Could Distributed Peer Review Better Decide Grant Funding?
The landscape of academic grant funding is notoriously competitive and plagued by lengthy, bureaucratic processes, exacerbated by difficulties in finding willing reviewers. Distributed […]
At the moment, some universities do seem to be very happy with quite a lot of inequality. Apparently, universities are even more likely than other employers to make extensive use of zero-hour contracts. This coincides in a striking manner with reports about a growing elitism in British academia.
In the context of consulting projects there may be very little room for the sociological imagination, the questioning of common sense, and, least of all, challenges to the status quo.
Critical scholarship and intellectual dissent are currently being closed down in favour of a model of academic life that accords scholars a limited role as purveyors of practically useful skills in ‘real-world’ labour markets.
As an academic, you are a brand not only as a matter of choice, but, increasingly, due to powerful institutional imperatives that are becoming harder and harder to ignore.
The recent and on-going reforms of higher education are enforcing an individualisation of academic labour. That academics would gamely play along with such a system is astonishing.
Sociology is a brand. To survive or even thrive in the academic marketplace, sociology needs to take care of its image. But at what cost?
The Ivory Tower has been toppled and academia has an impact in the ‘real world’. The problem is that this may have come at the expense of truly innovative and critical scholarship.