Editorial Power/Authorial Suffering°

In this article, I analyse the “publish or perish” enterprise and in particular the origins of editorial power/knowledge. My actor-network analysis shows how tenure, promotion, and salary decisions apparently unrelated to editorial decisions are important elements that accrue power/knowledge to editors of particular journals. What my actor-network analysis does not show, and which I therefore analyse from a subject-centred perspective, is the other side of editorial power/knowledge: authorial suffering. I suggest that the structure of our science education discipline necessitates a particular commitment to the responsibilities and obligations of editors and reviewers to the authors, particularly the newcomers, and therefore to the production and reproduction of science education. Power is exercised rather than possessed; it is not the ‘privilege’ acquired or preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall effect of its strategic position. (Foucault, 1979, p. 27) In torture, it is in part the obsessive display of agency that permits one person’s body to be translated into another person’s voice, that allows real human pain to be converted into a regime’s fiction of power. (Scarry, 1985, p. 18) Publishing in science education, as in all of academia, is part of a professor’s lifeworld. It is so much part of life, and in such a threatening way, that it has led to the adage “publish or perish.” That the slogan is threatening, I experienced early on in my career when I abandoned my academic career because I was repeatedly ° To appear in the RISE special issue on peer review. All correspondence concerning this paper should be addressed to Wolff-Michael Roth, Lansdowne Professor, Applied Cognitive Science MacLaurin Building A548, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada V8W 3N4. E-mail: [email protected]. 2 WOLFF-MICHAEL ROTH told by senior science education colleagues (and subsequently came to believe) that I was not cut out to meet the rigorous demands of publishing in respected journals. Writing certainly is not every educator’s forte or interest. Because the requirements are to have a certain number of publications before tenure and/or promotions are granted, the culture of academia forces those who aspire to academic life and appropriate salary adjustments to engage in publication of some aspects of their work. In the decision-making process concerning possible publication of submitted manuscripts, journal editors are crucially positioned to make decisions about which articles are accepted for publication in the scarce journal pages. Hence, editors are a crucial element in the architecture of information technology; this architecture always reflects the societal power relationships that the technology affords (Newhagen & Levy, 1997). VOICE OVER: Over the last decade, it has become increasingly clear that the Internet has provided a vehicle that separates the production and control from authors to consumers due to the different forms in which texts can be shared. The interactivity of the internet architecture has allowed this change in news distribution and the related shifts in power (Newhagen & Levy 1998). It is not surprising that traditionalists who wielded most of the power in the traditional paper-based modes of publication turn out to be the most resistant to accepting different modes of publishing on the internet for making tenure decisions. Electronic journals and web publishing are still regarded as having lesser value—a perspective related to the differential ease with which a manuscript is accepted in the print versus online media. This power can be abused. Though rarely publicised, there is mounting evidence of serious abuses of editorial power (Altman, Chalmers, Herxheimer, 1994). Editors make their decisions in part by drawing on the advice of reviewers who potentially gain from their work in a double way. VOICE OVER: Eisenhart, this issue, argues that reviewing does not add to the tenure and promotion portfolio. In my experience, the absence of review activities is noted negatively, whereas the presence does not add much; it is taken for granted. In my institution, there are professors who list among their scholarly accomplishments each individual review they have done, including the title of the original manuscript. Editorial Power/Authorial Suffering 3 Reviewing cumulatively adds to their own portfolio submitted for tenure, promotion, and salary purposes and (by rejecting the work of others) increase their own chances of accessing the scarce space constituted by journal pages. From this perspective, it is apparent that editors, reviewers, tenure committees, and others who make decisions about authors’ publications (or publication records) are in strategic positions from which they exercise power. This power, as the first opening quote suggests, is not something that one can hold such as a material possession. In this case power is exercised and accrues from a strategic positioning of the editor who exercises it. In fact, for editorial power to be exercised, the collaboration of those who are subject to the power (i.e., the authors) has to be assured. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL DATA: I recall very well an article in which I described how my fellow teachers and I had translated research in science laboratories from a social-constructivist perspective into curriculum design and praxis. Although the article was reviewed very positively, the editor made the publication of my article contingent on including one or two paragraphs in which I reviewed the work of his friend who took a very antisocial–constructivst view. It did not make sense to me because the article had nothing to do with the paradigm war that the editor is engaged in. Having spent so much time in the writing of the article, and being a young scholar, I complied. In this situation, it was not just the editor exercising power. By complying, I actively participated in the performance of power, which is always an outcome of particular relations rather than something someone “has” or “owns.” When such relations are stabilised long enough, they generate the effects and conditions of power. That is, uses of power should be treated as relational products; to store power or to have discretion in its development means to enjoy (or suffer from) the effects of a stable network of relations (Law, 1991). In a general way, editors do not have opportunities to exercise power over those who do not submit manuscripts to their journals. On the other hand (and as I will show later in this article), the relationship of authors and editors may be at the origin of experiences of power and suffering not unlike that described in the second opening quote about torture. In the classical view, editorial processes that lead to acceptance or rejection of scholarly work have long been hailed as an 4 WOLFF-MICHAEL ROTH important aspect in the construction of “reliable” knowledge and truth (see Larochelle & Désautels, this volume). However, recent work in the sociology of scientific knowledge showed that any practice is situated in, and legitimated by, a substantial range of other practices. If we want to understand peer reviewing and editorial decision-making, the relations to other associated practices in the construction of knowledge need to be investigated. In this contribution, I will use a double-pronged analytic framework to conduct such an initial investigation. My interpretive framework is rooted in hermeneutic phenomenology. This framework acknowledges and celebrates the importance of (scientific) explanation and (personal) understanding in interpretation (Ricœur, 1991). A scientific explanation of the networks that are stabilised by peer review and from which the stability of editorial power arises thereby constitutes the hermeneutic part of the approach. Personal understanding—which arises from my participation as author, peer reviewer, coach for new authors, and editor in the science education community—constitutes the phenomenological part of the methodological frame. For the scientific explanation, I draw on actor-network theory (Latour, 1987), which allows me to bring into focus a range of human (e.g., authors, reviewers, editors) and non-human actors (e.g., a variety of texts such as manuscripts, reviews, letters, citations). This approach embodies, in a deep way, Foucault’s (1979) analysis of the knowledge/power dimension. In actor-network analysis, editorial decisions emerge not as matters of truth about the quality of research reports submitted for consideration to be published, but as constructions that emerge from the interaction of a range of human and non-human actors by means of intermediaries. VOICE OVER: Intermediaries are the entities that circulate (go around) in a network. In the academic “publish-or-perish” business, manuscripts, cover letters, reviews, revised manuscripts, copy-edited manuscripts, and galley proofs are some of the intermediaries that move between the different social actors involved. Intermediaries may return (come around) in their original (marked up manuscript, proof) or translated form (review, editor’s decision letter). Literally, intermediaries stand or move between two or more social actors like a letter sent by an editor to an author. Intermediaries are therefore “go betweens,” they establish and contribute to the performance of rela-