Month: October 2018

The Social Structures of Global Academia – New Book, Coming Soon!

bobbydazzler Book

the social thinker

Since the broadly neoliberal reforms of the 1980s, debates about the future of higher education have been a contest over the rightful mission of universities. From the corporatisation of public research in the USA’s Bayh-Dole Act (1980), to the reputation markets produced through the UK’s RAE/REF, and the quasi-markets produced through Australia’s demand-driven Unified National System of higher education, economistic language has been central to the pronouncements of both advocates and critics of these reforms. Formalised economics has long been recognised as the unifying language of politics, with behavioural economists checking the grammar of Homo economicus.

By contrast, the study of institutional culture in higher education has been much slower to develop as a unified or even comparative practice. The sociology of academia has long been associated with the names of Max Weber, Robert Merton, Edward Shils, then Pierre Bourdieu, Mary Henkel, Tony Becher and Paul Trowler. However, these…

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Five benefits of a writing ‘system’

oooh writing systems

The Research Whisperer

Chris Smith is co-founder of Prolifiko and interested in using behavioural science, neuroscience and positive persuasive technology to unlock human potential.

He’s also a consultant to academic publishers and higher education advising on marketing and digital strategy, design thinking and the future of edtech.

Chris is a former founder of Swarm, a content and digital marketing agency, and a former lecturer in social psychology, continental philosophy and aesthetics.

Prolifiko tweets from @beprolifiko.

Working hands (photo by madamepsychosis on flickr) | www.flickr.com/photos/belljarWorking hands (photo by madamepsychosis on flickr) | http://www.flickr.com/photos/belljar

In July, I wrote about Prolifiko’s survey of scholarly writing practice, and our early objectives for that study. We teamed up with two academics and a data insight expert to design a large-scale study into academic writing practice.

So far, the study has gathered responses from 510 academics from over 40 countries and the interim findings build an intriguing picture of how academics write.

The data reveals…

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Stephen Hawking: Technology drives ever-increasing inequality

the history of class struggles and new tech 0-Hawking spoke

Economic Sociology & Political Economy

On 6 October 2015, a great theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking conducted a special Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session. Out of the thousands of submitted issues, Hawking selected those he wished to reply, mainly discussing aspects of artificial intelligence. In conclusion, Hawking picked a question about technological unemployment and ended with an insightful alarming observation on socio-economic and political trajectories:

Q: Have you thought about the possibility of technological unemployment, where we develop automated processes that ultimately cause large unemployment by performing jobs faster and/or cheaper than people can perform them? Some compare this thought to the thoughts of the Luddites, whose revolt was caused in part by perceived technological unemployment over 100 years ago. In particular, do you foresee a world where people work less because so much work is automated?
Stephen Hawking: “If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy…

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Lessons learned through failure

learning curves, failures and academia

ESRC blog

by Olivia Maynard

This is how I chose to tell my colleagues on Twitter that I’d been awarded a prestigious ESRC New Investigator Grant. People congratulated me and ‘liked’ my post – it looked like a fantastic success story. However, I’m sure there were many (particularly other early career researchers) who read my post in dismay –  I certainly remember the feeling of personal failure when others had posted something similar in the past. So, I quickly decided to follow up my initial post to show that every success story has a (often long) back story…

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Toxic workplace cultures and bullying at work

another one – adds to a increasing evidence base —

Minding the Workplace

Those who have studied workplace bullying, mobbing, and abuse know very well that these behaviors are often stoked by toxic organizational cultures. Today I emphasized that theme in a presentation at a workplace mental health seminar hosted by The Conference Board (TCB), “a global, independent business membership and research association working in the public interest.”

I built my remarks around the concept of relational workplace cultures so brilliantly developed by Drs. Linda Hartling and Elizabeth Sparks in their 2002 paper, “Relational-Cultural Practice: Working in a Nonrelational World” (2002), which I’ve referenced on numerous occasions on this blog.  (Linda Hartling is the current director of the Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies network.)

According to Hartling and Sparks, a “relational” culture is one that values “growth-fostering relationships, mutual empathy, mutuality, [and] authenticity,” creating qualities of “zest, empowerment, clarity, sense of worth, and a desire for more connection.”

By contrast, three types of…

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Why Does Paranoia Arise in the Workplace?

abusive supervision study calls for training of managers……

SAGE Business and Management INK

[We’re pleased to welcome authors Barbara C. Lopes of the Universidade de Coimbra, Caroline Kamau of Birkbeck College, and Rusi Jaspal of De Montfort University. They recently published an article in the Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies entitled “Coping With Perceived Abusive Supervision: The Role of Paranoia,” which is currently free to read for a limited time. Below, they recount the motivations and innovations of this research.

JLOS_72ppiRGB_powerpointWhat motivated you to pursue this research?

Work is an important part of most people’s lives – after all, we spent most of our lives at work and what happens at work can affect us profoundly. We wanted to understand what causes negative cognitions (e.g., paranoia) and maladaptive coping strategies (e.g., workplace deviance) in the workplace. In his 2001 study, Kramer discussed the corporate ethos of neoliberal societies and its potential contribution to paranoia among workers – essentially in order for survival in a…

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A Review of the Empirical Literature on Meaningful Work

meaningful work and empirical research!

SAGE Business and Management INK

[We’re pleased to welcome authors Catherine Bailey of King’s College London, Ruth Yeoman of the University of Oxford, Adrian Madden of the University of Greenwich, Marc Thompson of the University of Oxford, and Gary Kerridge of the University of Warwick. They recently published an article in the Human Resource and Development Review entitled “A Review of the Empirical Literature on Meaningful Work: Progress and Research Agenda,” which is currently free to read for a limited time. Below they reflect on the inspiration for conducting this research:]

hrda_16_4.coverWhat motivated you to pursue this research?

In recent years we have witnessed a growing interest in meaningfulness. As we started to research in the area of meaningful work, we became aware that the literature is quite disparate, with studies published in a wide range of different fields such as sociology, psychology, political theory, ethics, philosophy and theology, but no efforts to bring this…

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Metaphors we work by

the language of an academy at war with itself…….v collaborative, cooperative and life-enhancing languages

Academic Irregularities

This post has been inspired by a vigorous discussion on Twitter initiated by a question from Jesse Stommell (@jessifer) (6th November) who had been attending the recent #opened16 conference. “How many of us have been told our work doesn’t count as research or scholarship? How many teachers, adjuncts, activists? How many students”? The question raises issues of autonomy, academic judgement, academic freedom – and all the mechanisms of audit and regulation which act to compromise these, making academic work and research a contested area of access and legitimation.

Helen Sauntson (@HelenSauntson) and I have been investigating how discourse constructs notions of what counts as academic labour, and we started by analysing the discourse of university managerial training courses. The choice of managerial, not management, is deliberate. Managerialism offers the sense of management for its own sake, of management as the central and privileged purpose of the university. Managerialism imposes ‘false’…

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Mental health, academic life and me

integrity, honesty and courage – try this

ESRC blog

by Matt Flinders

There can be little doubt that mental health is a growing global challenge. And it really is a global challenge. Although rapid rises in relation to depression, anxiety, substance misuse, self-harming and eating disorders have been well-documented in many ‘advanced’ and relatively wealthy countries, it has been estimated that over 80% of those suffering from mental health disorders actually live in the Global South where support is rare.

Seen from this perspective the potential role and impact of the social sciences in terms of helping to understand why the mental health of so many nations seems to be fraying and what might be done has never been greater. I’m not suggesting that it is the role of the social sciences to come up with simple answers to complex problems. But I am suggesting that the complexity of the mental health challenge – with its cultural, economic and…

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