Becoming Editor: Or, Pinocchio finally notices the Strings

Abstract

This paper uses my experience as an academic journal editor in order to reflect upon the social arrangement that brings academics, universities, states and knowledge capitalist organizations together to produce the contemporary academic journal and access paywalls. After some consideration of the history of publishing, I analyse the market for articles like this one, and consider the consequences of the ranking and monetization of journals, papers and citations by different agents. As I do this, I insert various biographical reflections on the relationship between 'editing' and being 'edited'. The overall aim of the paper is to suggest that this set-up actually has some very negative consequences for taxpayers, academics and students. It encourages the overproduction of academic output because it turns it into a commodity which is traded, whilst simultaneously tending to discourage forms of knowledge production that fail to fit into the boxes which have already been established for them, whether in terms of content or style. I conclude with some thoughts on open access journals, and their limits.

On interference, collegiality and co-authorship: Peer review of journal articles in management and organization studies

“…Rodolph talked, for example, of the 'privilege' that he sees being accorded to scholars from the global north. Here, my respondents echo Parker (2013) and Macdonald (2015) in suggesting that authors who lack the cultural capital of English as a first language and/or the social capital of working for a global north institution are disadvantaged in the peer review process for supposedly 'international' journals. Their remarks also chime with Meriläinen et al's (2008) claims around the 'hegemonic practices' which 'organiz[e] whose theories count and whose work is cited, whose experience is valued and whose empirical data is deemed interesting and relevant' (p. 88).…”

“…From the reviewer's perspective, there is also more reviewing to be done. Parker (2013) suggests the tide began to turn in MOS in the 1990s when publishers realized the considerable profits journals could generate, given the externalization of most production costs to universities. Starbuck (2013: 715) says the volume of publications in business journals increased by 11.04% annually between 1999 and 2009, excluding the presumably much larger number of rejections.…”

Critical essay: Blinding faith – Paradoxes and pathologies of opacity in peer review

“…at others' expense' (see also Rennie, 2003) -the expense incurred being the invisible receipt of incompetent, high-handed or even abusive editorial conduct. On this point, I would question Lipworth and Kerridge's (2011) claim that editors possess the power ascribed to them when, arguably, such 'power' is temporarily loaned to editors by publishing houses or learned societies (Parker, 2013). The central point being made by Lipworth and Kerridge (2011), nonetheless, is that routine editorial exercises of power, including those that established and now perpetuate blinded peer review, operate to exclude, discredit and suppress more transparent (e.g.…”

“…Maintained through editorial 'control mechanisms' (Berger and Luckmann, 1967: 78) often imposed by publishers (e.g. non-disclosure agreements; Parker, 2013;Willmott, 2021), opacity in evaluation processes is legitimized not only by its normalization but also by ostensibly ethical principles, such as those of anonymity and confidentiality.…”

“…Peer review that is blinded, as Fuller (2000: 87, emphasis added) notes, 'miraculously discriminates important from unimportant research as the overall result of a set of privately taken decisions in referee's reports' whose opacity publishers as well as editors and reviewers are more than content to maintain. This entrenched arrangement has, arguably, enabled, and perhaps encouraged, editors to present and conceive of themselves as benevolent guardians, rather than unaccountable overlords, of scientific fields (Wellington and Nixon, 2005) -as displayed in self-congratulatory 'Meet the Editors' and 'Manuscript Development' events hosted by journals and/or their publishers (see Parker, 2013). Reflecting upon the role of reviewers in relation to editors, Zuckerman and Merton (1971: 96, emphasis added) ruefully comment: .…”