The Quantified Scholar

Since 1986, the British government, faced with dwindling budgets and growing calls for public accountability, has sought to assess the value of scholarly work in the nation’s universities. Administrators have periodically evaluated the research of most full-time academics employed in British universities, seeking to distribute increasingly scarce funding to those who use it best. How do such attempts to quantify the worth of knowledge change the nature of scholarship? Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra examines the effects of quantitative research evaluations on British social scientists, arguing that the mission to measure academic excellence resulted in less diversity and more disciplinary conformity. Combining interviews and original computational analyses, The Quantified Scholar provides a compelling account of how scores, metrics, and standardized research evaluations altered the incentives of scientists and administrators by rewarding forms of scholarship that were closer to established disciplinary canons. In doing so, research evaluations amplified publication hierarchies and long-standing forms of academic prestige to the detriment of diversity. Slowly but surely, they reshaped academic departments, the interests of scholars, the organization of disciplines, and the employment conditions of researchers. Critiquing the effects of quantification on the workplace, this book also presents alternatives to existing forms of evaluation, calling for new forms of vocational solidarity that can challenge entrenched inequality in academia.

After a remarkable career in higher education, Sidonie Smith offers Manifesto for the Humanities as a reflective contribution to the current academic conversation over the place of the Humanities in the 21st century. Her focus is on doctoral education and opportunities she sees for its reform. Grounding this manifesto in background factors contributing to current “crises” in the humanities, Smith advocates for a 21st century doctoral education responsive to the changing ecology of humanistic scholarship and teaching. She elaborates a more expansive conceptualization of coursework and dissertation, a more robust, engaged public humanities, and a more diverse, collaborative, and networked sociality.

Qualitative Inquiry in Transition—Pasts, Presents, & Futures: A Critical Reader gathers more than 30 internationally renowned scholars in qualitative inquiry to present provocative interventions into the politics of research, philosophy of inquiry, justice matters, and writing practices. Drawn from a decade of cutting-edge plenary volumes emanating from the annual International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, these contributors and their chapters represent the leading edge of scholarship that has pushed the field forward over the last decade. Topics discussed include the research marketplace, data entanglements, the neoliberal university, Indigenous methodologies, slow research, performative ethics, intersectionality, civically engaged research, post-qualitative inquiry and the new materialisms, collaborative research, poetic inquiry, academic writing, and the future of the field. These and other topics comprise a moving—rather than static—center to the field, one that moves across contexts and ontologies, moves between agreement and disagreement, forges new collaborations, and informs new inter- and trans-disciplinary approaches to research. Qualitative Inquiry in Transition—Pasts, Presents, & Futures: A Critical Reader will be required reading for those seeking to understand where the field of qualitative inquiry has been and will look to go in the years to come.

The information revolution has ushered in a data-driven reorganization of the workplace. Big data and AI are used to surveil workers and shift risk. Workplace wellness programs appraise our health. Personality job tests calibrate our mental state. The monitoring of social media and surveillance of the workplace measure our social behavior. With rich historical sources and contemporary examples, The Quantified Worker explores how the workforce science of today goes far beyond increasing efficiency and threatens to erase individual personhood. With exhaustive detail, Ifeoma Ajunwa shows how different forms of worker quantification are enabled, facilitated, and driven by technological advances. Timely and eye-opening, The Quantified Worker advocates for changes in the law that will mitigate the ill effects of the modern workplace.

A sweeping critique of how digital capitalism is reformatting our world. We now live in an “ordinal society.” Nearly every aspect of our lives is measured, ranked, and processed into discrete, standardized units of digital information. Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy argue that technologies of information management, fueled by the abundance of personal data and the infrastructure of the internet, transform how we relate to ourselves and to each other through the market, the public sphere, and the state. The personal data we give in exchange for convenient tools like Gmail and Instagram provides the raw material for predictions about everything from our purchasing power to our character. The Ordinal Society shows how these algorithmic predictions influence people’s life chances and generate new forms of capital and social expectation: nobody wants to ride with an unrated cab driver anymore or rent to a tenant without a risk score. As members of this society embrace ranking and measurement in their daily lives, new forms of social competition and moral judgment arise. Familiar structures of social advantage are recycled into measures of merit that produce insidious kinds of social inequality. While we obsess over order and difference—and the logic of ordinality digs deeper into our behaviors, bodies, and minds—what will hold us together? Fourcade and Healy warn that, even though algorithms and systems of rationalized calculation have inspired backlash, they are also appealing in ways that make them hard to relinquish.

"With artificial intelligence developing so rapidly that even some of the biggest names behind the advances are calling for pauses and increased regulation, discussions of the future of work in the age of AI have reached a new level of urgency. While certain less specialized jobs have long faced the threat of being replaced by more efficient and profitable machines (e.g., self-checkout lanes at grocery stores), many specialized jobs and jobs requiring high levels of human interaction have remained safe. Now, however, with enrollment in "virtual preschools" skyrocketing and thousands of mental health apps on the market, this threat has expanded to include even the educational, medical, and legal professions. But are efficiency and profitability the most important concerns in this transition, or is there something more essential at stake, something we risk overlooking and potentially losing? In The Last Human Job, Allison Pugh develops the concept of "connective labor" to capture a particular kind of work that plays a significant role in a wide range of professions-and which, she argues, cannot be accomplished by computers. Drawing on over 110 interviews and 300 hours of observation across a wide range of occupations, Pugh reveals connective labor as a particular kind of mutual recognition of each other's humanity, which is essential in all kinds of work relationships, whether teacher-student, coach-player, or doctor-patient. Connective labor depends upon the spontaneity of human contact and requires the physical expression of empathy toward another person; it can be learned through mentoring and encouragement, but it cannot be programmed without disturbing its fundamental human value. Without being opposed to technology, efficiency, or profit, Pugh engages with and pushes back against the arguments of technophiles and entrepreneurs, whose "utopian" visions, she argues, have lost sight of the fundamental, irreplaceable importance an achieved and shared emotional understanding has for the outcomes toward which we work and strive. By defining this form of work and carefully illustrating the significance it has both in the lives of individuals and for the "social intimacy" that binds our communities together, The Last Human Job is an impassioned plea for us to recognize, value, and protect a bastion of humanity in an increasingly automated and dehumanized world"--

This edited book addresses the complex topic of writing for scholarly publication by early-career scholars. Drawing on self-study and auto-ethnographic perspectives, a group of international early-career researchers share their personal histories, narratives and first-hand accounts of their scholarly publication practices. The book helps paint a richer and more nuanced picture of the experiences, success stories, failures, and challenges that frame and shape academic trajectories of both Anglophone and English as an additional language (EAL) scholars in writing for publication. This book will be of particular interest to scholars of Applied Linguistics, English for academic purposes (EAP), and second language writing, but it will also be of use to other early-career scholars embarking on their first attempts at writing for publication.

Why is finance so important? How do stock markets work and what do they really do? Most importantly, what might finance be and what could we expect from it? Exploring contemporary finance via the development of stock exchanges, markets and the links with states, Roscoe mingles historical and technical detail with humorous anecdotes and lively portraits of market participants. Deftly combining research and autobiographical vignettes, he offers a cautionary tale about the drive of financial markets towards expropriation, capture and exclusion. Positioning financial markets as central devices in the organization of the global economy, he includes contemporary concerns over inequality, climate emergency and (de)colonialism and concludes by wondering, in the market’s own angst-filled voice, what the future for finance might be, and how we might get there.