Beyond Competitiveness? Academic Gift Culture and Its Discontents

Abstract

In this article, we explore various forms that giving and receiving may take in academia as well as ambiguous motivations, intentions, and outcomes of gifting. Based on responses elicited from fellow academics in written form and analyzed empirically through thematic coding, the article examines academic gifts along two axes: vertical (research grants) and horizontal (citation and epistemic sharing). Our results attest to the existence of what may be called ‘academic gift culture’ that presents an alternative to the ‘competitive struggle’ (Bourdieu) in the contemporary university where competitiveness, in view of scarce research funding and teaching positions, is especially pressing. However, we also show that this culture is not entirely opposed to or incommensurable with competition. Neither does it only convey noble feelings of devotion to science and academic collegiality but also enhances risks of dishonesty, leads to tension among peers, encourages partiality, and makes research dependent on uneven and whimsical donations.

Introduction

Academics tend to perceive generosity and devotion as essential aspects of what they do, whether it is by giving a gift of time to students and colleagues or laying an offering at the ‘altar of science.’ Anyone familiar with academia knows that writing an article on a weekend or having a coffee with a graduate student in the middle of summer holidays is part of the profession. However, gratuitous academic labor may also be viewed as a strategy for accumulating ‘symbolic capital’ – a practice aimed at suspended dividends, as argued by Pierre Bourdieu. In his sociology of science, Bourdieu (1975: 19) famously suggests that ‘[t]he “pure” universe of even the “purest” of science is a social field like any other.’ Bourdieu views the scientific field as the locus of ‘competitive struggle.’ Competing for ‘the monopoly of scientific authority’ (1975: 19), researchers are prone to see each other as rivals, fighting for scarce scientific resources, such as recognition, teaching positions, funding, and the like. Bourdieu’s insights about competitive struggle are as relevant as ever in the climate of what Peter Fleming calls the ‘businessification’ of the neoliberal university, ‘busy aping the corporate world’ (Fleming, 2021: 36, 46). Recently, social scientists have paid attention to the phenomenon of competitiveness in academia seen through the lens of market economy and/or managerial engineering including academic rankings and audit regimes (e.g. Back, 2016; De Angelis and Harvie, 2009; Gil, 2009; Peters and Jandrić, 2018; Sørensen and Traweek, 2022; Welsh, 2021). The question of gift culture ¹ as an alternative to the pressing competitiveness in academia remains on the periphery of the ongoing research. Bourdieu’s own exclusive focus on the accumulation of symbolic capital and struggle for monopoly in academia is remarkable, given his sustained engagement with the gift elsewhere (see e.g. Bourdieu, 1977, 1990, 1997).

This article engages with the dynamics of academic gift practices by exploring various forms that giving and receiving may take in academia as well as examining ambiguous motivations, intentions, and outcomes of gifting. Thereby, we ultimately aim to contribute to the sociology of academia (e.g. Bloor, 2004; Bourdieu, 1988; Hagstom, 1965; Merton, 1979; Whitney, 2000; Winn, 2015), providing new insights into how gifts intersect with competition in academic work. We show that while presenting an alternative to the culture of competition, gifts are not entirely opposed to or incommensurable with it. Neither do the gifts given and received by scholars only convey noble feelings of devotion to science and academic collegiality but also enhance risks of dishonesty, lead to tension among peers, encourage partiality, and make research dependent on unequal and capricious donations.

We start by discussing gift theory and the existing scholarship on academic gift culture. Then we introduce our materials and methods. After that, we present our analysis, which is structured along two axes: vertical (research grants) and horizontal (citation and epistemic sharing) academic gifts. We conclude by summing up the contributions of the article and discussing the complex relationship between giving, ownership, and symbolic capital in the outlined contexts of knowledge and data sharing, citation, and external funding, while reconsidering Bourdieu’s insights.

Research on Gifts in Academia and Beyond

Ever since the ground-breaking and now classic study by Marcel Mauss that introduced the gift as the object of scientific and intellectual inquiry (Mauss, 2008 [1925]), there has been an ongoing dispute about the meaning of the gift. There is no single definition of the gift; rather, the concepts of the gift and gifting are discipline-bound. For example, while philosophical studies of the gift (e.g. Derrida, 1994; Marion, 2002) tend to disregard the question of the social bond and how intersubjective relationships are spun and developed, relationships are crucial and formative in sociological research regarding various forms of exchange (e.g. Blau, 1964; Bourdieu, 1977, 1990; Caplow, 1984; Cheal, 1988; Gouldner, 1960).

Empirical-based research within the tenets of classical anthropology (e.g. Godelier, 1999; Gregory, 1982; Mauss, 2008 [1925]; Sahlins, 1974; Weiner, 1992) has predominantly dealt with indigenous societies and economies. It was only in the 1980s that anthropologists and sociologists started to pay explicit attention to the modern gift, thus turning the analytical gaze from colonized Others to ourselves and our own gift relationships (e.g. Appadurai, 1986; Bourdieu, 1990, 1997; Caplow, 1982a, 1982b, 1984; Cheal, 1988; Godbout and Caillé, 1998; Gregory, 1982; Parry, 1986).Yet, the basic structures and patterns (e.g. gift exchange/gift economy; potlatch, kula-ring, etc.) employed by the research on modern gifts still largely stem from the concepts of classical anthropology. An important ongoing dispute within gift theory is whether indigenous gift exchanges in tribal societies can serve as the model to understand gift practices in modern capitalist society, or must one consider a much more complex network of obligations, expectations, liabilities, rights, and structures when speaking of modern gift-related practices (Hénaff, 2020: 146).

To counter the reductionist and universalist tendencies of classical anthropology, recent contributions to gift theory have considered gift relations as principally heterogeneous (Hénaff, 2020; Pyyhtinen, 2014; Pyyhtinen and Lehtonen, 2023). Such an inclusive approach allows interdisciplinary scholars to overcome dogmatic discipline-bound views and study a variety of social, cultural, and legal phenomena under the term ‘gift,’ from literary contributions (Colesworthy, 2018; Urakova, 2022a) to intercorporeal exchanges (Shildrick, 2022, 2023). Historians, for example, have insisted on defining the gift as ‘simply whatever contemporaries call a gift’ (Groebner, 2002: 1) and have demystified the universalism of classical anthropology by contextualizing the late 19th and early 20th-century fascination with ‘primitive’ societies (e.g. Liebersohn, 2011; Wagner-Hasel, 2003). Likewise, gender scholars (Joy, 2013) and postcolonial critics (Bracken, 1997) have criticized classical anthropology for being politically and ideologically biased.

Sharing the idea that, unlike their indigenous counterparts, academic gifts are entangled with the question of property, whether we speak of copyright, license, or monetary donations, in what follows we consider academic gifts as a form and variation of modern gifts. ² The pioneering work in this field was Warren Hagstrom’s The Scientific Community (1965), which addresses the gift as an organizing principle in science. Examining science as a ‘system wherein gifts of information are exchanged for recognition from scientific colleagues’ (Hagstrom, 1965: 52; see also Gregory, 1982), Hagstrom argues that one becomes an acknowledged member of the scientific community only as a donor, unable to gain before and without having given first. It is quite telling in this regard, he reminds us, that articles published in academic journals are often called ‘contributions’ (Hagstrom, 1965), which frames them as gifts. The merits of this work notwithstanding, many of its outcomes are significantly outdated by now and are in need of revision in light of recent changes. In addition, Hagstrom’s study offers a somewhat reductionist approach to the gift, defining it solely in terms of exchange.

In a more recent study on the subject, Wallis et al. (2013) refer to the gift culture of scholarship based on the principle of data sharing insofar as data are ‘not treated as commodities to be traded on an open market’ but as gifts to be exchanged for recognition ‘through trusted relationships’ (Wallis et al., 2013: 15, 2). ³ In alignment with this finding, Kasavin (2019: 469) has identified the ‘gift’ in academia as an alternative ‘cultural pattern for describing scientific communication as opposed to trade.’ Despite their merits, these two articles reproduce the antiquated ‘gift’ vs ‘commodity’ binary which gift scholars have debunked already some decades ago (e.g. Gell, 1992; Hart, 1986; Kopytoff, 1986). They also reduce academic gifts to data sharing which as we will demonstrate later in this article is an important but not the only form of gifting.

As we hold that giving and receiving in academia may in fact take many forms and variables, we find especially useful the idea of the ambivalence of the gift that is rooted in the linguistic ambiguity of the Germanic word ‘gift,’ also meaning ‘poison’ (Benveniste, 1997 [1948–1949]; Mauss, 2008 [1925]). In contrast to Wallis et al. (2013) and Kasavin (2019), our data show that academics do not necessarily view academic gift culture as entirely positive. The gifts of money and freedom often come bound with a debt, chaining the scholar to the ‘hamster wheel’ of academia, as the pithy metaphor of one of our respondents expressed it. And, when it comes to the gifts and favors among academics, they for their part give way to a range of risks, from trivial theft to uncomfortable exposure and misrecognition to cronyism and partiality. As an analytical frame for various kinds of academic gifts, in our empirical analysis we will employ the concepts of vertical and horizontal gifts. While anthropologists use the two concepts to describe the gifts of gods as part of the religious beliefs of indigenous people on the one hand, and the gifts exchanged between equal parties on the other (Godelier, 1999: 29–31, 179–97), this scheme, however, effectively works not only in pre-capitalist contexts but also in reference to modern forms of gift-giving, for example charitable donations versus exchanges of family tokens (see Urakova, 2022a: 217–220 ). As we will show later, the vertical (research funding) and horizontal (citing and epistemic sharing) axes also function as organizing principles of the academic gift culture. ⁴

Data and Methods

As for our empirical materials, we use responses we elicited from fellow academics in written form between the years 2022 and 2024 (for more on elicited writing in qualitative research, see e.g. Johnstone, 2000). We asked the respondents to reflect, in their own words, on their experiences, feelings, and thoughts about three topics: first, receiving an academic grant; second, citation practices; and third, sharing ideas. We instructed the respondents to share their personal views and experiences as academics, not scholarly expertise or findings backed up by research. The initial decisions for the collection of data were simply based on the general subject: we were interested in exploring the phenomenon of academic gifts and refining the notion, not in analyzing a certain predefined population according to a set of variables. In that sense, the sampling design of the study could be called ‘theoretical sampling’ (Glaser and Strauss, 2006). First, we sent out the invitation to two large mailing lists, with the hope of potentially reaching a significant number of scholars all around the world. As we inferred that mailing lists might not be useful in finding informants interested and willing to share their experiences with us, we decided to rely on our own networks. From the large number of colleagues in our networks, we purposefully selected to send out the invitation to those experienced enough to be able to articulate their experiences, feelings, and thoughts about the three aforementioned topics. Thus, we outright excluded early-career scholars, such as doctoral students.

Ultimately, we received responses from 20 people in total. While we were not interested in the background variables of the informants as such, we nevertheless regarded it as important to have enough variety among the informants, preventing the selection from becoming too homogeneous and overly narrow. Our sample covers diverse disciplines, career stages, countries and nationalities, as well as genders. They were from 13 countries (Belgium, Canada, Croatia, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Spain, Sweden, UK, and USA) albeit some having different national backgrounds (e.g. Russian, Iranian, British etc.), ⁵ belonged to different career-stages (from post-docs to tenured and retired professors), and represented a variety of disciplinary backgrounds (literary studies, contemporary philosophy, ancient philosophy, pedagogy, economics, sociology, film studies, maritime history, Soviet history, political studies, marketing, informatics, and media studies). 11 of the respondents identified themselves as female and 9 as male. The responses we received varied in terms of length, from a few lines to more than a page response per topic.

We analyzed the responses through thematic coding. First, we read through the entire data corpus to get an overview of the material and a sense of the whole. After that we began to read and re-read the materials more systematically, trying to identify recurring themes. The identified key themes were highlighted and then subjected to closer analysis. We paid special attention to the themes of various forms of gifts and gift relationships; dangers of receiving/giving; how gifts create and strengthen communal ties; and to the question of intellectual property. We also focused on the language used by our respondents to describe their academic experience: for example vocabulary that indicates the logic of the gift (gratuitousness, generosity, unexpected recognition, asymmetrical exchange, the Matthew effect, etc.) even when the term ‘gift’ itself was not used.

We acknowledge that our study has inevitable gaps: for example, we do not discuss teaching, ⁶ or the idea of the free gift of knowledge that revolves around Open Access practices and requirements, nor do we cover widespread forms of self-help, for example reading and revising the drafts of fellow colleagues’ grant applications. Yet we firmly believe that the chosen examples are representative while the proposed structure can effectively work for discussing similar and related phenomena.

Vertical Gifts

Vertical gifts in academia may take many different forms, such as prizes, honorary doctorates, and elected memberships of academies of science as well as teaching. ⁷ In this section, however, we focus on academic grants as perhaps the most competitive form of recognition in academia. As a sphere, it allows us to search for the gift where it is both in open sight (someone gives you the gift of money, time, experience, or facilities) and yet, coming as a surprise, is least expected by a recipient. Grants are not based on a symmetrical exchange striving towards equivalence, but they express, perform, and maintain a relationship of explicit hierarchy from the start, considering the a priori subordinate relationship between a funding body and an applicant.

Grants

If we think of university employment as a type of exchange, it does not considerably differ from employment relationships in any other sphere: you get paid for the services that you provide – for example teaching hours and administrative work – and you pay taxes and enjoy social benefits. ‘Neoclassical economics treats labor as a hired input in much the same manner as capital’ (Gneezy and List, 2006: 1365). It is well known how nowadays academics are pressed hard in exchange for climbing the career ladder or even just keeping their jobs, resulting in the rise of the academic precariat (Burton and Bowman, 2022). We are expected to teach more, publish more, do more admin work, but first and foremost, to apply for external funding. As Emilie Pine writes in her book Notes to Self (Pine, 2019: 159), ‘in a cash-strapped, do-more-with-less university, success means bringing in money.’ Today, grants and fellowships form an essential part of academic professional life – and livelihood – while for many scholars, especially doctoral students and post-doctoral researchers, a grant or a fellowship is a full-fledged employment.

Albeit rooted in the long tradition of charity and patronage ⁸ that forms the axis of vertical gift-giving, grants are not charity. Firstly, one must work hard to get one. Besides grants being highly competitive (for example the success rate of the research grant which enabled us to produce this article was 4.7%), writing grant applications requires time, patience, and skills. Big universities even offer training to apply for large grants such as the Marie Curie Fellowship or European Research Council (ERC) In some cases, most notably ERC, the application process alone may take up to several months of full-time engagement. In this sense, a grant is a result of a hard work routine which in many cases does not pay off. Martina, a Spanish mid-career literary studies scholar, tells us that she considers her grants to be her personal achievements precisely because of ‘perseverance and time invested in the application process.’ Secondly, the grant is not given for nothing but comes with strings attached. The grantee often has contractual obligations, which makes the gift an impure one, in contrast to the notion of the ‘pure’ or altruistic gift, though this must be understood in a technical rather than moral sense, referring to the complex, hybrid nature of relations between the giver and the recipient.

So, what makes grants and fellowships different from ‘ordinary’ academic employment relations that often also incorporate elements of gift-giving (see e.g. Baron, 2013, Gneezy and List, 2006) and, respectively, being described with the help of gift exchange model (e.g. Akerlof, 1982)? One crucial distinction lies in the nature of contractual obligations. ‘Personally, I have never been thrilled by landing a job which always comes with certain onerous expectations, whereas a grant at least promises a bit more freedom,’ says Marion, a British philosopher in her early 70s. Whereas a work contract specifies the exact number of hours one might teach and other related obligations for the money paid, with grants it is never clear how exactly the scholar is supposed to fulfill their obligations. This is so not only because as with any creative process, research often eludes direct control (one may have an intellectual breakthrough after months of procrastination or become engaged with a project other than initially promised and planned) or because in many cases, the annual or final report is a formality. The looseness of contractual relations between a grantee and a fund has a rational explanation: the algorithm and conventions of the successful grant application make it nearly impossible to fulfill what is promised.

In a viral New Yorker cartoon, a woman, presumably at some writers’ reception, calls herself ‘a fiction writer in the grant-proposal genre.’ This cartoon is not only funny but also sharp; the conventions of the application genre indeed induce elements of a fictional narrative. Most funds, for example, expect that the applicant indicates how many articles they will produce during the time of the grant/fellowship and in which journals these articles will appear. Since prestigious journals are peer-reviewed, no one can guarantee a publication venue in advance. The same applies to the described research project: specific yet global, innovative yet grounded in previous research, broad yet focused, ambitious and high-risk yet feasible – such unspoken self-contradictory requirements for a successful application verge on utopian wishful thinking. Symptomatically, some of our respondents confess that the structure of the application is more important than its content. Elina, a Finnish post-doctoral researcher in marketing in her early 30s, says: ‘When receiving the first grants, I also remember thinking that ‘yay, now my application’s structure and style of writing is in line with the funders’ standards’ rather than thinking that the funder is really excited for my research idea as such.’

Writing about the modern myth, Swiss literary theorist and historian of ideas Jean Starobinski (Starobinski, 1993: 191) argues that starting with the 18th century, the

expectation of a new flourishing of myth [. . .] attributes to the future, to history yet to come, a function whose equivalent can be found only in religious or gnostic eschatologies. Even though that myth still seems to be lacking, human time and man-made history are deeply mystified by this hope: in awaiting the advent of a new mythology as if it were a veritable second coming.

Like the myth that Starobinski is describing, the project in the grant proposal is relegated to some yet-to-come future where the scholar can fully realize their potential. Contrary to the academic award given for past accomplishments, the grant – in the spirit of modernity obsessed with novelty and progress – is future-oriented; the scholar’s CV that plays a crucial factor in the highly competitive selection process becomes but a springboard to the future breakthrough or further accomplishments. In William Wordsworth’s words (The Prelude, 1970: 100, bk. 6, line 608), it is always ‘something evermore about to be.’

The mentioned utopianism disrupts the relation of the equilibrium exchange typical for a contract relationship. We do not exchange our services for an equivalent salary as we do when we teach – inasmuch as in the market economy ‘two heterogeneous things are treated as equivalent’ (Gregory, 1982: 46). On the contrary, researchers are given money for something that is impossible to return – the promise of the perfect research. At the same time, the actual research that they end up carrying out by means of the grant money – their contribution to the academic community and/or investment in their academic career – is never an equivalent return either. What a grantee eventually gives back to the funding body is a formal acknowledgement in the publication supposed to increase the donor’s social prestige, especially if the publication gains visibility, but this is a delayed benefit or a side-effect rather than a return gift of comparable equivalence. In a word, we are dealing with the ‘alternating disequilibrium’ (Andrew Strathern; qtd in Gregory, 1982: 53) that anthropologists attribute to gift exchange.

The impossibility to repay the gift – and the very refusal of the expectation of return gift – enhances the vertical, asymmetrical relations between the grant organization and the grantee. Not only is there no exchange of equivalents; in the future, the same organization might even consider giving the grantee more money in the form of another grant. As Merja, a Finnish professor in pedagogy in her 50s bitterly notes, grant distribution is ruled by the Matthew effect of accumulated advantage: ‘Those of you who have received funding, will have more, and if you have not received (especially if you are not ‘the young potential’), you should give up.’ This comment also highlights another manifestation of the aforementioned asymmetry: the applicant is placed in a vulnerable position, at the mercy of the generosity of the funding body, which has the power to help a project come true or kill it, and ultimately to make or break careers.

In the outlined context, it did not come as a surprise that most of our respondents describe their feelings upon receiving a grant as not just a personal accomplishment but also as big luck. ‘Although of course I needed to submit an application, it felt more like winning in a lottery, quite different from a permanent appointment, which seemed more like a response to all the previous scholarly achievements,’ says Werner, German Emeritus professor in his late eighties. This element of surprise – that one’s achievements, no matter how excellent, do not automatically make an applicant entitled to a grant (even though the achievements certainly matter; one has to prove to be an eligible, reliable, and noteworthy applicant) – aligns with a fundamental characteristic of gifts, which are granted without any rightful claim, being simply ‘bestowed upon us’ (Hyde, 2007: xiv). Also, the selection process is less personal than in job recruitment because, as Elina argues, the interview with a candidate is often unnecessary for the successful grant application. We would say that the element of impersonality that the grant encompasses is another factor that aligns grant-awarding practice with the whimsical work of the fortune wheel, especially in a strange combination with the too-personal emotion of recognition that some of our respondents experienced. Thea, a Greek post-doctoral researcher in maritime history speaks of ‘relief and deep satisfaction that my research potential was finally recognized,’ whereas Eeva, a Finnish linguist in her late 30s, confesses that ‘I read and reread the notification many times to make sure they made no mistake.’ While this latter confession may be symptomatic of the imposter syndrome that many academics share (e.g. Addison et al., 2022), it is also a sign that an awarded grant is perceived as an extraordinary event with low credibility – in a word, as a blessing or a gift ‘from above.’ The ambivalence of an academic grant – being partly a form of reward for scholarly achievements yet oriented towards future accomplishments on the one hand and expression of luck, a sign of sudden and unexpected distinction on the other – produces the surplus of meaning that sets the grant apart from other forms of professional encouragement.

Albeit the grant being a pleasant and welcome surprise, some of our respondents somewhat counterintuitively share negative feelings about it. Martina describes her experience of getting grants as burdensome: ‘The joy of getting a grant always came with a high degree of commitment, self-demand, and anxiety.’ Another respondent, Gabriel, a Belgian professor of sociology, admits that he feels shame when receiving funding, associating grants with ‘bureaucracies, third stream funding, rankings, and other modes of academic governmentality.’ Despite the feeling of freedom and fulfillment that a grant usually bestows on the recipient, a position of the scholar living on grants is dramatically insecure, precarious, and vulnerable, as Luka, a Croatian professor of informatics suggests:

This money is for one, two, three, or five years. And then? Back to the hamster wheel [. . .] I don’t like grants – and even getting them does not help me alleviate the feeling of unease about this inhumane process of needing to constantly prove myself.

One who depends on gifts and donations for living risks enslavement as the Innuit proverb ‘gifts make slaves like whips make dogs’ suggests. As with any asymmetrical donation, a grant evokes a specter of variegated feelings – from ecstasy and elation to shame, or dependence, or anticipation of need. Though aware of the high competition for funding and the crucial role of luck in the selection process, our respondents shared with us that rejection is something they take too personally, as a sign of being unworthy or misrecognized in their endeavors.

Yet even the grant-related verticality may be contested. Elina describes how at her workplace, they have a tradition of celebrating academic grants; she remembers ‘baking a cake for the afternoon coffee break after receiving a bigger grant (one year).’ Sharing food goes back to the archetype of communal gift exchange: the scholar bakes a cake and gives it away as a return gift – not to the (usually anonymous) grant administration and peer-reviewers but to departmental colleagues, invited to acknowledge the grant by taking a slice. Colleagues participate in the ritualized celebration in hopes that next year it will be their turn to bake and generously give away the cake. One could even observe here a mechanism of replacement at play: the cake may be seen as a symbol of the grant as academic manna from heaven bestowed on one distinguished member of the community and yet responsible for the circulation of communal intellectual goodness; as long as there is money circulating within academia, you can always hope to be the next one to receive it. Here, we can see a breach between vertical and horizontal exchanges, the latter building a like-minded community of scientists and scholars who are aware of their entangled professional and personal connections. Alternatively, one can say that a vertical gift of a grant gives impetus to the chains (Sowerby and Urakova, 2022: 15) of communal gifts among academics in the form of epistemic contributions to the academic community and possibly also to extra-academic audiences.

Horizontal Gifts

‘Knowledge development is a community process – it just cannot be done on our own. We need others, and others need us. This is [a] basic philosophy of knowledge,’ our respondent Luka notes. The collective nature of knowledge-making despite the competitiveness of the scientific field allows us to explore the horizontal model of gift exchange in academia, for example exchange between peers based on principles of reciprocity and solidarity or, to use a more specific term, academic collegiality. In this section, we will thereby move from grants as monetary and tangible gifts to gifts that are tangible but not monetary (citations in published works) or intangible and seemingly ephemeral (‘contributions’ of ideas and knowledge, especially when shared at academic events or in private conversation).

Citation

While ideas may circulate as gifts within the academic community, this does not mean that they would be fair game for everyone to appropriate at will. Rather than amounting to a commons (Hardin, 1968) or a res nullius, that is, appearing without a designated owner, ideas and texts are attributed to an author. The anonymity of concepts, for example, is not tolerated in academia, but they are subjected to the ‘author function’ (Foucault, 1998: 213). It is important to announce where they come from: who coined them, where (i.e. in which publication) and when. Likewise, an article or a monograph is not tolerated without citations that ultimately serve as markers or signs of scientificity. Citation is a way of respecting and reinforcing the inalienability of the property rights pertaining to ideas, a practice that is specific for academia, distinguishing it from, say, art, literature, and design where references tend to remain implicit instead of citing one’s sources in a formal referencing style.

Once published, ideas are both objects of appropriation and individual property marked by the name of the author. As such, they are the polar opposite of the so-called inalienable possessions as described by classical anthropologists (Godelier, 1999; Weiner, 1992) – sacred objects that belong to the community of the tribe and are thereby exempt from gift exchange. Academic ideas present a paradox of a kind as they become a possession of the academic community via contribution and circulation, while continuing to be inalienable from the contributor.

Thinking of citing as gifting may of course seem counterintuitive considering that the prime motivations for citing, as also voiced by our respondents, tend to be intellectual indebtedness, academic rigor, and epistemic responsibility. Sergey, a Swedish postdoctoral researcher in economics, describes how he sees citation as a way of giving recognition: ‘In my research, I try to accurately and appropriately reference the work of others to give credit to their contributions.’ Giving credit and bestowing a gift to someone is not the same thing. Indeed, deciding which works get cited does not depend on subjective citation practices and preferences alone. For example, not citing the ‘right’ sources may give the impression that the author is not familiar with relevant literature and therefore lacks the required credentials, expertise, and credibility (Mott and Cockayne, 2017: 965).

At the same time, there is no explicit rule or norm commanding the decision to cite exactly this or that particular work, especially in the situation when the publishing market is so overabundant that in most fields, acknowledging every available source is scarcely feasible. Citing the ‘must’-reference works (such as, for example, Marcel Mauss’s The Gift in the context of gift theory), one might be selective when it comes to less visible studies, prioritizing some and neglecting others. The choice may be limited by the scholar’s knowledge of the state of the art and research experience, but it can also be a conscious act of political or personal preference as the examples discussed later demonstrate. Can we think of our decision to give voice to this or that marginalized group as a tribute – a form of donation, not dissimilar to monetary donation we contribute to political or social organizations? And what happens when we cite not a remote or dead author but an academic friend or immediate colleague?

While citing does not necessarily imply paying a favor to the cited scholar – we may spurn the opponent or make our own argument shine by pointing at mistakes and limitations of our predecessor – it would be hard to deny that citation has become a valuable currency in the academic world. In fact, when the search algorithms increase visibility of the more-cited works and obscure the rest, citation becomes a value in itself regardless of the context and the content. Some of our respondents explicitly emphasize the ‘social capital’ potentially generated and accumulated by citing. Eeva openly admits that she has cited works ‘to make myself look well-connected.’ While insisting on the scholarly objectivity of his citations, Sergey nonetheless confesses that he occasionally tends to ‘reference papers or broader literatures that are experiencing an increase in attention across the discipline, as a strategic way to increase the visibility and impact of my own research,’ even if that work is not always thematically close to his. This illustrates how citation counting is part of the neoliberal university’s technologies of measuring impact, influence, and academic excellence (Mott and Cockayne, 2017), and that under certain circumstances, it can become a vehicle of personal gain.

The value of citation and its role in the distribution of symbolic capital makes its potential value as a gift proportionally increase. A few of our respondents acknowledged that citation is hardly neutral. John, a Canadian professor of sociology, tells how ‘[a]s a Canadian living under the hegemony of myopic US [scholarship]’, he has ‘always been aware of the politics of recognition embedded in citation practices.’ This opinion correlates with the recent discussions in feminist scholarship. Acting as a ‘successful reproductive technology, a way of reproducing the world around certain bodies’ (Ahmed, 2013), prevailing citation practices are seen as producing geographical, ethnic, and gender biases (e.g. Ahmed, 2013; Berlant, 2008; Foster et al., 2007; Joshi et al., 2015). ⁹ Feminist postcolonial scholars have argued that contemporary citation hegemony ‘contributes to the reproduction of the white heteromasculinity of thought and scholarship’ while at the same time resulting in the exclusion and marginalization of other groups (Mott and Cockayne, 2017: 954).

Whilst predominant citation norms and prerequisites are prone to unevenly privilege the voice of selected few at the expense of others, the politics of recognition can also be harnessed to strategies of resistance to the hegemonic practices, for example, by citing underrecognized or marginalized scholars. This is how Marion views citation. ‘I often cite friends and colleagues when I feel their work is appropriate but perhaps under-recognised – and that’s particularly the case with newly emerging scholars who often have something non-conventional to bring to an argument,’ she tells us. Not dissimilarly from this, Elina expresses that she prefers to avoid ‘citing only ‘big names’ and super highly ranked journal articles.’ For her, citing can thereby also act as a gesture of giving support to the less acknowledged scholars and articles. In Living a Feminist Life (2017), Sara Ahmed declares that it is her explicit citation policy not to cite any white men. For her, ‘[c]itation is a feminist memory. Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow’ (Ahmed, 2017: 15–16). Not dissimilar to this, Ann, a US sociology professor, tells about a colleague of hers who actively and openly resists the structural violence of academia related to gendered and racialized citation practices: ‘One of my sociology colleagues is an activist, and she reminds us to ‘cite Black women’ as a matter of course. In fact, she has a t-shirt with this slogan written across the front.’ Ann mentions that she also tries to do this in her own publications whenever it makes sense.

The word ‘debt’ used by Ahmed inevitably implies relations between the act of citing and the cited that go beyond the pragmatics of scholarly publication, with the cited names for example being transformed into the author’s symbolic capital. Such citation practice seems to resonate with the notion of ‘munus’ as it is explicated by Esposito (2010): munus is a gift that one contributes to creating and sustaining a community, in this case a community of Black women or otherwise, for example, left academics (Marion mentions privileging scholars from Global South over fellow female colleagues). The community created via citing can cross not only social, gender, and geographical boundaries but also the boundaries between life and death, establishing relations to deceased scholars from past generations. Didier, a French-Canadian mid-career sociologist, sees that ‘referencing deceased authors, like Fanon, is a kind of gift—it gives them a place among my predecessors.’ Yet another form of communal gift relations ensured by citation is personal gifts, when one cites a scholar whom they know as a personal favor or a sign of sympathy.

When we asked our respondents if they cite their personal contacts with an intention to establish or keep up friendship or professional connection, we received sharply divided answers. Some insist that they cite other scholars solely based on scholarly relevance and content and thus dissociate themselves from either strategic thinking or from personal ties. ‘No, no and no. My policy for referencing certain works always has to do with academic reasons and never with any kind of reputation benefits or network benefits,’ Olga, a mid-career scholar of ancient philosophy currently based in Switzerland, firmly declares. And so do two Swedish researchers, Alla, a literary scholar in her early 40s who says that ‘I use citations as I see fit to benefit the text I am writing,’ and Hamed, a professor in film studies in his 40s, who replies ‘No, I wouldn’t cite someone to please them nor would I cite someone in order to try and get a connection with them.’

So, our respondents tend to deny that they would return favors by citing or that they would ever cite someone’s work just to establish a personal or professional bond with them. Not only do they feel that they have never felt ‘obliged to reference friends and colleagues in [their] texts,’ as Elina says, but they also express disbelief in the bonding value of the citation. For example, Iina, a Finnish post-doctoral researcher in media studies, claims that ‘I don’t believe referencing has [ever] brought me any connections.’

Another group admit that they do occasionally cite friends or close colleagues and do not see such citational ‘cronyism’ as a crime. Yet the reasons they voice are different. Luka, for example, remarks that ‘I cite them because I know their work best, so the citation comes naturally.’ On a related note, Thea mentions that for her, citing friends and colleagues can hardly be avoided, since her sub-field is so small. Such reasoning makes us think of the ‘neighboring’ relationship between academics: just as we would rather call our neighbor rather than a total stranger for help, we would cite someone we know because it is less time-consuming. If we already share common knowledge with the ‘neighbor’ in our narrow sub-field, institution, or research group, why look far and wide?

Albeit admitting that they cite colleagues they know personally, others nonetheless share with the first group the idea that citation practices must be kept ‘pure,’ not tarnished by personal interest, and without an explicit wish or expectation of return. For Gabriel, citations are akin to acknowledgements and not ‘part of a utilitarian circuit. It’s got more to do with affect and gratitude than social capital.’ In Marion’s case, the refusal of the expectation of reciprocity is emphasized by the fact that she cites personal contacts in secrecy, as she tells us: ‘I don’t generally tell people if I have cited them, nor expect any return regardless of whether it’s a personal or professional connection.’ Interestingly, Marion’s position places her at the hierarchically superior stance of a Christian donor who should not let her left hand know what her right hand is doing.

Yet some of the respondents who similarly claim that they do not expect the favor to be returned, nevertheless admit that they do not mind if they are cited back. As Ronan, a late-career British historian based in Ireland describes his citing rationale: ‘I don’t do it in expectation of a returned favour, though it’s nice when it happens.’ And occasionally the favor is indeed returned. Luka mentions that while he would never cite someone to ‘get a favour, or a get a citation back,’ he has noticed that the people he cites working in the same area as he, ‘usually do cite back.’ This is reminiscent of Bourdieu’s (1990, 105, 107; 1997, 231) idea of the two ‘truths’ of the gift: while according to the first, the gift is free and irreversible, characterized by disinterested giving, its objective truth nevertheless is that it amounts to a balanced ‘‘mechanism’ of exchange,’ interlocking the seemingly disconnected two acts of giving.

Just as a grant is a gift that often comes with strings attached, citation, regardless of the motivations behind it, can lead to frustration. Sergey mentions how he was forced to cite his ‘anonymous’ reviewers because he wanted to secure the acceptance of his paper. Martina intimates that ‘in the Spanish academic system there is a huge pressure to cite people who have supported you in your academic career (mentors, thesis supervisors, etc.).’ The extreme case of citation misuse is fraud, such as when the academic in power forces their subordinates to cite them as it has recently happened in Spain (see Marcus and Oransky, 2024). In the cases just mentioned, citation adds to the list of forced or imposed gifts dating back, for example, to the so-called Christmas ‘tax’ at the American workplace in the beginning of the 20th century (Litwicki, 2022).

A decision to cite or not to cite someone you know may affect personal relations. The first author of this article took it close to heart when she was not cited by an academic friend who made an encompassing bibliography in her field: ‘Does he not value me as a researcher? What made him omit my work as irrelevant at odds with our good personal relationship?’ Another risk that leads to the lack of visibility of certain scholars or even social groups lies in the inevitable partiality that citing friends and colleagues incurs. Our respondents complain that this presents a risk not only to the overlooked academics but to the future of science itself. ‘What future do we lend to successors if we become people pleasers, referencing each other without deeper grounding than utility and profit?’ asks Didier. The motivations behind cronyism – which is one of the dark sides of academia and certainly not exhausted by citation practices – are not just ‘utility and profit’ as our data have shown; they range from disinterested ‘pleasing’ to altruistic help and trivial convenience when scholars cite personal acquaintances because their work is easier accessed.

Sharing

An important factor contributing to and fostering the circulation of ideas among academics as gifts is sharing. At least for some of our respondents, it is what brings ideas into being. Ann, for example, tells us that

it’s very rare that I’m just sitting in a room alone and have a lightbulb moment where I have an idea on my own. It’s much more likely that when I'm talking with colleagues or students or preparing course materials or reading other brilliant texts that ideas start to coalesce in my mind – so I would say that most of my ideas are an effect of sharing, not the other way around.

For her, sharing thus comes first and ideas second, not the other way around.

Our findings are supported by those of previous studies (e.g. Tenopir et al., 2011; Wallis et al., 2013) that attest to the willingness of academics to share for the sake of sharing yet not being indifferent to potential gains this practice may bring them. Berthoin Antal and Richebé (2009), for example, speak of academic sharing in terms of a paradox: their respondents, while emphasizing the element of calculation and personal profits they get from sharing knowledge, state that the ultimate drive of this routine practice is enthusiasm and passion. Escaping from ‘the Charibdis of economism,’ there is, however, a risk of getting caught by the ‘Scylla of sentimentality,’ to paraphrase Mark Osteen (2002: 31). Calling their essay ‘A Passion for Giving, a Passion for Sharing,’ Berthoin Antal and Richebé (2009: 9) imply that the ‘true’ nature of academic exchanges is ‘passionate caring’ for knowledge. Not denying the existence of passion or enthusiasm in academia, we however believe it to be only one of the many, rather than the major, motivations for sharing.

Our data reveal that there are different motifs that encourage scholars to share: bringing one’s own ideas into life (‘sharing [. . .] makes ideas more real and helps them materialize into the world’); kick-starting new projects (‘some of the very best ideas are kick-started by talking and listening to others’); contributing to the knowledge-making routine in general (‘I believe that knowledge development is based on sharing ideas’); and feeling collegial support (‘getting support from peers is instrumental to improving academia and making it a kinder, more comfortable place to be and work from’).

The variety of motivations is partially explained by the fact that ‘sharing ideas’ clearly appears in our data as a generic term that encompasses several different meanings. First, by ‘sharing,’ our respondents mean feedback given by peers or seniors. ¹⁰ Iina calls feedback a ‘precious gift’: ‘people devote their time and energy to comment on my ideas and work. I may never be able to return [it], even though the academic community will.’ If we allow an analogy with indigenous gift economy however modernized and applied to contemporary phenomena by Lewis Hyde (2007), this latter comment implies that sharing in academia functions as a sort of kula ring: you give a gift to one participant of the ring but get a return gift from another one; gift exchange has a multi-sided rather than do-ut-des structure. Listening is valued as much as commenting. For example, Gabriel says that he ‘refrain(s) bringing in [his] ideas’ when listening to the colleague waiting for feedback. ‘I hold back out of a sense of scruple – like in those phone calls with friends where you listen to them for half an hour before you even start talking about yourself.’ Thus, he follows academic etiquette or bon ton which tacitly implies that he will receive similar treatment from this or other member of the academic community when he needs feedback himself.

Second, academics share ideas and knowledge in the course of less structured, often spontaneous discussions of a chosen topic, for example during a conference panel or a coffee break, at a reception or at a private gathering – other studies too have found this (see Berthoin Antal and Richebé, 2009; Wallis et al., 2013). An important factor contributing to feeling comfortable to share is recognizing whether the audience is ‘receptive to sharing’ and/or has the same ‘research mentality,’ as our respondents specifically indicate. ‘There are a very limited number of peers that I trust and share my work with before it is published. I know they will read my work carefully and constructively,’ Martina says.

Third, yet another subcategory is sharing with students and graduate students. In our analysis, we have deliberately bracketed teaching as a vertical model of sharing, but we nonetheless would like to include one opinion here. Valdur says that he sometimes shares with students ideas he considers worth pursuing if he feels that he ‘would probably not carry them through in a reasonable timeframe and would “waste” them in that sense.’ His condition for sharing with both students and colleagues is that ideas must fall into ‘the fruitful soil.’ As in the Biblical parable, ideas, once seeded in the fruitful soil, will give a harvest. This metaphor, like Marion’s ‘citing in secret’ we talked about earlier in the previous subsection, comes with strong Christian connotations. It is of interest not only because it naturalizes academic sharing but also because it objectifies ideas and emphasizes the question of value. The respondent views ideas as if they were his donation to the community: if I cannot use the idea myself, it would be selfish to let it go to waste and not to give it away to someone who can make something worthy out of it.

In his seminal essay ‘Sharing’ (2009), Russell Belk suggests that sharing is a type of consumer behavior distinct from marketplace or gift exchange. For example, when we share food with a child, we do not expect the child to reciprocate (even though perhaps we are hoping to have some benefits in the long-distant future). In the case of car-sharing or shared apartment rent, there is no element of exchange, rather temporary co-ownership. Belk himself uses ‘the open science model that has dominated since the Scientific Revolution’ as an example of sharing: ‘When we academics present our work at conferences, publish or otherwise distribute papers, and review for journals, we play a part in this sharing model of open science, even though there may also be some self-aggrandizement’ (Belk, 2009: 729). While we strongly believe that the model of open science remains one of the many post-Enlightenment utopias that obscures global capitalist inequalities – even open access publications demanded from academics nowadays often must be ‘bought out’ from the copyright holders which is close to impossible without substantial institutional support or grants – Belk’s idea of the shared space/co-ownership seems to work well in the academic context. It is especially true when we are talking about the space of discussions where the ideas are being ‘cooked’ and whether their ownership is not confirmed in writing. Thus, ideas shared in peer-review reports or during a PhD thesis discussion cannot be referenced, only acknowledged; sometimes, you do not know the name of a conference participant who made a great comment on your paper but are willing to appropriate and use the comment to improve it anyway. As Ronen expresses it: ‘I try to acknowledge and reference the origins of important stuff but it’s not always clear where and from whom particular ideas come from.’

The problem with referencing or even attributing ‘raw’ ideas leads to ethical issues and makes the academic space especially vulnerable. Our respondents show awareness of theft and plagiarism as dangers inherent in the process of sharing, however the opinion about the actual possibility of stealing each other’s ideas is divided. Some believe that in the absence of a written record which would enable one to easily link ideas back to their source, ideas can be easily stolen precisely because they are not yet elaborated in a form that allows reference to the source and are subjected to the author function that we mentioned earlier. This makes Eeva, for example, reluctant to present at conferences ‘something unpublished if I thought it was very significant.’ Marking ideas as one’s property is a way of making them less vulnerable to appropriation by others; John tells us how ‘[o]occasionally in class, with graduate students, or in a talk I’ll mark an idea or a diagram as my own with a copyright when I’ve already published it somewhere, or when I plan to make use of it later on.’

Many respondents underline the importance of trusting the fellow academics they share their ideas with; ‘trust’ is one of the most often recurring words in our data. Yet others believe that stealing ideas is useless precisely because they are raw material. For example, Valdur observes:

In principle, I have no limits to what I would give away, since even if somebody is stupid enough to ‘steal’ my idea, there’s a good chance that she [sic] is also stupid enough not to know what to do with that idea (at least the way I would know).

In a similar fashion, Ronen tells us that ‘I don’t worry too much about my ideas being stolen because I’m confident I can realize them in publication as well as anyone else and better than most.’

So, if you share a raw idea in an academic space and we appropriate it in publication without acknowledgement, we are committing an act of theft that will be ethically (though perhaps not legally, unless the violation of copyright is involved) condemned. At the same time, the idea, at least in the opinion of some of our respondents, has little value when being still undeveloped and only waiting to be realized and brought into existence and circulation. With shared ideas, authorship can indeed be confusing and uncertain above everything. ‘There have been situations where someone has got really excited [about] my idea and added a new idea on top of that, and good things have happened,’ Elina symptomatically observes, implying that some third idea has developed from the previous two; it is not clear, however, to whom this third idea belongs.

Theft is undoubtedly the dark side of academic sharing. It is noteworthy, however, that our respondents appear to be more concerned about bad or inappropriate feedback when sharing unpublished ideas than about plagiarism: ‘Bad feedback from a friend at that [incipient] stage could crush me,’ Martina says, and ‘I have also had negative experiences, for instance, by getting an instant rejection of my idea,’ Elina tells. The ‘wrong’ feedback can even lead to humiliation, frustration, and tension with peers as is evident from Didier’s emotional comment: ‘I’ve witnessed colleagues undoing my ideas with laughter or distorting them into something else. This is frustrating and makes me feel stuck, as if my mind was surrounded by walls.’ While you can get negative feedback anywhere and at any stage of the project, one coming from a friend or when the idea is still fresh, is particularly hurtful or harmful.

Despite these risks, most of our respondents express willingness to continue sharing because the benefits are much bigger than potential losses. This is because academic routine is unthinkable without sharing no matter which stance you take: ideas often need to go through a circulation phase in order to develop or, quoting our respondent once again, ‘materialize.’ We can go even further and say that this highly specific and peculiar gift culture of the ‘academic tribe’ (Carnochan, 2009) indeed diversifies academic occupation from many other professions. Here we overlap with Hagstrom’s definition of science as a ‘system wherein gifts of information are exchanged for recognition from scientific colleagues.’ However, we believe that this definition will be more nuanced if we rephrase it as a system wherein different forms of gift-giving and sharing play a formative and a meaning-making role.

Concluding Remarks

In this article, we contested the idea of competition as the sole or primary organizing principle of the scientific field by examining how the gift structures the scholarly community. Our analysis shows academic work as being intimately entangled with practices of giving and forms of gift exchange. Moreover, the culture of the gift and the culture of competition, as we argued, are often complementary rather than mutually exclusive, and therefore the binary of pragmatism and disinterestedness is too schematic to account for the range and scope of gift relations involved in the making and disseminating of knowledge. It is typically by what they give that scholars compete for recognition.

The complementary relation of gifting and competition called for attention to the tension between the gift and property. How they relate to property betrays differences between various kinds of academic gifts, suggesting also thereby that academic gifts are not of only one type but heterogeneous. Ideas subjected to the author function that exist and circulate as contributions to the field appear as inalienable gifts. When contributing to scholarly debates by sharing one’s ideas with one’s (potential) readers, one gives them away yet keeps them in possession. And not only that; the act of giving confirms the ownership of the idea or knowledge and marks it as property, belonging to a designated author. So, instead of the donor’s property rights being transferred to the (potential) recipient(s), it is only just the gesture of donation, of making a contribution, that actualizes those rights and affirms one at once both as the donor and the owner of the idea. This makes giving and possession intertwined: to give is to possess. In the case of ideas subjected to the author function, sharing is thus a matter not only of keeping-while-giving (Weiner, 1992) but also of keeping-by-giving. While the ideas can be enjoyed and put to use by others as well, the original donor remains their sole owner.

Our analysis suggested that citation practices underline this specific function of authorized ideas in the academic world. By citing, one does not reappropriate the idea but rather acknowledges both the predecessor’s contribution to the academic community and the rightfulness of one’s intellectual possession. While it does not hold that citing would automatically comprise a gift, insofar as many, perhaps most, citations are driven by a logic other than that of the gift, some citing practices are nevertheless motivated by gifting. When amounting to a gift, reference is a gift of choice and visibility bestowed on a cited scholar for whatever reason (objective scholarship, self-presentation, following publication conventions, communal or personal favor, etc.), and this gift has a price given the importance of citation indexes in contemporary academia. Citing thus performs a double function being both a form of iterating the original contribution or ‘gift’ and performing as a gift in its own right, often obscured by the presumed objectivity required from academics.

A more precarious and unsettling situation occurs when ideas are still raw, making a scholar who shares them doubly vulnerable in the face of both too hasty disapproval and theft. What may be called the imperative of sharing iterates along the ever-shifting boundaries between common and private property and makes us think of academia in spatial terms – that is, as a shared, or co-owned space of discussion which enables some of the ideas to get a shape before they get authorized in publication. While access to this space is regulated by privileges, inclusion and exclusion, and economic factors (say, a conference fee), the space itself comes as close to the ideal of academic communality as it can, since the agencies of a giver and a recipient appear to merge: when one receives valuable feedback or gets a springboard to new ideas as a result of sharing the original idea or knowledge, the giver is the recipient and vice versa. It should not therefore surprise us that academics highly value or even treasure informal conversation and unbound exchange of thoughts despite the risks and discomfort that sharing potentially incurs. In particular cases of giving focused feedback, scholars admit to altruistically giving a gift of ideas and/or time, however, in hopes of receiving similar treatment from the community.

Both sharing and citing contribute to the accumulation of symbolic capital. However, the mechanism of monetizing this capital suggested by Bourdieu works only approximately. Most of our respondents nonetheless tend to see a grant – which, as we have suggested, amounts to a vertical gift, in contrast to citing and sharing, which are of a more horizontal nature – as a reward for the previous accomplishments or as a recognition of one’s excellence only partially; time and effort spent on writing a successful grant application that matches the algorithm criteria of what a perfect research may be, count as much as anything else. Even more important is the role of external factors that go beyond one’s control, including such irrational, causal factors as chance and luck. The asymmetrical relationship of the funding body and a grantee disrupts the equilibrium maintained in the relationship between the employer and the employee, whereas the shared vision of the grant as a supreme, impersonal, and pseudo-divine gift obscures and mystifies the economic and administrative nature of funding distribution.

As our study has demonstrated, academic occupation is intimately entangled with the idea of the gift on different levels. ‘Gift culture’ is, ultimately, an umbrella term that covers a range of ties that relate to diverse gift practices as described in anthropology or sociology. Yet rather than only conveying the supreme feelings of generosity and devotion that we mentioned in the beginning, this culture is sustained by various tangled motivations, intentions, and outcomes. It promotes the ideas of community and collegiality in academia perhaps more explicitly than in other occupations and aspires to the utopian ideal of ‘pure’ research. Nevertheless, the same culture also enhances risks of dishonesty and disapproval, encourages partiality, and makes research dependent on uneven and whimsical donations being part of rather than an antidote to the ‘dark academia.’