Final Report Summary - DISCONEX (The Discursive Construction of Academic Excellence.Classifying SSH Researchers Through Text-Processing Practices)
The DISCONEX project (“The Discursive Construction of Academic Excellence”, ERC Starting Grant, 2013-2018, led by Johannes Angermuller, http://www.johannes-angermuller.net) investigated academic discourse understood as practices and processes of attributing value to academics in their communities. The project compared practices and knowledges, careers and positions, types and profiles of senior and junior academics in France, Germany, the UK and the US. in linguistics, sociology and semiotics.
DISCONEX perceived “excellence” as resulting from academics’ discursive practices which shape, and are shaped by, power structures in academia. In particular, DISCONEX focused on practices of categorising and positioning academics in their communities. The key objective was to account for the perceived "excellence" of academics through the bundles of academic and non-academic categories that give visibility and recognition to academics among their peers (such as specialist of x, member of y, status z...). Looking into academic careers as processes of categorising and positioning academics over a long time in large communities, DISCONEX revealed patters of academic valuation according to country and discipline.
The social world of academia presents methodological challenges to which DISCONEX responded with a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. Our qualitative case studies were based on discourse analyses of text and talk in the social context. We carried out more than 200 semi-structured interviews with senior and junior academics from the four countries. DISCONEX also had recourse to standardising and quantitative methodologies (such as coding of documents, corpus analysis, sequential analysis) in order to account for social categorisations of a large population of academics, including all full professors in linguistics and sociology in France, Germany and in the United Kingdom (as of spring 2015). To collect online biographical profiles from more than 3000 academics, we developed a database to collect and analyse academic and non-academic categories from the researchers’ publicly available web pages, especially with regards to their career points, educational trajectories and research orientations. By systematically investigating the academics’ social categories that contribute to defining their “excellence”, DISCONEX revealed the mechanisms of making academics distinctive, unique and singular.
While the constraints on academic careers of professors are surprisingly similar in linguistics and sociology, significant differences could be observed between national academic systems with respect to status categories, especially for junior academics. As academics move through the social academic space, they switch between periods of slow and fast biographical time while picking up academic and non-academic categories in various social arenas. While we found no universal rules of how to become a fully recognized academic, academic careers are subject to various filtering mechanisms. Academics typically build up a distinctive reputation among members of a community and academic systems usually define, e.g. qualification thresholds at certain career stages (e.g. certain diplomas such as the PhD). DISCONEX has found increasing salary disparities in the US, UK and Germany as well as strong concentrations of citations in all disciplinary fields. Typically, less than 10% of professors are cited more than all professors. Academics as well as policy makers are therefore invited to critically reflect on unintended effects of academic practices, such as devaluing research creativity through institutional evaluation or extreme inequalities between cited and uncited academics.
With its emphasis on the intricate entanglements of knowledge and power in academia, DISCONEX has contributed to the emerging field of Social Sciences and Humanities Studies (SSHS) as well as to the transdisciplinary field of Discourse Studies. The team crucially contributed to establishing DiscourseNet, an international and interdisciplinary network for researchers in Discourse Studies (http://www.discourseanalysis.net).
The working languages having been in English, French and German, the team consisted of more than 20 sociologists, linguists, engineers, technicians and assistants at the University of Warwick (Coventry, UK), École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris, France) and the University of North Western Switzerland (Bale, Switzerland). In the future, we will want to extend our critical and reflexive research on research as a discursive practice to fields outside the social sciences and humanities as well as to non-Western countries.
DISCONEX perceived “excellence” as resulting from academics’ discursive practices which shape, and are shaped by, power structures in academia. In particular, DISCONEX focused on practices of categorising and positioning academics in their communities. The key objective was to account for the perceived "excellence" of academics through the bundles of academic and non-academic categories that give visibility and recognition to academics among their peers (such as specialist of x, member of y, status z...). Looking into academic careers as processes of categorising and positioning academics over a long time in large communities, DISCONEX revealed patters of academic valuation according to country and discipline.
The social world of academia presents methodological challenges to which DISCONEX responded with a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. Our qualitative case studies were based on discourse analyses of text and talk in the social context. We carried out more than 200 semi-structured interviews with senior and junior academics from the four countries. DISCONEX also had recourse to standardising and quantitative methodologies (such as coding of documents, corpus analysis, sequential analysis) in order to account for social categorisations of a large population of academics, including all full professors in linguistics and sociology in France, Germany and in the United Kingdom (as of spring 2015). To collect online biographical profiles from more than 3000 academics, we developed a database to collect and analyse academic and non-academic categories from the researchers’ publicly available web pages, especially with regards to their career points, educational trajectories and research orientations. By systematically investigating the academics’ social categories that contribute to defining their “excellence”, DISCONEX revealed the mechanisms of making academics distinctive, unique and singular.
While the constraints on academic careers of professors are surprisingly similar in linguistics and sociology, significant differences could be observed between national academic systems with respect to status categories, especially for junior academics. As academics move through the social academic space, they switch between periods of slow and fast biographical time while picking up academic and non-academic categories in various social arenas. While we found no universal rules of how to become a fully recognized academic, academic careers are subject to various filtering mechanisms. Academics typically build up a distinctive reputation among members of a community and academic systems usually define, e.g. qualification thresholds at certain career stages (e.g. certain diplomas such as the PhD). DISCONEX has found increasing salary disparities in the US, UK and Germany as well as strong concentrations of citations in all disciplinary fields. Typically, less than 10% of professors are cited more than all professors. Academics as well as policy makers are therefore invited to critically reflect on unintended effects of academic practices, such as devaluing research creativity through institutional evaluation or extreme inequalities between cited and uncited academics.
With its emphasis on the intricate entanglements of knowledge and power in academia, DISCONEX has contributed to the emerging field of Social Sciences and Humanities Studies (SSHS) as well as to the transdisciplinary field of Discourse Studies. The team crucially contributed to establishing DiscourseNet, an international and interdisciplinary network for researchers in Discourse Studies (http://www.discourseanalysis.net).
The working languages having been in English, French and German, the team consisted of more than 20 sociologists, linguists, engineers, technicians and assistants at the University of Warwick (Coventry, UK), École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris, France) and the University of North Western Switzerland (Bale, Switzerland). In the future, we will want to extend our critical and reflexive research on research as a discursive practice to fields outside the social sciences and humanities as well as to non-Western countries.