Abstract
Twenty years of Organization has seen huge changes in academic publishing. This Journal was born towards the beginning of a long boom in the number and importance of academic journals. The journal format is now the default mode for the dissemination of top end scholarship across the social sciences, with books (authored or edited) being increasingly relegated to student texts or limited run hardbacks. Anyone can write a book, so the logic goes, but getting published in a top journal involves surviving a gladiatorial intellectual combat in which only the best survive. The bloody pile of rejections becomes testament to the strength of those who make it through, and the competition builds CVs, salaries and egos. Journal rankings have proliferated too, with complex methods and fine distinctions to separate the best, the middling and the rest. Where you publish seems to have become vastly more important than what you publish, and decisions about academic appointments, promotions and reward are often now made on the basis of a small number of articles published in certain ‘top’ journals. In part, this has been driven by the commercial imperatives of an increasingly small number of very large publishing firms, who have seen in journals the potential for substantial and repeated profits. Externalizing costs to university library budgets and university employees (as editors, authors and reviewers) has been a profitable business model. It has also meant that the value and importance of journals and rankings has been promoted by publishers and rating agents, because there has been money in both selling the journals, and selling the rankings of the journals. So universities pay three times—once for the labour of academics, once for the product and once to be told what the product is worth.
Yet this issue of Organization is coming out at a time when the very idea of the academic journal might be on the way out. The root of the idea of a ‘journal’ comes from the French, and the idea of writing about the events of a day, as in ‘journalism’. Ironically perhaps, the academic journal is far from contemporary, with review, revise and resubmit, and editorial procedures that pretty much ensure that it takes an average of two years for something to move from submission to acceptance. Commenting on the problems of the day is not what we do, instead largely tutting about events years after everyone else. As this issue suggests, we are better at analysing anniversaries than being present at events. The very idea of a yearly volume and issue number makes little sense in a world in which webpages re-present the distant contemporary within minutes, and the pay walls established to protect publisher’s property sit uneasily with ideas of open access and the digital commons. So what might Organization@40 look like?
Historically, the function of an academic journal has been about the institutionalization of a certain sort of trust. This used to refer to the accuracy of the experiments or facts which the journal relayed, and which hence distinguished this form of output from the short term interests of pamphleteers, quacks and newspaper hacks. This institutionalization of a particular social relation is still important today, perhaps even more so in a kaleidoscopic age of digital media. The difference between publishing a blog and a journal is not necessarily anything to do with a definable version of quality, but with the idea that what you read in a journal has been implicitly warranted by the reviews and editors. In an oddly corporeal way, they lend their collective names to the project, adding weight to what otherwise might just be blown away like chip paper. Their reputation in some vague sense acts as an advert for the contents, a promise that they have vetted what you will find within. If you trust them, you can trust that this article will be the genuine article, because the big girls and boys say so.
It seems to us that the age of @ doesn’t change this fundamental social relation, and that the apparatus of editing and review is still one that will distinguish the ‘academic’ mode of essay writing from any other. It also suggests that some sort of common platform will be required to host these essays, and hence that the visibility and credibility of the gatekeeping function will be crucial in order to ensure that only material which has been subjected to this specific set of social processes can be found within. Nothing about the internet changes this. It substitutes a babble of pixels for a babble of paper, but the problem of trust isn’t simply solved by a search engine. But Organization@40 will not be the same, even if the wetware stays relatively constant. The print version is almost obsolete already, with most people never holding a bound issue of the journal, and reading it from beginning to end, musing on the editorial board on the inside front cover, and the instructions for authors on the inside back cover. If the print version disappeared, few people would notice, but this would call into question issues of timing and length. With papers being published once they have been accepted, on online first, all papers having Digital Object Identifier numbers, and being discoverable by any search engine, there is no need to have volumes or issues, and no need to have word lengths either. The platform is what matters, and that should be able to host whatever is put on it, and whenever it is ready. The only reason for clumping papers as issues might be to market them more successfully, perhaps to encourage an audience to notice the latest stuff, or have some sort of special section of papers on a similar theme.
So Organization will be the same in 20 years time in terms of its social relations, and probably its speed of response to contemporary issues, but it will probably look different. It will no longer need to pretend that it is a paper based episodic form which is replicated virtually, but could just be a website which hosts a particular form of academic communication. This could be a huge repository, encompassing different languages, and modes of communication such as online debates, films and links to social media. Just as long as the editorial and review processes are still credible, and this will necessarily slow the speed of response, anything that can be put on a screen could be put ‘in’ the journal.
The biggest question still lurks though, because at the moment Organization, like hundreds of other social science journals, is owned, printed, distributed and marketed by a company which is not owned or controlled by academics or their institutions. At the moment, SAGE perform a series of functions which the editors of the journal would find it difficult to carry out on their own, but if the journal is only a website, then there is a real question about the role that the academic publisher plays. This is a question for all of the players in the value chain for the publishing industries—publishers, printers, agents, representatives, bookshops—because in principal the author can cut out all the middle people. For academic journals, if the work is done by academics, and paid for by their universities, why shouldn’t they publish the websites themselves? At the time of writing, a series of proposals to change the accessibility of publically funded research are being very actively discussed in most parts of the global north. This will almost certainly mean changes to the business model that publishers rely upon, perhaps pushing towards an author or institution pays model, but it still assumes that academic institutions, or taxpayers, will pay publishers for ‘publishing’. The problem is that if the web and a laptop is all we need to make words public, then what are publishers for? What do they do that justifies their rent? An imaginary new journal called Organization 2.0, possibly with all the same people involved, might not need SAGE any more, because the only ground it needs to stand on is a domain name.
We have decided to respond to these issues by putting some of our own resources into making papers ‘open access’. This will involve us paying a discounted fee to SAGE in order that particular articles are available to anyone who wants to read them. We have decided that there will be three main criteria for selection. First, papers which are written by authors from the global south, or which raise issues directly concerning the global south. Second, papers which we believe would have an audience beyond the regular readers of Organization on the basis of their topics or authors. Third, papers by early career scholars. We are not sure how many papers this will involve, and our decisions partly depend on our resources, but we see this as a move towards opening up the debate about who can read the results of publically funded enquiry. At present, it is very difficult for those outside the pay wall to get access to what we write. For a journal which seeks to be international, interdisciplinary and which always assumes that knowledge has a politics, this restriction is clearly a problem and this is a small contribution to the solution.
The essays collected in this anniversary issue serve as musings on the past and future of this Journal. All the papers include authors who are, or have been, editors or associate editors of the journal. They ruminate on questions of gender, relevance, language, citations, anniversaries and many other things, collectively standing as a testament to the disorganized creativity and political engagement which we would like this journal to stand for. Even in a virtualized world, you have to stand somewhere.