Session Information
23 SES 13 B, Research(-ers) and Policy Making
Paper Session
Contribution
In recent years, researchers throughout the world have come under increased pressure to publish in English, direct their scholarly work to internationally acclaimed journals indexed in the dominating databases (i.e. Scopus and Web of Science), and render their work citable among peers in other countries. Strong political waves of managerial reforms are gradually making academic career trajectories and promotions more dependent upon what Larsson (2009; 2010) calls “an emerging economy of publication and citations”. This development, as well as the standardized measurements of scientific output and evaluation on which it is reliant (number of articles, journal impact, average citations, etc.), is often criticized for giving highly inadequate or reductive images of the complex ways scholars in diverse fields relate to the question of quality (Karpik, 2011).
The establishment of “what counts” as quality among scientific peers is arguably a rather opaque issue, where the valuation practices of different research fields are divergent from one another (cf. Lamont, 2010; Lamont & Huutoniemi, 2011; Hicks, 2004; Lariviére et al, 2006). It has also been pointed out that the kind of ranking and benchmarking procedures which are often established to evaluate research, tend to trigger re-activation strategies among researchers as well as institutions as they try to maximize their own remuneration and climb collegial “pecking orders” (Espeland & Sauder, 2007; Carruthers & Espeland, 1991). Although contemporary forms of political steering have placed much weight on bibliographic data and scientometric analyses, these tools are still rather under-utilized for making more detailed accounts of the modus operandi of distinct research fields and for mapping out their scientific content and dominating players.
In this paper, we will map out the position of the dominating research traditions within one of the subfield of education, namely adult learning, by the use of a bibliometric and bibliographic analysis. Our empirical material consists of a relational database of cited work in articles published between the years of 2006 and 2014 in five peer-reviewed journals pertaining to adult learning listed in Scopus: Adult Education Quarterly, International Journal of Lifelong Education, Studies in Continuing Education, Journal of Education and Work and Journal of Workplace Learning. Our sample thus includes all references in the reference list of articles and reviews published in these five journals over a period of eight years, in total 151 261 citation links between more than 33 000 different authors.
We draw inspiration from a research tradition within the sociology of science where efforts have been made in order to map out the full structure of any given research field relationally (Bourdieu, 1988, Broady, 1991; Heilbron 2015). Building on Bourdieu’s work we conceive a research field as a relationally structured space with its own rules of entry and within which agents compete about scientific recognition (Bourdieu, 1988; Sapiro, 2010). Citations can thus, we argue, be seen as an important sign of collegial recognition. In accordance with Bourdieu’s field theory, we see scientific practices as historically and relationally constructed (Bourdieu, 1988, 1996, 2004). A fundamental aspect of Bourdieu’s field theory is symbolic recognition. Symbolic capital can in fact be seen as the most generic concept in Bourdieu’s toolbox, one that permeates to the three forms of capital his work is normally associated with, i.e. cultural, social, and economic capital (Broady, 1991). Yet within a field that has established a certain degree of autonomy – such as a cultural field of professional jazz musicians or a scientific field of academics – agents are more preoccupied with field-specific forms of recognition, something that is hardly reducible to material interest (Ref deleted for anonymity).
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
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