EDITORIAL

Critical scholars in the machinery of publishing:Experiences, reflections, alternatives

Scandinavian Journal of Management (2012) 28, 205—208

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The aim of this Special Topic Forum is to voice concernsrelated to the contemporary global academic system ingeneral and to publishing in particular. Scholars who workoutside the mainstream in organization and managementstudies and associate themselves with critical scholarshiptake the opportunity to share their personal experiencesand insights. They do so without being straight-jacketedby journal editors and reviewers who impose their preferredevaluation criteria on academic work and who disregard textsthat are not written in what they consider to be normal ways.The articles published here have been subject to an appre-ciative and supportive review process.

We all know that the present academic system puts a lot ofemphasis on publishing articles in a small set of ‘top’ jour-nals. This seduces us to invest time and effort in craftingmanuscripts that conform to the editorial policies and guide-lines of these particular outlets — and, in so doing, forces usto reproduce their favored theoretical and methodologicaldogmas. In the apocalyptic vision of where this is taking us,statistical methods reign supreme, mechanistic descriptionsare manufactured, broad generalizations are sought andcelebrated, and research becomes mass production (Star-buck, 2009). Whether this vision of the machinery of publish-ing materializes in its extreme form or in more tempered andcunning ways, we know that the system is unfair. The ‘top’journals are not equally accessible to all. Critical, feminist,and post-colonialist scholars find it extremely difficult to gettheir work published in these journals, which neverthelesscount when their scholarly work is assessed by departmentheads, deans, and tenure track committees. This is discoura-ging especially as there seems to be no way for non-main-stream scholars to share their often frustrating experiences,apart from chats with other disillusioned colleagues over aglass or two.

This Special Topic Forum provides a space for sharing suchexperiences. We reflect on university policies and practicesthat put pressure on us to publish in specific journals, onobstacles to having our critical work published in these

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journals, and on unfavorable outcomes of reviews and otherprocesses that often receive little or no attention. We alsoreflect on what it means to be critical in contemporaryacademia. We thereby join the growing tide of criticalcommentaries on publishing in organization and managementstudies and offer fresh contributions to the debate (Parker &Thomas, 2011).

The articles in this Special Topic Forum are personal. Theyare reflexive. They suggest alternative ways of conceiving ofpublishing and of relating to the system. They were writtenwith passion and will ideally engender emotional responses.This is what is missing in extant debates on publishing — or,rather, this is what is missing in articles that tend to getpublished on the subject, whether mainstream or critical.

The Special Topic Forum opens with a story that relatesthe fate of two critical papers. Banu Ozkazanc-Pan is assis-tant professor at the College of Management, University ofMassachusetts, USA. She shares with us some of her experi-ences in engaging with a US-based ‘top’ journal and theconference that supports it. From the perspective of afeminist post-colonialist researcher, Banu offers an analysisof what happens when editors and reviewers refuse to under-stand a critical qualitative paper and its purpose and insteaddo what they always do: force their own rules on a text that iswritten differently and with different epistemological com-mitments. Banu argues that in the context of US-based ‘top’journals, papers based on qualitative methodology are trea-ted as a monolithic category. In a rather bizarre way, allpapers that are stamped qualitative are subject to the samekind of scrutiny: they are checked against positivisticresearch criteria. Banu recalls how her papers were critiquedin this way and discusses whether dismantling the hegemonyis possible. She puts forth the notion of reading critically (asopposed to reading critical work) as a requirement for asses-sing research and opening a space for interdisciplinarity as anethico-political engagement necessary for fostering dialogueamong business academics whose commitments may notalign.

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While the ‘top’ journals continue to (mis)judge qualita-tive papers and disadvantage critical work (although theywould, of course, deny this), publications in these samejournals have undue weight across the world in the assess-ment of scholarly performance. The Anglo-American obses-sion with publishing in the right places is spreading to moreperipheral locations (Merilainen, Tienari, Thomas, & Davies,2008). Scholars in a variety of contexts, with very differentacademic traditions, are measured against the same stan-dardized criteria.

The image of the ‘ideal academic’ constructed in thisspace is the focus of Rebecca Lund’s article. Rebecca is a PhD-student at the Aalto University School of Economics in Fin-land. Aalto is a new university formed by a merger of threeinstitutions of higher learning. Its top management has setambitious goals; Aalto is to become a world-class academicinstitution by 2020. Rebecca explicates how the ‘ideal aca-demic’ is constructed at Aalto and maps out the texts thatenter into and shape our everyday practices by formulatingparticular and standardizing notions of quality and excel-lence. Rebecca studies this topic from the perspective ofwomen who are disadvantaged within the system and showshow efforts to realize the Aalto vision have different con-sequences for different people. The article is based onRebecca’s ongoing doctoral thesis work, which is an institu-tional ethnography of the making of Aalto University, viewedfrom a feminist standpoint. Rebecca argues for the impor-tance of seeing what happens in the local as embedded in andshaped by wider trans-local processes. She emphasizes theneed to understand how we come to accept textual realitiesand particular definitions of quality and argues for theimportance of starting discovery from what people actuallydo as they take part in the institutional processes, ratherthan from abstract and decontextualized concepts. In parti-cular, Rebecca sees this as a necessary step in avoidinggeneralization and the essentialization of female experiencein the new academia.

In the competitive space marked by standardized perfor-mance criteria and assessments, academic life can some-times be tedious and it can appear rather surreal. Sometimesit just feels like a big joke. Carl Cederstrom and CasperHoedemaekers completed their PhDs in Sweden and theNetherlands respectively, after which they both moved tothe UK to take up work as lecturers at the Cardiff BusinessSchool of the University of Cardiff. Their polemical articlediscusses the situation in UK business schools today, and notspecifically at Cardiff (they wish to underscore this).Although Carl and Casper apply the joke metaphor todescribe academic work, there is a serious undertone inthe text. Like Rebecca, they reflect upon the uneasy rela-tionship between research and teaching and the privilegingof the former over the latter. While the official universitydiscourse celebrates teaching and learning, in practicescholars are evaluated on the basis of their publishingrecord.

Publications in journals that are stamped with three orfour stars by the Association of Business Schools (ABS) havebecome the only credentials that count in academic work inthe UK. Carl and Casper bemoan the instrumentality of thefinancialized university, in which the obsession with numbersand counting has made many academics disillusioned orcynical. But at the same time, the authors argue, there is

a perverse desire among academics to cling to this verysystem. It seems that in their affective detachment fromthe conditions in which they do their work, academics mock-ingly or jokingly follow the instrumental path set out by the‘neo-liberal ‘university. To counter this, Carl and Caspersuggest that one should trade the momentary pleasure ofpleasing a faceless system of numbers and reconnect to whatbrought many of us to the university in the first place: thedesire to study and to explore ideas.

The next two articles look at the space for critical scholar-ship in business schools in more detail. Alexandra Bristow’sarticle is a call to arms against the domestication of criticalorganization studies. Alexandra works as a lecturer at theSurrey Business School, University of Surrey, UK, which is herfirst academic post following a Lancaster University PhD and adouble maternity break. Alexandra has a dual connection tothe ‘publish-or-perish’ phenomenon in the field of manage-ment and organization studies. Like other early career aca-demics, she is currently learning about this as a criticalscholar-practitioner, but she is also a researcher of thephenomenon and its effects on knowledge in the field.(Alexandra’s doctoral thesis was on the work of editors ofexplicitly pluralist European management and organizationstudies journals and her current research continues herinterest in this area.)

Alexandra’s argument is that we practitioners of criticalorganization studies are becoming increasingly benign andtoothless, because we are preoccupied with our professionalsurvival and are gradually trading away radicalism inexchange for legitimacy within the very system that weset out to critique. This means that if we are serious aboutbeing radically critical, we must accept and embrace thepossibility of our non-survival, which necessitates facing andfighting our deep and desperate fears. Alexandra draws fromAldous Huxley’s post-Fordist dystopia to illustrate what maybefall a radically-minded, early-career academic ‘savage’entering the Brave New Higher Education and its publicationhatcheries. She introduces the contrasting metaphor of intel-lectual pregnancy as an ironic challenge to the totalizing,mechanistic and sterilizing reality of the brave new academicwork. Alexandra argues that one of the strengths of themetaphor of intellectual pregnancy is that it leads us toremember our love of ideas and knowledge, which can bean incredibly powerful force for facing our fears of non-survival.

How about joining the critical community in businessschools from the outside? How can we support this? Ali Young,Inma Adarves-Yorno, and Scott Taylor argue that the criticalcommunity in business schools should pay more attention tobelonging than to believing. Their article has its roots in athree-year-long conversation about what it is to be criticalbetween Ali, a doctoral researcher, and her two supervisors,Inma and Scott. The location is the University of ExeterBusiness School in the UK. Ali’s background is in social workand psychotherapy, while Inma was first trained as a socialpsychologist. Ali, Inma, and Scott offer a conversation sug-gesting that the critical community could spend more timeconsidering how it organizes itself and the effects of currentpractice. Publishing is a key aspect of this, as what we publishand where we publish can define our position and role withinthe community. Consideration of the practice of belongingand especially its social and emotional aspects is, the authors

Critical scholars in the machinery of publishing: Experiences, reflections, alternatives 207

suggest, a neglected aspect of the critical community’sevolution over the last two decades.

My own article rounds off the Special Topic Forum. I am aprofessor at the Aalto University School of Economics inFinland. My passion in academic work lies in gender studiesand feminist theorizing. I have also become increasinglyinterested in how academia — and the publishing machineryin particular — works, and I share the concerns raised byBanu, Rebecca, Carl, Casper, Alexandra, Ali, Inma, and Scott.I was editor of the Scandinavian Journal of Management forsome seven years before stepping down at the end of 2011.Over the years, SJM has published work on academia andpublishing, and much of it can be considered critical of theAnglo-American mainstream. As a kind of farewell, I sug-gested to Alexander Styhre, the new editor, that we dosomething different; that we give people an opportunityto get personal about publishing. This is what we set outto do — and somewhere along the way editing this SpecialTopic Forum became more personal for me than I had bar-gained for.

I worked in a bank during my graduate studies, and overthe last twenty years I have done research on financialservices organizations. For a long time, I had played aroundwith the idea of using financial services as a metaphor tomake sense of all the pretty weird stuff that I see around mein academia today; something like Carl and Casper’s jokemetaphor and Alex’s Brave New Higher Education and intel-lectual pregnancy. I talked to friends and colleagues aboutcomparing academia to financial markets and was encour-aged by their enthusiastic reactions. I crafted a text on thisbasis and submitted it as a discussion paper to a journal thatI’ve always found receptive to original ideas. I received whatI thought were favorable reviews, revised the text accord-ingly, and resubmitted it with high hopes.

Next, in a blunt manner, I was told that the paper wasrejected. I was baffled and angry. I thought that I had doneeverything that the reviewers had asked me to do. But it wasnot to be. . . I was informed that there were inconsistencies inthe comparison between academia and financial markets. Ithought that the criticism was absurd as I had made it clear inthe article that the metaphor was not a perfect match. I hadused it instead as a way of seeing the systemic features ofglobal academia: its various dimensions, interconnections,vested interests, and outcomes. Well, the reviewers and theeditor did not understand it like this. . . to them it was a cheaptrick that made no contribution. After the initial anger, I sawtheir point. The text is kind of naıve — or melancholy andFinnish, as Alexander Styhre put it. For me, this experiencewas a good reminder of the harsh reality of publishing; youcannot take anything for granted in academic work, not evenspeaking to an audience that you think you know. Reflectingon critical scholarship and editing this Special Topic Forumsuddenly seemed like an even better idea.

I revised my text further, and here it is. My argument isthat the financial markets metaphor enables us to explicatethe self-fulfilling prophecies that constitute the academicsystem today, to understand the role of journals, to confront(re)constructions of self-evidence, and to develop meaning-ful responses in relating to the system. It resonates with theexperiences and insights of the other contributors to thisSpecial Topic Forum and aims at a bird’s eye view of theglobal academic system and its elements. You can judge the

quality of its chain of argumentation for yourself. The articleis not perfect, but then no article is, not even those publishedin the ‘top’ journals (Starbuck, 2005). A different study, and aworthy one, too, would be an examination of the real finan-cial interests of actors in the contemporary academic system— such as global publishing companies — and the profits thatthey make through their involvement with journals.

We actually had one more paper in the pipeline, but itnever materialized. It puts my whining into perspective. Iinvited a scholar from an influential Asian country to writeabout personal experiences related to publishing. The aca-demia in this country is systematically finding ways to inter-nationalize. This of course requires a preoccupation withpublishing in the right Anglo-American journals. I would haveliked to learn more about this from the perspective of a youngcritical scholar. The person I contacted was excited about theopportunity and set out to write a personal and reflectivetext. A few days before the deadline this person wrote me ane-mail explaining that it was not possible to submit. Thepaper had been written and sent to a more senior scholar forcomments. The response had been the following: ‘‘you arenot the right person to reflect on the academic status quo inthis country.’’ I quite understand that the author thought thatit was better to give it a miss.

In the end, I think it would be unfair if I tried to summarizethe contributions to this Special Topic Forum and come upwith some grand concluding points of my own. All the articlesspeak for themselves. They are written by people who careabout what they do and who envision alternatives to thepresent system. Enjoy. Get emotional. Respond.

Oh yes, a disclaimer. Critical scholarship means a variety ofthings in this Special Topic Forum. I tend to conceive ofcriticality as being attentive to and suspicious of taken-for-granted assumptions and the ways in which those vested withauthority are able to construct particular understandings ofthe world as self-evident. For me, criticality is also aboutoffering meaningful alternatives to dominant understandings.That’s a pretty loose framing, I know. Others — like Alexandrain this Special Topic Forum — equate being critical with beingtransformative of what is critiqued; with being radical andrevolutionary, and with searching for ways to transcend thetotalizing influence of the system. Dunne, Harney, Parker, andTinker (2008) provide even more radical understandings ofcriticality, linking it to commitment to political outcomes suchas the redistribution of wealth. However, as Parker and Thomas(2011) suggest, any claim to draw a line in the sand betweenthe critical and its other (the dominant) remains a temporarymatter. Criticality, then, may be meaningful only when definedin its temporal and spatial context and in relation to theposition(s) of those claiming to be critical. However we defineit, there should be more room for criticism of the dominant. Solet’s keep on trying.

References

Dunne, S., Harney, S., Parker, M., & Tinker, T. (2008). Discussing therole of the business school. Ephemera, 8(3), 271—293.

Merilainen, S., Tienari, J., Thomas, R., & Davies, A. (2008). Hege-monic academic practices: Experiences of publishing from theperiphery. Organization, 15(4), 629—642.

Parker, M., & Thomas, R. (2011). What is a critical journal? Organi-zation, 18(4), 419—427.

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Starbuck, W. H. (2005). How much better are the most-prestigiousjournals? The statistics of academic publication. OrganizationScience, 16(2), 180—200.

Starbuck, W. H. (2009). The constant causes of never-ending fad-dishness in the behavioral and social sciences. ScandinavianJournal of Management, 25(1), 108—116.

Janne Tienari*Aalto University, School of Economics,

PO Box 21230, 00076 Aalto, Finland*Tel.: +358 50 3531093

E-mail address: janne.tienari@hse.fi