Social Science Research Council

The last four years have seen the emergence of two systems of global university rankings, conducted by the Shanghai Jiao Tong Institute of Higher Education and the Times Higher Education Supplement. These rankings generate media coverage throughout the world, with one exception, and have begun to exert direct effects in the marketing and development strategies of many individual universities, and in some nations the policies and priorities of government - indicating the growing role of global referencing in higher education.

The United States has been losing net manufacturing employment to production facilities overseas since 1989. Not only were entire geographical locales devastated. Some pundits proceeded to try and paste a positive ☺face on the phenomenon, by suggesting that advanced economies were becoming increasingly ‘weightless’, or else would graduate to a third stage of capitalism consisting almost exclusively of the service sector, or indeed disengage from gross physical production processes altogether. Of course, most people recognized that much talk bordered on delusional, but nevertheless managed to attain a patina of sensibility by engaging in locutions such as “The Information Society” or “The New Knowledge Economy”.

An interesting call for papers & proposals for a special issue of Ephemera: theory & politics in organization, to be edited by Craig Prichard & Steffen Böhm:
“Publish or perish,” that famous diktat, is without doubt the central, pervasive and unassailable logic governing most academic work in the current period. The central figure, the one around which this decree currently revolves, is, of course, the academic journal article. While the book and perhaps the lecture remain important in some locations, the journal article has become the core currency and the very measure by which academic jobs, careers, reputations and identities are made and traded.

In a 2004 article published in the International Herald Tribune, the former general secretary of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Donald J. Johnston argued that as educational systems are increasingly facing international competition for jobs, the demands for new technologies, and the broader needs of the knowledge economy, they are bound to [...]

Is Viridiana Jones to blame for her befuddlement concerning what has happened to her profession and her university over the course of her lifetime? By and large, I would be inclined to say no. Existing analyses of the commercialization of science and the transformation of the university on the part of economists, philosophers, sociologists and science studies scholars have left much to be desired, to put it politely. One of the stranger recent developments has been the performance of a small number of econometric exercises by economists to supposedly quantify the extent of harm done to science by certain aspects of the modern commercial regime.

As Harvard University is considering the adoption of an open-access policy for its faculty’s publications, John Willinsky discusses the stakes associated with such choices and their potential impact on the public use of knowledge.
It may be because I have spent my entire educational life in public schools, public libraries, and public universities, prior that is to joining Stanford this year, that I am drawn to recent news stories on the endowments that help to finance this country’s leading private universities. I have become all too aware that I’ve joined an institution…

Excerpts from the first chapter of Philip Mirowski’s forthcoming book, ScienceMart™: A primer on the new economics of science, to be published by Harvard University Press, will regularly appear on Knowledge Rules as The Viridiana Jones Chronicles.–N.G.
It’s not easy making a living in the knowledge biz these days. Of late our heroine, the intrepid academic researcher Viridiana Jones, often feels trapped between the Scylla of Disneyfication of higher education and the Charybdis of Free EnronPrise in securing a patron to support her inquiries, and finds herself sometimes wistfully wondering what life might have been like if she had gone and gotten that law degree instead….

What most struck me when I returned to academia as a history editor after seventeen years working in commercial publishing was an apparent general disinterest in the subject of reading. I don’t mean a disinterest in reading as the object of specialized technical investigations into its neurophysiology or its pedagogy. I mean a disinterest in reading in the Enlightenment sense of an autonomous individual citizen’s emancipative cognitive act of self-fashioning in relation to a democratic interpretive community of political equals.