it has been drip-fed by states which offset insolvency, resulting in the austerity measures we have today which are totally unproductive. But it is dying – and us with it.

Why?

As Bill Gates said: employment is over. Robots replace people [3]. In such a context, Francois Hollande obviously cannot “reverse the unemployment trend” — other than by expedient measures that do not last. Amazon is trying to replace employees with robots and Foxconn has announced the same intention. The price fo robots will drop, through the effect of economies of scale, and SMEs, for which they were too expensive, will gain access to them and, in addition to which, international competition will push adoption. This is a new industrial era that is beginning, and which shall not be based on employment.

What new model can emerge?

Salaried employment will become uncommon. Following this we must consider a new model for distribution. A contributory model of distribution, based not on work-time but on the model of the “intermittents du spectacle” [casual/part-time workers in the creative industries]. There should be the possiblity of regularly investing into contributive projects, which may be mercantile or may not. Projects of general interest would be funded by public authorities. A business would be a particular case amongst many other models.

Doesn’t the collaborative economy sketch the contours of this new mode of organising work?

Alongside the old world alternatives are emerging. The collaborative economy could be one, provided it is not recuperated by consumerism thus becoming an improved margin. The collaborative economy may also be a way to displace some of the work to the consumer. All of which merits further analysis on a case by case basis.

With what criteria?

In fact, the collaborative economy as such interests me only insofar as it allows us to think about the economy of contribution discussed earlier. Yet there is also a toxic form of the collaborative economy, which is that of Facebook. An economy in which the value of a company resides in the content users provide. Algorithms allow this to be exploited through surgical marketing which specifically trace and track products and people. This falls back into consumerism. A stupefaction [l’abrutissement].

How can we conceptualise a positive contributive economy?

There is an alternative contributive economy arrayed through free or open source software. This has developed a form of industrial activity that relies upon communities for the free development of knowledge. This is what, in the 1980s, we called concurrent engineering, but the web allows us to think at a greater scale. This is a “deproletarianisation” in the sense in which Marx intended “proletarianisation” to mean a loss of knowledge, induced by the arrival of machines.

Stupefaction [Abrutissement] on one hand and learning [apprentissage] on the other…

Exactly. All technology has, equally, curative and toxic potentials. There is both a generative web and a mimetic one, which destroys the know-how [savoir-faire] of those who use it. This crisis is related to the automation which arose with algorithmically-controlled high-frequency trading. Following the 2008 crash, Alan Greenspan, then Chairman of the United States’ Federal Reserve, admitted to having been wrong to have left the economy of his country to be organised by machines. Actors like Google, for their part, impoverish language by operating a website that over-represents the words of interest to them. What results is a semantic standardisation constituted by the auctioning of [particular] words to become ‘Adwords’. We now have, following the hypertextual web of 1993 and the ‘web 2.0’ of the 2000s, a third age of the web.

What will this new era of the web look like?

The basis of Western society has been to undertake what Heraclitus called Polemos [struggle/war]: confrontation and debate. I call for a new “hermeneutic web” which will facilitate exactly such forms of engagement between people who do not share the same views on political and environmental issues to enable them to work together. This was the first purpose of the web: to enable exchange and discussion between universities. At IRI, we are currently working on “Twitter Polemique” [Polemic Tweet], through which it is possible to associate a tenor/sense with a tweet: agree, disagree, querying, neutral. More genenerally, we need to develop a graphical language for annotation and an sharing of such annotation to stimulate collective debate.

Who should do this?

At the Chaos Computer Club in Hamburg, Glen Greenwald, the journalist who published the Snowden revelations, told the participants: “the future of combatting the NSA is in your hands”. He was both right and wrong. For a start, the problem is not solely the NSA: it is also the hyper-consumerist exploitation of data. I do not believe that the future of the web will solely be in the hands of activists, of states, or even of intellectuals like me. We must get everyone around the table. We will need hackers for their technical knowledge, political activists who believe in the public good — which still exists, manufacturers who are amongst the most lucid on these issues, universities, and Europe.

Interview by Côme Bastin.

Notes
1. The former boss of aerospace group EADS, Louis Gallois, was asked by President Holllande to investigate what was holding back French productivity, which resulted in a report, by Gallois, calling for a slashing of employment costs, see this 2012 BBC News article: ‘IMF and Gallois report urge France to cut labour costs’.

2. Due to plummeting circulation figures the management of the newspaper have recast the newspaper’s website as a kind of social network and former Libération journalists are responsible for the creation of the Rue89 news website, which has incidentally carried a few interviews with Stiegler.

3. For example, see the Business Insider article ‘Bill Gates: People Don’t Realize How Many Jobs Will Soon Be Replaced By Software Bots‘, quoting from the 2014 conversation with Bill Gates at the American Enterprise Institute: From poverty to prosperity: A conversation with Bill Gates [approx 46-minutes in]. Quote: ‘Capitalism, in general, will over time create more inequality and technology, over time, will reduce demand for jobs, particularly at the lower end of the skill set. “¦ Twenty years from now labour demand for lots of skill sets will be substantially lower and i don’t think people have that in their mental model’.

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Morozov on selling personal data

In a piece over on New Republic, Evgeny Morozov (author of To Save Everything Click Here) outlines a version of ‘the attention economy’, in which, because it is mediated through digital media, everything that we do, every way we interact with people, places, services and things becomes an ‘asset class’, and traded in bulk. Ultimately, Morozov’s argument is not dissimilar to Bernard Stiegler’s critique of a ‘generalised proleterianisation‘ insofar as the grammatisation (capturing, storing and sorting as data) of ever-increasing parts of our lives we become subjectivised through systems of calculation at an industrial scale that results in a kind of ‘incapacitation’. As Morozov suggests:

[T]o sell our intimate data in bulk is to fully surrender our quest for autonomy, accepting a life where the most existential choices are shaped either by the forces of the market or by whatever war–be it on climate change or obesity–the government has enlisted us (rather than corporations) to fight. In this world, whether we become vegetarians, and even whether we end up thinking about it, might ultimately hinge on which player (the steakhouses, the supermarkets, the bureaucrats) has the most to gain from this switch. Our data constitutes our very humanity. To voluntarily treat it as an “asset class” is to agree to the fate of an interactive billboard. We shouldn’t unquestionably accept the argument that personal data is just like any other commodity and that most of our digital problems would disappear if only, instead of gigantic data monopolists like Google and Facebook, we had an army of smaller data entrepreneurs. We don’t let people practice their right to autonomy in order to surrender that very right by selling themselves into slavery. Why make an exception for those who want to sell a slice of their intellect and privacy rather than their bodies?

Worth a read anyway, in spite of being a bit dystopian…

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Nancy – ‘the political and/or politics’

Daniel Ross pointed, on twitter, to the text of a presentation by Jean-Luc Nancy in 2012 addressing the theme of ‘the political and/or politics’ – which ends with an interesting distinction or divergence between two versions of ‘co-‘ living: a co-mmunal and a co-llective ‘with’ (in the sense of ‘being-with’):

If, today the economic, judicial, religious and cultural spheres – and with these spheres the semantics of their names –, all together or each in its turn, are racing out of control in a way that is inflationary and even exorbitant and ruinous, it is because “politics” or “the political” harbors a discrepancy or an internal distortion between two values which are henceforth foreign to each other – let us say, an existential value and a social value or, in other terms, a value in accordance with the community and another in accordance with collectivity . To be clear , the tw o values are related and interdependent. Yet that difference of the values of the same co- – of that same “with”, which is the with of being, even more than a “being- with” – and thus that self-differentiation of the co- is precisely that which prevents it from coagulating into a mass and a destiny.

Worth a read, available here: Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities [PDF].

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Provocations of the Present: What Culture for What Geography?

I will be participating in the joint OU/RHUL workshop, which is the 6th annual Doreen Massey event, concerning how we can continue to think about how we bring together issues of culture and politics through the engagement between geography and social theory. Should be a stimulating day!

Provocations of the Present: What Culture for What Geography?

Friday, 6 June 2014, 10:00 – 17:00 The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA

The Geography Departments of the Open University and Royal Holloway, University of London are delighted to announce that the 6th Doreen Massey Annual Event will take place on Friday 6 June 2014 at the Open University in Milton Keynes. This year’s theme is the role of cultural geography in the contemporary moment.

In his book Maps of Meaning (1989) Peter Jackson set out an agenda for the ‘new cultural geography’ that was firmly committed to bringing together issues of culture and politics through an engagement between geography and cultural theory. In the 25 years since its publication cultural geography has, arguably, come to dominate human geography. Theorisations of production of culture as production of space have formed the basis for addressing a variety of ‘issues’ including race, gender, nation, nature and culture.

Today those provocations for culturally attuned spatial thinking have been significantly reframed. Issues such as the environment, mobility, globalisation, liberalisation, security, sexuality and cultural intolerance have become more prominent political issues while other concerns have faded away. Cultural geography has also transformed, as too have the media and modalities of politics and political debate. How do we understand culture within this context and what is the role of cultural geography in the politics of the present? How will geography as a discipline be shaped by cultural geography? This event brings together some of the key thinkers in cultural geography in order to address these questions. As Peter Jackson said back in 1989:

If cultural geography is to be revitalised, … , ‘it cannot be by the defensive reiteration of well tried and by now well worn formulae. It can only be by an engagement with the contemporary intellectual terrain – not to counter a threat, but to discover an opportunity’(Jackson 1989: 180; Stedman Jones 1983: 24).

Programme:

10.00 – 10.30: Coffee and registration
10.30 – 11.30: Panel presentations (Societies/Economies/Cultures)
11.30 – 11.45: Coffee
11.45 – 12.45: Panel presentations (Histories/Technologies/Environments)
12.45 – 13.45: Lunch
13.45 – 15.00: Small group discussions
15.00 – 15.30: Tea
15.30 – 17.00: Plenary
17:00 – 18:00: Wine reception

This is an opportunity for students to meet and exchange with key figures in cultural geography today.

Confirmed panellists include: Peter Adey, Phil Crang, Anindita Datta (via webcast), Mona Domosh (via webcast), Claire Dwyer, Isla Forsyth, Peter Jackson, Sam Kinsley, Pat Noxolo, George Revill, Gillian Rose, Anna Secor (via webcast), Divya Tolia-Kelly.

Parts of this event will be streamed live (the morning panel sessions and the afternoon plenary) and accessible through the Open University’s Webcast page. Those who are unable to attend in person will be able to join the live streaming and have an opportunity to submit questions that may be selected for discussion.

Registration:
Registration is free, but we ask that everyone confirms their place by filling in their details on this registration form.

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Reblog > Writing for impact (Rob Kitchin)

Over on the excellent Programmable City blog, Prof. Rob Kitchin offers an interesting set of observations and suggestions about the kinds of writing academic social scientists (and I think particularly geographers here) engage in, how they can be received and thus what one might aim to do in the writing of an academic paper. In particular, I think Rob highlights the challenge (and implicit conflict) for the contemporary (and in particular early career) academic – to be productive and to have impact. In other words, one can read the piece as kind of saying – its all very well pumping out the papers but if you’re simply recycling other material, i.e. applying a bit of well-worn theory to a new empirical example, its not really enough.

My reading of such an argument is as a kind of implicit critique of the logic of exercises like the REF – especially if, in the future, it moves over to being driven by bibliometrics . Its all very well to be cited, but are people actually engaging with your material. This is certainly a challenge I don’t feel like I’ve cracked (and my work has only been very modestly cited)!

Anyway, for colleagues in academia (especially those who are early career), I suggest that this is definitely worth a read:

Writing for impact: how to craft papers that will be cited

For the past few years I’ve co-taught a professional development course for doctoral students on completing a thesis, getting a job, and publishing.  The course draws liberally on a book I co-wrote with the late Duncan Fuller entitled, The Academics’ Guide to Publishing.  One thing we did not really cover in the book was how to write and place pieces that have impact, rather providing more general advice about getting through the peer review process.

The general careers advice mantra of academia is now ‘publish or perish’.  Often what is published and its utility and value can be somewhat overlooked – if a piece got published it is assumed it must have some inherent value.  And yet a common observation is that most journal articles seem to be barely read, let alone cited.

Both authors and editors want to publish material that is both read and cited, so what is required to produce work that editors are delighted to accept and readers find so useful that they want to cite in their own work?

A taxonomy of publishing impact

The way I try and explain impact to early career scholars is through a discussion of writing and publishing a paper on airport security (see Figure 1).  Written pieces of work, I argue, generally fall into one of four categories, with the impact of the piece rising as one traverses from Level 1 to Level 4.

Figure 1: Levels of research impact

Level 1: the piece is basically empiricist in nature and makes little use of theory.  For example, I could write an article that provides a very detailed description of security in an airport and how it works in practice.  This might be interesting, but would add little to established knowledge about how airport security works or how to make sense of it.  Generally, such papers appear in trade magazines or national level journals and are rarely cited.

Level 2: the paper uses established theory to make sense of a phenomena. For example, I could use Foucault’s theories of disciplining, surveillance and biopolitics to explain how airport security works to create docile bodies that passively submit to enhanced screening measures.  Here, I am applying a theoretical frame that might provide a fresh perspective on a phenomena if it has not been previously applied.  I am not, however, providing new theoretical or methodological tools but drawing on established ones.  As a consequence, the piece has limited utility, essentially constrained to those interested in airport security, and might be accepted in a low-ranking international journal.

Level 3: the paper extends/reworks established theory to make sense of phenomena.  For example, I might argue that since the 1970s when Foucault was formulating his ideas there has been a radical shift in the technologies of surveillance from disciplining systems to capture systems that actively reshape behaviour.  As such, Foucault’s ideas of governance need to be reworked or extended to adequately account for new algorithmic forms of regulating passengers and workers.  My article could provide such a reworking, building on Foucault’s initial ideas to provide new theoretical tools that others can apply to their own case material.  Such a piece will get accepted into high-ranking international journals due to its wider utility.

Level 4: uses the study of a phenomena to rethink a meta-concept or proposes a radically reworked or new theory.  Here, the focus of attention shifts from how best to make sense of airport security to the meta-concept of governance, using the empirical case material to argue that it is not simply enough to extend Foucault’s thinking, rather a new way of thinking is required to adequately conceptualize how governance is being operationalised.  Such new thinking tends to be well cited because it can generally be applied to making sense of lots of phenomena, such as the governance of schools, hospitals, workplaces, etc.  Of course, Foucault consistently operated at this level, which is why he is so often reworked at Levels 2 and 3, and is one of the most impactful academics of his generation (cited nearly 42,000 time in 2013 alone).  Writing a Level 4 piece requires a huge amount of skill, knowledge and insight, which is why so few academics work and publish at this level.  Such pieces will be accepted into the very top ranked journals.

One way to think about this taxonomy is this: generally, those people who are the biggest names in their discipline, or across disciplines, have a solid body of published Level 3 and Level 4 material – this is why they are so well known; they produce material and ideas that have high transfer utility.  Those people who well known within a sub-discipline generally have a body of Level 2 and Level 3 material.  Those who are barely known outside of their national context generally have Level 1/2 profiles (and also have relatively small bodies of published work).

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Christian Fuchs on the Marx-Engels Complete Works debacle

Christian Fuchs has written a compelling argument that looks beyond the tit-for-tat political economic argument over the object of the Complete Works book, acknowledging the original labour of the authors as the creation of public good, and positing a contributive economic alternative – new translations.

I recommend reading the whole thing, but the final paragraphs are great:

Marx and Engels’ knowledge work is the primary work objectified in MECW and all other translations and editions. It is therefore ridiculous to stage struggles about copyrights, access and who is allowed to monetarily benefit from the sale of Marx and Engels’ dead work that has created works that are very alive up until today and into the future. Limiting access or making it more difficult makes these living works partly dead. The most important task is to make good translations as easily and as widely available to as many people as possible in order to enable them to read Marx and Engels’ analyses of capitalism that have crucial political relevance. The current debate has highlighted that there is a political economy of Marx and Engels’ writings that concerns questions of authorship, work and ownership. It has rather overlooked that there is also a cultural political economy involved that must aim at finding ways, means, media, resources and the work necessary to globally disseminate Marx and Engels’ writings. We should not deflect attention away from the importance of having good translations readily available in easy and accessible form for as many people as possible. The WWW can make an important contribution to this purpose.

The task should therefore be that we create a new and improved English online edition of Marx and Engels’ works, starting with Capital Volume 1, by making use of wiki-based collaborative translation work. We shouldn’t pay L&W, but gather work force and resources to improve the availability and quality of Marx and Engels’ works.

Marxist translators of the world unite!