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Extent to which knowledge of publishing is used for advice on careers and publishing ( n 1 = 71, n 2 = 71).
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This paper reports findings from an international survey into the research involvement and support of university teaching staff in a relatively new profession-orientated discipline, publishing studies (PS). It uses these findings to consider barriers and opportunities for academic research both specifically in PS and more broadly in other professio...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... degree of selectiv- ity imposed; thus the cohort approached may not be fully representative of the target population. • Response bias (i.e. the tendency of respon- dents either consciously or unconsciously to distort responses). In this instance there may have been an element of ‘courtesy bias’, as the respondents were sent the questionnaire by a familiar individual, and even though assured of anonymity this may have influenced their responses. • Non-response bias. There may be a differ- ence between those who were sent the link to the questionnaire and responded and those who did not. While these caveats and unexamined areas must be borne in mind when interpreting the results it was felt that the survey offered interesting insights into the discipline of PS, particularly given the opportunity to make more substantial comments through the open- ended questions. Ten key findings are summa - rized below followed by a discussion of barriers to and opportunities for research. Respondents were mostly highly experienced; 61% had 10 years or more of professional experience in the industry. The average time working in the industry was more than 15 years. Current involvement of the respondents in professional practice varied widely. 39% of the sample described themselves as highly involved (top two boxes on a 7-point scale) while a quarter were currently uninvolved. The average rating was 4.4. Involvement was highest by region in North America (average score 5.2) and lowest in Europe except the UK and Australia (both 3.4). The respondents’ level of research activity also varied widely, with 39% describing them- selves as highly active (top two boxes) and 27% as research inactive; the average rating was 4.3. 65% of the sample worked full time for their university while a quarter of the sample worked 50% time or less. The average contract size among those working part time was 0.4. The most common reason for working part time was that no full-time post was available. Everyone who responded to the survey was involved in research, professional practice, or both, but there was an inverse relation- ship between professional practice and level of research activity. 31% of the sample had a high involvement in professional practice but only low to medium research involvement, while 34% had a high involvement in research but only low to medium involvement in pro- fessional practice. This implies that academ- ics within PS have to choose how to allocate their research time. They are likely to choose practical work or research, but seldom both. The subject of how PS is accommodated within universities will be covered in more detail in a second paper but in brief, and to provide context to this paper, the survey dem- onstrated that the size of PS departments ranges from just a few students to departments with more than 500 full-/half-field undergrad - uates. About 60% of respondents had under- graduates and 90% postgraduates, both cat- egories either as full- or half-field. A third of respondents had Ph.D. students undertaking further study within PS. Of these, the median number of Ph.D. students in the department was 3, with a mean of 4.4. For the most part these departments are relatively new. Just three respondents taught on courses which were established prior to 1980. 60% of the respondents taught on courses which have begun since 2000. PS sits in many departments, (includ- ing publishing, communications and media, english, writing and information science), and many faculties/schools (including arts, engineering, humanities, and technology). The usage of visiting lecturers for teaching within the field is various. 40% of respondents reported that half the teaching or more was done by visiting lecturers, while 29% reported that teaching was almost totally (90%+) in-house. Respondents agreed strongly, and across the board, about the importance of their profes- sional experience in securing their role at university. When asked to rate the impor- tance of their experience in getting their job on a 7-point scale the average score was 6.1, the highest average score of all the rating questions. Professional experience is also considered an important factor in attracting students to an institution (average score 5.4). To a lesser extent it is also considered important in influ - encing the recommendations of their parents/ school advisors (average score 4.7). While respondents felt that their professional experience was reasonably valued within their immediate department (average score of 5.1), they felt that little value was placed on it by their school/faculty (average score 3.6) or by the university as a whole (3.3). Similarly while in general respondents felt that the advice they gave to students on careers and employability was somewhat val- ued (average score 4.9), they felt that their understanding of publishing was not being used by colleagues seeking to get published (average score 3.3 with just 18% in top two boxes) (Figure 3). By region, advice on careers was most highly valued in North America (average score 5.4) while advice to colleagues on publishing was most valued in Africa (average score 4.8). It is clear from the verbatim replies that some respondents feel they could be used to better effect to help. Many replied that they would definitely like to help more. However, time pressures clearly represent an issue for a number of respondents, and there is some evi- dence of resentment at the attitudes towards the PS departments: ‘We are used in this way as much as we are capable of being used; anymore and we would not have time for our central respon- sibilities to our own students and our own research.’ ‘I give publishing workshops on other cam- puses, but my institution does not welcome this service.’ ‘It would be helpful if these services were taken into account when allocating ...
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Citations
With the rise of Publishing Studies programs in universities, there has been a “search for a discipline” (Murray 2007, 2–35). But why consider Publishing Studies in and of itself? Does the social practice of publishing need its own disciplinary frame? Or do conceptual models adequately live in other disciplines, from Information and Library Sciences, to the Sociology of Culture or Literary Sociology, or Communication and Media Studies? Or is Publishing Studies more suited as vocational training, rather than an academic, disciplinary practice, where training of professional practice is subsequently siloed and normalized into sub-categories, genres, and dynamics of practice? With this journal, and the larger Research Network, we seek to offer a framework to approach the question of what makes this domain of social practice unique. We have a twofold aim. On the one hand, we set out to consider the conceptual frames—a social theory of publishing. On other hand, we are equally concerned with considerations of practice—how Publishing Studies shapes the development of a professional community that “lives” in cultures, and societies.
Much has been written on the neoliberalization of the academy on the one hand and precarious creative labour/work in the culture industries on the other, but there has been comparatively little writing which makes explicit the intimate links between these two sociological phenomena and how they have come to complement and reinforce one another. Taking as a case study a new postgraduate MA course in Self-Publishing, this article aims to fill this gap, arguing that fundamental to learning to labour in the neoliberal university is both ready acquiescence to exploitation and further willingness to self-exploit on the part of both staff and students. Furthermore, incumbents of a profoundly unequal and managerial knowledge hierarchy benefit from the introduction of programmes which neither train students vocationally nor educate them liberally. This, in turn, threatens the autonomy within institutions of higher education while simultaneously undermining future artistic and intellectual flourishing.
