Publishing and the Academic World

Passion, purpose and possible futures

Ciaran Sugrue, Sefika Mertkan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317424062
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Within the Academy, itself a changing and increasingly entrepreneurial entity, publishing is no longer an option; it is the universal currency that secures a position, tenure and promotion; it is key to academic life. Providing a panoramic picture of the changing publishing climate, Academic Life and the Publishing Landscape will empower scholars by enabling them to navigate this changing terrain more successfully.

This book provides guidance from a range of contributors who use their own wide expertise in writing and publication to document the challenges faced by scholars at different career stages and in different locations. It covers a wide range of debates on publishing, spilt into the following three sections:

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• Mapping the Publication Landscape,

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• Writing for Publication—Learning from Successful Voices,

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• Further Challenges and Possibilities.

With topics ranging from the process of preparing manuscripts for publication, including chapters on calculating journal rankings and understanding the Peer Review process, through to chapters on speaking to international audiences and writing for elite international journals, this book offers a unique perspective on how the changing nature of publishing works.

This will be a useful guide for scholars across the globe looking to enhance their publication performance, and those questioning what needs to be done in order to understand, navigate and to (re-)position one's self and institution in this increasingly significant and rapidly altering terrain.

Ciaran Sugrue is Professor of Education, University College Dublin, Ireland and has been Head of School from 2011-14.

Sefika Mertkan is an Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership and Management at Eastern Mediterranean University.

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Part 1
Mapping the publication landscape

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Chapter 1
By book and by blog

The future of academic scholarship

Andy Hargreaves and Ciaran Sugrue

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Introduction

In the field of education and beyond, Andy Hargreaves is a ‘household’ name, his work ubiquitous. It is highly likely that he has rejected more solicitations to provide keynote lectures than many of us combined have had invitations. I have heard him described and introduced as ‘the most outstanding researcher of his generation’. For readers less familiar with this academic trajectory, the following anecdote helps to put this in perspective. In a recent conversation, he mentioned that during the past three years he had published three books,¹ and when I suggested playfully that he would now have to travel the world to promote them, he responded with a self-deprecating tone: ‘Your first worry is they [books] don’t have an impact and then your second worry is they do!’. The response also indicates that no matter how successful any item of written work may be, there is also an ever-present possibility of failure laying in wait. Present ‘success’ is evanescent: a solitary event. Without more, good, hard work, it guarantees no further successes in the future.

By all the usual yardsticks of academic productivity, Andy Hargreaves is ‘up there’ among the elite. Yet, he too had to start somewhere. In his case, he registered as a doctoral student in the University of Leeds, UK, in the early 1970s. Nominated by one of his academic colleagues from another university, Martin Hammersley, he became the only graduate student to receive an invitation to present a paper at an invitational conference in Keele University organised by Professor John Eggleston. Typically, 12 to 15 scholars would be invited to present work in progress. Lacking any familiarity with the modus operandi, Andy felt obliged to prepare a full paper (37 pages) on the recent theories of Basil Bernstein (Bernstein, 1975), ‘whose work was enormously influential in the field of sociology of education at the time’. Andy had identified ‘contradictions between Bernstein’s linguistic theories and his theories of classroom pedagogy’.

Being new to such surroundings, when Andy was presenting his first paper, he proceeded to read it in its entirety. It took him nearly two hours! An audience of senior and, to Hargreaves at the time, revered colleagues, responded to him at first with interest in his daring critique. As the presentation started to overrun, however, the mood of the other participants shifted to one of polite forbearance in view of the presenter’s inexperience and youth, followed by loud yawning and shuffling of seats. The only thing Andy felt able to do in response was read his written words even faster!

Despite ‘feeling quite embarrassed’ and thinking ‘I’ll never be invited to anything ever again’, Andy was encouraged by one of the more senior academics at the seminar to revise his paper and submit it for publication in The Sociological Review (see Hargreaves, 1977). Clearly, what was initially, by his own admission, a ‘maladroit’ presentation had considerable substance, thus leading to his first journal publication while still a doctoral student, a relatively rare phenomenon for the time. Looking back, Hargreaves says, ‘most of us have to do something badly before we do it well’ and it is the job of great mentors to identify and foster the potential of emerging scholars to contribute to the field of ideas long before they are fully formed, and sometimes in spite of how they first appear.

Fast forward two decades to the other side of the Atlantic and by the 1990s Andy Hargreaves was applying his sociological imagination to the field and practice of educational change. The first edition of the International Handbook of Educational Change was published in 1998 (Hargreaves et al., 1998) and with Hargreaves as its founding Editor-in-Chief, the first issue of the Journal of Educational Change was launched in 2000. Mindful of the significance of succession planning, after just over a decade at the helm he passed the leadership mantle of this journal on; he then established another journal (Journal of Professional Capital & Community) in 2016:

Because it occurred to me there was no journal anywhere that focused on teacher communities or teacher collaboration or teacher networks and that people didn’t really know where to put their work, they didn’t know whether to put it in a teaching journal, a leadership journal…

The launch of this new journal connects with the three books he has published in the past three years to influence the quality of teaching and learning in schools, at home and abroad, while seeking simultaneously to build professional capital and community in the teaching profession – a consistent passion throughout his career.

The material above as well as much of what is to follow has been selected from a recorded and edited conversational interview between us about the new and emerging ‘realities’ in academia and publishing and their implications for writing for publication.

Continuity and change

On the subject of the often solitary process of writing, Andy’s initial response was to indicate that ‘George Orwell called it being like a long bout of a horrible painful illness!’ To mitigate such painful experiences and try to avert possible maladroit presentations, Andy describes how much more formal mentoring is now in place for many doctoral students and emerging scholars:

… but we now have things at Boston College like journal sessions, the editors of journals in Boston College will hold a session for graduate students and talk about the inside secrets of publishing a journal. Of course we house journals at Boston College … and we really try to share that knowledge with graduate students so that they learn from the inside what to do and what the rules are and so on.

I went on to ask Andy where his own motivation to write had come from in the first instance. There are two distinct but intimately related elements to his response. First, while he was still a school student in 1968–1969, it was widely reported by a multiplicity of newspapers that rioting and unruly behaviour on the part of protestors in Grosvenor Square (London) against the Vietnam War was predominantly orchestrated and carried out by students. As a student, and fuelled by what he called ‘righteous indignation’, Andy set about checking the facts. On doing so, he says:

I looked at the arrests and the occupations of those arrested and the coverage had concentrated on students … not quite ‘long haired, loud mouthed’ students, but not far short of that. And I went through all the occupations, one of which was a student, another unemployed or no fixed abode or labourer or whatever it may be. … I was in my last year of school, I was a school student so I wrote as a student and I guess I felt righteous indignation …

His letter to the Lancashire Evening Telegraph continues to be a proud possession, but holds more significance than as a mere reminder of his first venture into print, as a ‘crucible’ experience (Bennis and Thomas, 2002) for him.

And I guess like most of my writing it didn’t come down in a predictable way on one side or the other. It sort of articulated a third view which surprised people which is, I think, one thing I am able to do and interested in doing which is to pursue the values that are important to me but to do it in a non-scripted, non-predictable way.

While such an approach to writing makes his work engaging, interesting and unpredictable, this method is far from being merely a stylistic matter. Rather, it runs considerably deeper, revealing passion, purpose and commitment that still remains open to possibilities. Andy elaborates on his ‘righteous indignation’ thesis, by asking rhetorically: ‘and where does that come from?’

It is in my character, I have had it ever since being in primary school. I remember having strong opinions about justice and fairness issues when being a very small child. And I think it comes from growing up in a working-class community and in a working-class family as well. Not everybody who grows up in a working-class community or family ends up with an urge to write but I think if you have got that in you somewhere and you don’t immediately know you have, it is one way of having agency.

Rather ironically, his capacity to find his own ‘third way’ led him more recently to critique The Third Way (Giddens, 1999), a considerable influence on ‘New Labour’ (1994–2010) in the UK when it came to power under the leadership of Tony Blair (1997–2007). However, never content with critique alone, Hargreaves’ Fourth Way, developed with his Boston College colleague Dennis Shirley, is proffered as a viable and vibrant alternative: ‘a way of inspiration and innovation, of responsibility and sustainability’ (Hargreaves and Shirley, 2009, p. 71):

The fourth way does not drive reform relentlessly through teachers, use them as final delivery points for government policies, or vacuum up their motivations into a vortex of change defined by short-term political agendas and the special interests with which they are aligned. Rather, it brings together government policy, professional involvement, and public engagement around an inspiring world of greater inclusiveness, security and humanity.

Thus far, in our conversation, a potent cocktail is emerging: courage, conviction, commitment to a value system that promotes fairness and social justice with a more scholarly disposition to address evidence in less conventional ways, to turn the evidence on its head as a more constructive and creative means of identifying (future) possibilities. And, though he does not mention it specifically in our conversation, these characteristics are accompanied by a very strong work ethic, sustained over time.

Like many of us, though Hargreaves did not always understand it at the time, he was definitely mentored, at least informally. He mentions Peter Woods, David Hargreaves, Michael Fullan, Ann Lieberman and Ivor Goodson as some of his most important influences and advisors in this respect. Now in his 60s, Andy Hargreaves is more self-consciously the mentor himself, but the academic world in which new scholars emerge is not just a more recent version of what it always used to be.

The changing publishing landscape: perceptions from the field of education

In addition to conventional academic publishing, social media and new technologies along with data, impact factors and rankings are having a significant effect on the careers and intellectual contributions of most scholars:

In our rankings here [US] and in the rankings in the UK for most scholars, for most of their career, peer review papers remain the prime responsibility. So if you are in North America the fairly standard tenure and promotion advice that a young scholar will get is to publish several papers from the dissertation, then to begin some new work, then to publish papers from that work.

Depending when in the field of education one commences doctoral studies, often having gained some teaching experience, the requirements of tenure track positions can be particularly demanding – a rather extended apprenticeship that does not always have a positive outcome:

And some time while they are being Associate Professor, probably not assistant, the equivalent of Lecturer/ Senior Lecturer in Europe, sometime then to think about their first book. So, mainly people in North America will not really think about doing a book until they are seven to ten years into their career because so much weight is put on the scholarly papers and because for the first six years you are really at the mercy of tenure and promotion.

While such demands are onerous, he sees them as having a positive dimension also that puts the field of education on a par with other disciplines.

The good side of this, we are of course a scholarly community, we do research like every other field, therefore our work should be subjected to the methodological and intellectual rigours set by our peers in that field, just as it is in medicine or social work or anywhere else.

But this means that other kinds of contributions and product also have to wait, in academic careers that often begin later than in other disciplines:

And the fairly standard view has been when you get through promotion and tenure then you can, and I have two of the first doctoral students who worked with me when I came to Boston College 13 years ago, my first two doctoral students are this year publishing their first books. … So this is several years after they have completed their PhDs. And that is fairly standard.

Hargreaves values, and he himself tries to live up to, Karl Mannheim’s ideal of the ‘public intellectual’:

… to draw on the best knowledge they have available, their best if not perfect interpretation of it, to come out with authority and influence and integrity on issues of the day to which their field speaks. And that is often a role of senior scholars I think, it is a role of scholars who are on the whole at or past [Bloom, 1988] the tenure and promotion stage of their careers.

But the increasingly arduous and in some ways scripted apprenticeship of early to mid career can also have an inhibiting impact on the cultivation of a new generation of public intellectuals. Posner states: ‘we are all specialists now. No longer is there a common intellectual culture, the possession of a versatile and influential intellectual elite’ (Posner, 2001/2004, p. 55). Collectively, such considerations contribute to making the public intellectual a disappearing species.

Many of us we began before the tenure promotion process was so demanding and exerted with such force. So at the very top end there are people who are great public speakers, will speak to the professions, speak to policy, speak to the public, write for those other areas as well and most of those people now are over 60. And people coming behind I think are so locked into the tenure and promotion criteria they have developed neither the skill, or in some cases, the will to be able to engage with that wider public or wider community.

While he did not say this, perhaps neo-liberal performativity and a more atavistic individualism combine to stifle dissent and covertly or overtly encourage conformity rather than distinctive contribution, conventional think...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Mapping the publication landscape
• Part II Writing for publication – learning from successful voices
• Part III Further challenges and possibilities
• Index