Not before time a head of steam has been built up against publications hidden behind publisher’s paywalls. It is just a matter of time before open access becomes the norm. Halting and intermittent progress has been made too on easing generalised surveillance and control of discourses and peer review journals out of the flexed hands of middle-aged white, male academics in Ivy League or Russell Group universities or their equialents outside of the USA and the UK. Ok, it’s slow.
Feminists and post-colonialists, plus others like disability theorists and activists, have interrogated what appeared until recently a virtually unassailable combination of ethos and practice. And yes, there remains a long way to go.
This blog is inspired by the experiences reported by Lisa Mckenzie, mostly in social media outlets. It concerns class rather than gender and ethnicity. First, a few brief preliminaries. I agree with Andrew Sayer who in his excellent Why We Can’t Afford the Rich draws a distinction between class on the one hand and gender and ethnicity on the other. Women and people from ethnic minority groups are pushed aside, stalled, held back and disadvantaged by sexism and racism respectively. These are phenomena that long antedated the advent of capitalism in Europe in the long 16th century.
But neither gender nor ethnic divisions were or are (structurally) pivotal for capitalism, for all that they have been rendered functional for it. Class, and class divisions and struggles, however, are part and parcel of – inherent to – capitalist social formations.
It seems to me that this distinctive role of class has neglected sequelae, even for ‘us’, that is, academics inside and outside the primary institutions of further and higher education. How is this?
Are we less conscious of, concerned about, salient aspects of classism in academia than we are about the likes of sexism and racism? And has the emergence of ‘identity politics’ fuelled fightbacks against the latter while contributing to the neglect of the former?
Lisa detects a bias against working-class authors submitting articles to mainstream journals. Several concepts of ‘bias’ are pertinent here. One hopes that explicit discrimination against authors from working-class communities on the grounds of their origins is a thing of the past. But it is forms of implicit discrimination that I want to address here; and I distinguish between: (a) the prestige of placement; (b) authorial stereotyping; (c) content, method and message; and (d) the formalities of presentation. In practice, each of these can inform each of the others.
Consider prestige of placement. Might it be that putative authors from ‘metrically excellent’ institutions or departments get more favourable consideration? Does the anonymity conventionally required for refereeing purposes cancel out any such discrimination? Well, it only takes a few exceptions. Moreover some editors are on record saying that they personally reject more than a third of submissions rather than send them out to referees. Hmm: not peer review journals then!
Authorial stereotyping can focus on personal characteristics. Stereotypes are replete with errors of both commission and omission. S/he is ‘one of those’, ‘has an axe to grind’, ‘is polemical/political’, and so on. Editors can enact bias beyond the limits of their (typically middle-class) reflexivity.
The reference to content, method and message and to formalities of presentation require elaboration. Message is the easiest to confront: at the time of writing this I am actually under obligation to respond to a referee’s charge of political bias (though the argument of my paper is entirely consonant with a substantive literature s/he is obviously unfamiliar with (ie the bias is his/hers, not mine).
In a way, content and method and formalities of presentation are more insidious and insinuating. This in fact is the crux of my blog. And my questions are about sub-texts. Is it the case that the criteria commonly deployed for content and method and presentation are classist? Are we less conscious of classism in this context than we are of sexism and racism? Both questions call for nuanced responses (backed up by empirical study), but my conjecture is that a case can be made for answering both in the affirmative. What am I getting at?
Prevailing discourses in sociology (as elsewhere) have over time been exposed as sexist, racist, dis-ablist etc, and a degree remedial action has been fought for and ‘won’. Less so perhaps with classism. Several theses (if that isn’t too grandiose a word) suggest themselves:
- publishing conventions, most strictly policed in the world of journals, compell a polite and courteous form of scholarship that sits comfortably with the political status quo and mitigates against its rejection;
- reason in this ‘field’ is not only: (a) invariably informed and circumscribed, as Bourdieu contended, by the political field, but it (b) excludes – as irrational – manuscripts reflecting and articulating multifarious other human qualities and motivations, like anger at injustice for example;
- while social theorists have challenged overly narrow interpretations of ‘reason’ (as instrumental, strategic etc), word has yet to reach editors of the major international journals;
- ‘textbook’ recipes for methods in articles judged fit for consideration for publication in journals are sufficiently prescriptive as to expose and cough up ‘deviant’ offerings, in the process disproportionately bundling up and shuffling aside pieces that are oppositional to the status quo’;
- the net effect of all this is a largely unrecognised middle-class – anti-working-class – bias in who is able to publish what;
- it is rude, a middle-class attribute if ever there was one, to raise this as an issue.
It is difficult not to think that future generations might – though remember that we collectively inhabit what Bhaskar called an open system, so sociologists are hopeless at predicting – judge classism in this guise too obvious to warrant further comment.
I am myself a journal editor – of Social Theory and Health (STH) – and am therefore obliged to ‘think on’!
Lisa McKenzie might well have a different analysis to offer, but I thank her for provoking me to think about these issues.