Academic Knowledge Production and the Global South: Questioning Inequality and Under-representation [1st ed.] 9783030527006, 9783030527013

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Academic Knowledge Production and the Global South Questioning Inequality and Under-representation Márton Demeter

Academic Knowledge Production and the Global South “Critique of global hierarchies along with aspirations to decolonize knowledge have increased significantly in Western academia over recent decades. And yet this critique has hardly upset the global hierarchies that it has decried. In this book, Márton Demeter opens the closet to expose the skeleton of a production of academic knowledge that remains heavily determined by its location in the Global North.” —Professor Gilbert Achcar, SOAS University of London, UK “Can the subaltern speak in communication studies? This is a deceptively simple question and, although recent arguments for the de-Westernization of communication studies take the answer for granted, Demeter’s elegantly theorized and empirically detailed analysis shows that the reality is more complex than we thought. Scholars and institutions truly committed to the internationalization of knowledge will find this book to be an indispensable guide to fully understanding the challenges and crafting solutions. I enjoyed reading the book and I hope that it gets the wide attention it deserves.” —Professor Larry Gross, University of Southern California, USA “Márton Demeter’s monograph invokes rich anecdotal, empirical and scientometric evidence to delineate the contours of a world system that preserves the dominance of Western knowledge and scholars and the westernisation or peripheralisation of the rest—a system defined by geopolitical and material inequalities, socio-economic class differences, institutional elitism and publishing biases. Demeter’s work counters narratives that present academia as meritocratic and that justify disparities in world publications on the basis of pure rigour, exposing rather norms and values that perpetuate a western elitist system and peripheralise those who happen to lack this cultural capital. Demeter’s work adds to an expanding field of research documenting how Anglophone standards and biases in journal indexing, peer review and editorial board recruitment marginalise consistently the Global South. His practical and concrete suggestions to subvert this system of horizontal and vertical inequalities could not be timelier and provides momentum to decolonisation movements in higher education across the world.” —Dr Romina Istratii, SOAS University of London, UK

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“Márton Demeter is a scholar dedicated to revealing the inequality in academic publishing and a strong advocate for scholars from the Global South. This book is an epitome of his effort on this cause. Demeter utilizes his wealth of data including authorships, citations, journal publishers, editorial review board compositions, the reviewers and the editors of journals as strong evidence of inequality with his three-dimensional model of academic stratification. This book is a must-read for scholars both in the Global North and the Global South to reflect on the current state of academic knowledge gatekeeping and production. It will spark a dialogue between scholars to address the dominance of the Global North especially in the field of communication.” —Professor Louisa Ha, Bowling Green State University, USA “Márton Demeter’s analysis and critique of the unequal structure of global knowledge production is a powerful contribution to the global justice movement with dramatic implications for what academics in both the Global North and the Global South can do to help science and the humanities live up to their claims of meritocracy and universality. Demeter employs a useful critical combination of the world-systems perspective and Bourdieusian field theory to organize the results of his careful and sophisticated empirical studies of global knowledge production. He is an intrepid protagonist of a more egalitarian human future.” —Professor Christopher Chase-Dunn, University of California, Riverside, USA

Márton Demeter

Academic Knowledge Production and the Global South Questioning Inequality and Under-representation

Márton Demeter Department of Social Communication National University of Public Service Budapest, Hungary

ISBN 978-3-030-52700-6    ISBN 978-3-030-52701-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52701-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

As all authors, I also have my reasons for writing this book. Books are neither born, nor function in an ideologically, culturally and politically neutral vacuum, and they also reflect the position and the personal experiences of the author. This holds true not only for books in the humanities and social sciences, but also for works in the natural sciences, as they are also the results of culturally, politically and ideologically determined traditions. Still, from among different disciplines, the social sciences have a distinctive position since they are by definition permeated with cultural and political traits. Therefore, it is of crucial importance in the social sciences that authors disclose their positions in order to avoid even the appearance of impartiality in the strict sense, as even the natural sciences are far from being objective, that is, independent from personal attitudes. At the same time, since academic books, unlike works of fiction, are not written with the direct purpose to express the personality of the author, to engage, entertain or emotionally involve readers, they should represent a more general position, something beyond the author’s own experiences. Thus, when authors disclose their positions, they should also determine which people might share this position. Partiality is a very common feature of our societies, and most of us have personal experiences from both sides of partiality. Most of us have been, in some instances, the beneficiaries of partiality and favoritism, v

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while we have also found ourselves on the downside at other times. It is always easy to see favoritism when we are in the disadvantaged position, while the same unfair practice might seem totally feasible when we are part of the privileged group. When we were children, we might have experienced how it felt to be the black sheep in our communities, or how teachers showed favoritism towards undeserving children because they came from rich or influential families. Later in high school and university, we might experience that some ideas, despite their trivial or even irrelevant nature, are considered important and noteworthy, just because they were expressed by important people. A mere annoyance in the fields of art, media or entertainment, this phenomenon is however inadmissible in the field of science, where merit should be the principal criterion. Still, by the time I finished my Ph.D., I started to conjecture that this negative tendency is an essential part of the field of academy as well. As a scholar educated exclusively in the periphery, namely in Hungary, a relatively small Eastern European country, it was evident to adapt to our regional standards. We were educated by professors who had a national reputation, but without, in most cases, considerable international experience. Still, since I am a member of the younger generation educated after the end of the socialist era, we started to explore the possibilities of making our voices heard to a wider community. Our first attempts were so disappointing that most scholars from my generation (excluding those elite students who were able to be educated at the West) quickly gave upon the idea of having an impact on international academia, and started to condemn Western exclusivism without making any serious attempts to change it. Another type of young researchers that I usually call “centrophiles” start instead to worship Western scholarship, all while being ashamed of their inferior academic culture and scholarly merits. I have to confess that I was a centrophile myself for a few years, and then something changed. In the first few years, my articles were rejected from elite journals. There were various reasons, but I started to understand that, as a peripheral author, I have to submit extremely strong papers in order to be published. Once one of my papers was rejected because, allegedly, the sample in my analysis was too small (it included only 93 journals from the 400 journals published in communication). A month later I found that, in the same journal, a very similar article was published in which

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two English professors from prestigious universities analyzed no more than five journals. In my case, the 93 journals sample was too small, but five journals were more than enough in the case of authors from a Russel Group university. After this, I submitted a paper to the same journal in which I analyzed the full sample, more than 400 periodicals, and, after the so-called rigorous peer review process, my paper was published this time. This was when I realized that authors from the periphery might have to do a 100 times more effort than their central peers if they wanted to make their voices heard. I also realized that most likely all of my peripheral peers were suffering from the same obstacles, and I started to relinquish the idea that central scholarship was inherently superior. Similarly, when I started to present my research at the most prestigious international conferences of my field, I realized that sometimes professors from elite universities could present almost anything, while my peripheral peers had to do their best performance in order to attract any attention at all to their research. After a few dozen international conferences, I developed the unshakeable conviction that central scholars from elite universities are neither smarter nor more hardworking nor more talented than their peripheral peers: they are only in a much more privileged position. As a former centrophile, it was a real conversion, and from that time onwards, I began dedicating all of my professional efforts to the analysis of inequalities in global knowledge production. My first papers were almost exclusively empirical, since it is very hard to get your critical paper published when you are an invisible peripheral author. I had to publish at least a dozen empirical papers on academic inequalities in elite central journals before my first critical paper was published, and it took a considerable time before any journals and international conferences invited me to present critical studies on this issue. This was a long and hard journey, and all empirical evidence shows that this road to international visibility is much harder when one starts out from the periphery than from the center. All the pages of this present book tell this story from different perspectives. By shedding light on the serious inequalities in the world-­ system of knowledge production, my book aims to help to change the uneven operation of the field, and make my peripheral colleagues’ way into international visibility easier. But this highly needed change of the world-system would serve not just the emancipation of peripheral

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knowledge: it would also serve the interests of the global academic community and through that, it would be beneficial for all humanity. It is my firm conviction that talent is universal and is equally distributed all around the world. Consequently, the knowledge of different regions of the world should be proportionally communicated and disseminated in the world-­system of global knowledge production and it is inadmissible that a small central part of the world accounts for almost the totality of global scholarly knowledge. Budapest, Hungary

Márton Demeter

Acknowledgements

To end the cultural and intellectual subordination of the periphery, and to develop a more just global knowledge production, peripheral and central agents should work shoulder to shoulder. I am extremely proud of and grateful to all my comrades, from both the periphery and the center, who have helped me, and continue to help me in this endeavor. First of all, I am extremely grateful to my family, since, while they have not always clearly understood what I do, they have helped, supported and protected me throughout my studies. I would not have been able to complete my studies without my grandmother’s continuous assistance—she was always full of love and support, without thinking about the returns on her life-­ long investment. Similarly, my wife Erika has been with me in both my joy and grief throughout my journey, and my lovely children—Irma, Ella and Aron—always fill me with positive energy. Regarding professional support, I give kudos for as many colleagues that counting their names would fill an individual chapter. Still, I have to name some of them. My teacher in mathematics, Dr. Ambrus Árpádné was the first person to truly believe in my talent. My doctoral supervisor Özséb Horányi taught me to think hard. I have learned from my Hungarian friends and colleagues a lot, especially from János Tóth, Zoltán Ginelli and Tamás Tóth, who work on similar topics as myself. I am grateful to Louisa Ha for her continuous support, and to Larry Gross, ix

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Christopher Chase-Dunn, Federico Navarro and Gilbert Achcar for the same reasons. Romina Istratii from SOAS is my colleague and coauthor, and has also taught me a lot about courage and vocation. Manuel Goyanes, my Spanish friend and coauthor is one of the most inspiring and hard-working scholars I have ever met. I am also obliged to my editors Eleanor Christie, Rebecca Wyde and Ruby Panigrahi at Palgrave, and to my proofreader Marie-Josée Sheeks.

Contents

Part I Theoretical Considerations   1 1 Introduction  3 2 The Stories Are Written by the Victors: Theoretical Considerations 25 Part II Empirical Evidences and Practical Considerations  61 3 The Dynamics Behind the Problem of Inequality: The World-System of Global Inequality in Knowledge Production 63 4 The Rise of the Global South 85 5 Collecting Academic Capital105

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6 Gatekeepers of Knowledge Dissemination: Inequality in Journal Editorial Boards137 7 Global Academia and Reeducation153 8 Technical Appendix181 Index191

About the Author

Márton Demeter  is an associate professor at the National University of Public Service in Budapest, Hungary, and also a Bolyai Research Fellow at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His critical works on global academic inequalities have been widely published in leading periodicals of his field, such as International Journal of Communication, Journal of World-Systems Research, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Journalism, and Journalism Practice.

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List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 The structure of the three-dimensional model of academic stratification. (Source: Demeter 2019c) 43 Fig. 2.2 Stratification of capital accumulation on the social dimension of the model 44 Fig. 5.1 Distribution of world regions in development studies publication output from the 1960s to the 2010s. (The author’s calculation)114 Fig. 5.2 Distribution of world regions in educating development studies scholars. (The author’s calculation) 116 Fig. 5.3 Career trajectories in development studies by mobility. (The author’s calculation) 117 Fig. 5.4 Cooperation patterns in development studies by co-authorship. (The author’s calculation) 118 Fig. 5.5 Patterns of mixed (GN-GS) co-authorship in the sample. Thicker lines represent higher weights, which mean more frequent co-authorship between the linked countries. (Source: Demeter 2018) 126 Fig. 5.6 Education and career paths from the Global South to the Global North (the width of the edges represents the frequency of a given path). (Source: Demeter 2019) 127

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List of Tables

Table 2.1 The three-dimensional model of power relations in global academia42 Table 2.2 Key statistics for the Global North and South by Publons 47 Table 2.3 Contributions of world regions to the Journal of Communication for 2013–2014 and 2016–2017 52 Table 4.1 Contribution of world regions in different disciplines from 1975 to 2017, by the affiliation of authors of research articles indexed in SCI/SSCI WoS 88 Table 4.2 Longitudinal representation of the contribution of different world regions in communication studies 89 Table 4.3 Distribution of humanities journals from different world regions in 2000 90 Table 4.4 Distribution of humanities journals from different world regions in 2018 90 Table 4.5 Distribution of social science journals from different world regions in 2000 91 Table 4.6 Distribution of social science journals from different world regions in 2018 91 Table 4.7 Distribution of authors from different world regions in 2000 and 2018 in Scopus-indexed humanities journals 92 Table 4.8 Distribution of authors from different world regions in 2000 and 2018 in Scopus-indexed social science journals 92

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List of Tables

Table 5.1 The number of Global South authors by world regions in the sample 125 Table 5.2 Matrix of the main network features of Global South world regions132 Table 6.1 Contributions of different world regions to global academia in communication and media studies in terms of data collection site, authorship and editorial board membership 143 Table 6.2 Publication output of Scopus-indexed Eastern European journals, by world regions 146 Table 6.3 Representation of world regions on editorial boards in Scopus-indexed Eastern European journals 147 Table 6.4 Average representation of world regions in journal authors and editorial boards in Scopus-indexed Eastern European journals148 Table 7.1 Typical central and peripheral features in global knowledge production166 Table 7.2 World-systemic positions in global knowledge production 169

Part I Theoretical Considerations

1 Introduction

A few years ago I attended a conference in Liverpool, UK. The scope of the meeting was international journalism, and thus included an extraordinarily colorful palette of participants from different parts of the world. However, I definitely missed my fellow Eastern European colleagues and it was only on the third day that I heard a Hungarian word for the first time. Unfortunately, it was not part of a sophisticated academic argument, but the Hungarian version of the F-bomb, since the cleaning woman had accidentally dropped something outside the conference hall and felt that she had to label the situation in her mother tongue. That evening, I checked some statistics and found that there are about 500,000 Hungarians in the United Kingdom, most of them in the capital city, but typically live in low-income areas and would be unlikely to frequent prestigious places like conference halls and other venues of academic meetings. Of course, this book is not about my personal experiences, but I will never deny the fact that academic inequality as it is experienced by all researchers of the Global South and by all scholars without an elite education is the fuel of research on power relations in global academia for many scholars, including myself. It is no surprise that most researchers in women’s studies and feminism are female, most academics writing about © The Author(s) 2020 M. Demeter, Academic Knowledge Production and the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52701-3_1

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gender and LGBTQ inequality are members of the LGBTQ community, and that the social movements against racism have been initiated by people with an ethnic background other than white. Similarly, the systematic bias against Global South academics is one that is mostly investigated by Global South authors, not only because they are the devalued, often exploited participants of this global inequality, but also because Global North academics often have the privilege of never having to encounter the problems of their Global South peers. This does not mean, of course, that Global North academics are evil or uncaring; instead they are, to some extent, blind to the problems of their Global South colleagues. While this is the typical case, there are many Global North academics that face similar problems as their geopolitically disadvantaged peers, namely elitism, exclusion and exploitation. These are the academics that work in a periphery-within-the-center position, either because they are working in downgraded institutions such as state universities or community colleges maintained for the masses, because they belong to a disadvantaged minority or are from the lower social classes (Arunachalam 2002; Bourdieu 1996). Thus, academic inequalities, academic oppression and academic exploitation could be observed and experienced on both geopolitical and societal levels. Consequently, I consider it my duty to define my position as a scholar working on the topic of academic inequalities. I come from a Hungarian working class family, and consequently, I have a typical education pattern of relatively talented working-class people: attending local schools and a state university reserved for the mass education of the non-elite classes. As soon as I had finished my Ph.D., I started to perceive the consequences of my peripherality. It was extremely hard to find an academic job, since even in Hungary, academic positions are—albeit informally—maintained for the elite. It was also extremely difficult to publish in elite international journals. On one occasion, I submitted a paper to a not too highly-rated but still internationally recognized journal that desk-rejected my article. A few months later, I found out that the same journal had published an article very similar to mine by an American professor, one which was not only considerably lower in quality than my proposed title, but even contained some paragraphs from my paper. When I wrote the editor about this issue, I was astonished by the reply: the editor could imagine how frustrating it is to be an Eastern

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European scholar who wants international contribution and has been rejected, but to please not bother them again. It was around that time that I decided to dedicate all of my scholarly interest to the problem of academic inequalities. In a very early stage of my research, I realized that my own personal experiences as a peripheral scholar seeking international recognition coincided to a great degree with the experiences of many other scholars in the same position (Ake 1982; Aman 2016; Bandyopadhyay 2017; Canagarajah 2002; Shi-xu 2009). After this discovery, I wanted to understand the processes of elitism and geopolitical exclusion—how these work in a way that is clearly visible for the oppressed but, in most cases, totally invisible for the beneficiaries of the system. This social blindness is detrimental not only to the oppressed social groups, but to all of society. By “socially blind”, I mean that most members of the dominant group—including professionals—truly think that the members of the underprivileged groups somehow fall below the standard. Aristotle, one of the greatest Western philosophers of all time, honestly thought that women are less intelligent than men and that they are even not adults, but eternal children. In his Politics, he maintained the idea that women should be governed like children, and the only difference between women and children is that children—of course only boys and never girls—will grow up one day. The father of Western rationalism, René Descartes, wrote in the preface of his Discourse on the Method that he had written his paper in a style which would allow even women to understand something from it, but that he hoped that more intelligent readers would also find it valuable. And we should not forget that, even in enlightened Western democracies, women were unable to vote until quite recently on the basis that they do not have the appropriate intellectual capacity to assess political issues. In order to be taken seriously, women had to, and sometimes still have to, act like men: they had to wear suits, short hair to become similar to their male peers. In the same countries, people with a non-white ethnic background were, and in many cases, still are regarded as less valuable than their white counterparts. For many years, for example, it was maintained that African-Americans have lower IQs than whites (Rushton and Jensen 2005). Accordingly, black and other non-white individuals have had to, and sometimes they still have to, act like their white peers in order to achieve recognition. The

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very same phenomenon can be seen among LGBTQ people. We should not forget that homosexuality was considered a deadly sin for a long time, and in later years it was regarded as a mental illness. It was only by the second half of the twentieth century, in 1973, when the American Psychological Association removed homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, where it had been listed under the mental illness heading of paraphilia. Accordingly, homosexuals were somewhat tolerated as long as they appeared to be heterosexuals or, as a minimum, did not appear to be homosexual. As a matter of fact, in most countries, LGBTQ people still do not have the same rights as their straight fellow citizens, and can only be themselves behind closed doors. In brief: women were disqualified for a long time on the basis that they failed to meet the standards of men; people with non-white ethnic backgrounds failed to accomplish the standards of white men: and LGBTQ people were discriminated against on the understanding that they do not meet heterosexual standards. The main purpose of this book is to show that, similarly to other unjust exclusions, we should examine the serious discrimination against Global South academics, who are usually regarded as people who do not comply with the standards of the Global North, and against lower class academics that do not share all of the cultural, epistemic and academic values of their elite colleagues. But why so many people are blind to the problems of the underrated? The point here is that most members of the dominant part of society are almost always convinced that the social order is fair and square, and that if they are in a privileged position, it is due to their merit and value. Louisa Ha, for example, the distinguished communication professor and editor-in-chief of Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, one of the oldest and most prestigious periodicals in the field of communication and media studies, compared the world of global academia to the Olympic Games. She said that in both domains of global competition, we are judged based on global standards set by our peers in the field through a refereed process. More touching stories cover the athletes as human beings and individuals: how their talents were discovered by their coaches or parents, how they struggled, overcame difficulties, achieved and maintained their success.

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The success metrics for scholars are typically research publication citations, research awards, fellowships, and productivity ranking. Recently, altmetrics such as news media coverage and social media mention of research are also gaining importance. Similarly, published works or research award glamor only represent a small portion of the researcher’s work. Many behind-the-­ scene revisions, coordination, failed projects, prior rejections, labor in data collection and analysis, background research that culminates many years, and many more other things are not known to the public. In refereed journal publications, how authors survive through the review process and improving their manuscript, how reviewers act as the anonymous coaches, and how the editor helps authors to get the best out of the manuscript are all a story of its own. (Ha 2016, p. 725)

However suggestive and lively this description of the field of academy is, it is, unfortunately, not real. As I will show in the present book, especially in Chap. 3, the world of science—especially in social sciences and the humanities—is similar to a hypothetical Olympic Games where at least 90% of gold medals are guaranteed to Western and especially American competitors, where athletes must wear Western clothing, or risk being disqualified before even entering the competition, and where they can only reach the Olympic podium if they look exactly like a Western (preferably American) athlete. Although the main concern of this book is, at first sight, the world of global academia, and especially social sciences, I will argue that the moral of the story is much broader. It is about a need for social change to ensure that Global South competitors are equally respected on the global job market, in the cultural industry and, of course, in the field of science. As we will see later in this book, Global South workers are systematically employed at levels below their competence and value in almost every segment of academic pursuit. What is more, most Global North and even Global South colleagues usually think that this is, at least in a “What can we do” sense, an inevitable aspect of globalization. In this present work, I will show that the underestimation of Global South employees in the world-system of transnational labor and especially in knowledge production on the grounds of their origin being the Global South is no less unfair than the underestimation of women or different minority groups

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by reason of their identity. If the global job market in general, and the world of global academia in particular, want to claim to be merit-based, they will have to jettison their preconceptions against Global South authors just as they have started (but not yet finished) abandoning their prejudices against women, ethnic groups and LGBTQ people. In this way, global academia might provide a positive example to other fields such as politics, economy, education and any areas of global collaboration that are subject to international power relations. One can say that the Global South is not a homogenous, unstructured mass; it is rather a general term for world regions (in our case, in terms of academic production) with different levels and trajectories of development, even in a structural sense. For example, Latin America has been able to set up a huge alternative and almost autonomous academic hub which has increasing weight without essentially increasing its Global North capital. As opposed to Latin America, China does the opposite: instead of establishing an autonomous academic hub, it tries to acquire as much Global North capital as it can. However, in terms of inequalities, all Global South regions should face the serious biases in global academia. While most edited volumes on the similar topic concentrate on different world regions individually (Heilbron et al. 2018; Kuhn and Vessuri 2016; Keim et al. 2014), this present monograph deals with both general features of the Global South and with the alternative paths of different world regions of the periphery so it can discuss different world regions in a common conceptual framework. Thus, this book is the first attempt to provide a monographic view on the issue of global inequality in the world-system of knowledge production as it is represented in social sciences.

 ome Remarks on Terminology S and Classification In this book, I have generally followed the categorizations used in the fields of economics, political science or international relations. However, my approach is not always in line with the divisions of the world used by

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other scholars. In the following lines, I will briefly introduce my categorization scheme and explain why I have used it. A comprehensive discussion on the division or conceptualization of the world into the Global North and the Global South would require a separate book. Thus I have decided to define my understanding of this classification and simply present my categorization scheme. It corresponds to most decolonial conceptions of the Global North/Global South divide (Amin 2011; Kiely 2016; Parnell and Oldfield 2014; Rigg 2007), and also correlates with the economic understanding of this issue (Amin 1997; Soederberg 2004). In short, following both dependency theories and world-systems research, I considered “Global South” as a generic term for the geopolitically dependent, typically colonized and historically exploited regions of the world. It is typical to count Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and non-Westernized or less wealthy Asia (often called “developing Asia”) as parts of the Global South, and to this list, I add Eastern Europe. I will argue for this categorization of Eastern Europe as part of the Global South later in this book, here I only refer to its dependent position in the European context both in terms of economics and knowledge production. In contrast to the regions and countries of the Global South, the Global North typically refers to those regions that were—and from several points of view, still are—the exploiters of the South economically and academically. Since most parts of this book directly address how the Global North practices academic exploitation and knowledge colonization, here I only present the list of world regions that, in my understanding, are part of the Global North: the US, the UK, Western Europe (including Scandinavia), Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Israel, as well as the developed Asian countries like Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea. Maybe the most controversial issue is my categorization of the Latin hub, usually referred to as Latin America. I have to point out at the beginning of the book that, as in the case of other classifications, I have followed the empirical results of my scientometric analyses. There are several legitimate arguments for referring to the “language divide” between Brazil and Hispanic America, and thus it is problematic to group them in a common Latin hub (Ávila Reyes 2017; Bazerman 2016; Navarro et al. 2016). The “language divide” results in fewer cross-citations between

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Brazil and Hispanic America, less non-Brazilian authors in Brazilian journals, and less scholarly collaborations between regions. Moreover, as Navarro points out, Chile, for instance, has a state-funded policy that pays private and public institutions direct money for each paper that gets published in WoS-indexed journals. Therefore Chile’s WoS-indexed publications have more than doubled in a decade (Navarro 2020, in press). Brazil, on the other hand, has its own international journal indexing system that is not exclusively based on impact factor, and Brazilian journals can be found in the same category as top international journals. There are also differences in the research effort of the different countries. In particular, Brazil stands out in terms of demographics (+200 million people) and research investment, while other countries have limited expenditures on research and little to no indexed journals.1 However, when we take a closer look at the academic cooperation between Brazil and Hispanic America, we can find sufficient justification for categorizing them in a common Latin hub. While it is true that Hispanic American countries cooperate with each other more frequently than they do with Brazil, they still have more joint academic endeavors with Brazil than with any other countries (except Spain). Considering three major Brazilian journals in communication (Informacao e Sociedade, Texto Livre and Transinformacao), Scopus shows that Brazil is followed by Spain, Portugal, and Latin-­ American countries like Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay, Chile and Argentina in both author and citation counts. Most of the authors published in the prestigious Brazilian journal Cadernos de Pesquisa are from Brazil, but they are followed by authors from Portugal, Argentina, Chile and Spain. A review of citations shows a similar pattern, with most citations to this journal coming from Brazil, followed by citations from Chile, Spain, Portugal and Colombia. Consequently, at least in terms of scientometrics, there clearly is a Latin American hub, and, augmented by Spain and Portugal, it forms a strong Ibero-American hub. The Organization of Ibero-American States, including all Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries, deliberately seeks to promote intergovernmental cooperation among its member nations, primarily in the fields  I am extremely grateful to Federico Navarro for these valuable comments.

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of education, science, technology and the arts.2 Thus, at least in scientometrics, one could legitimately speak of a Latin hub that includes both Brazil and the Hispanic American countries, and of an Ibero-American hub that extends to Portugal and Spain as well. But, since both Portugal and Spain are strongly connected to Western Europe in a scientometric sense, I have decided to use the term Latin (and not Ibero-American) hub, and to categorize Spain and Portugal as Western European countries. Other contested aspects of categorization might be my decision to include China as part of developing Asia, Israel as part of the center, and transcontinental Turkey as a Middle Eastern country. Among these issues, the most important is the case of China. One can justly argue that, in the scientometric sense, China has not only caught up to the Western world, but in several disciplines, has even overtaken the most successful countries such as the US or the UK. The tendency is quite clear: in a few years, China will be the leading producer of global knowledge. However, if we take a closer look at the data provided by Scimago, we can see that the Chinese contribution has increased mainly in a quantitative sense, as measured in the number of published papers. In this respect, China performs extremely well even in the social sciences, since it is the third most successful country (behind the US and the UK) in terms of the number of published papers. But the qualitative dimension is much less impressive: the citation per document index of China is relatively low, as China ranks 59th on the global list, and only 13th on the list of countries with the highest H-index. Nevertheless, I am sure that this is the last time that I will count China as part of developing Asia in the context of global knowledge production, and that within a few years, it will become one of the most important players on the field. From a scientometric perspective, Israel is much closer to the center than to the periphery, and in particular, closer to the US than to any Middle Eastern countries. Israel is the typical example of the “center within the periphery” phenomenon: its role in global knowledge production is similar to the most successful Western countries in aspects such as publication output, international collaboration or the prestige of its higher education institutions. It should also be noted that Israel is the  https://www.oei.es/

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OECD country with the highest share of GDP spending on research and development (4.91% in 2018).3 Thus, it is reasonable to classify Israel as part of the global core in knowledge production. Finally, Turkey is transcontinental with several connections to both Europe and the Middle East. In this case, I followed Scimago’s categorization that counts Turkey as part of the Middle East. Another categorization problem emerges when we want to define social sciences. One can justifiably claim that “social sciences” is a very inclusive umbrella term that covers a legion of disciplines, ranging from those closer to the natural sciences (such as experimental psychology and linguistics), to those that bear more similarity to the arts and humanities (such as cultural studies). Since there is no general consensus on which disciplines the category of social sciences should include, I again used Scimago’s classification, whereby (as in most scientometric studies), the social sciences are those that have become typically embedded in  local cultures and epistemologies such as cultural studies, development studies, gender studies, communication, political science and similar disciplines. Accordingly, my conception of social sciences does not include those disciplines with strong methodological and epistemological ties to natural sciences such as formal linguistics, social psychology, psychology, economics and so on.

The Scope of the Book Generally, my analysis concentrates on the realm of social sciences, because these are the disciplines where cultural, epistemic and methodological differences between different geopolitical locations play crucial roles insomuch as they cause systemic biases against non-core world regions and non-elite agents of the system of knowledge production, including individual agents such as researchers, and collective agents like higher education institutions. Put simply: while the development of mathematics is almost independent of any specific culture, and natural sciences (excluding infrastructural and financial inequalities) function in  https://data.oecd.org/

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different geopolitical locations in a very similar way, social sciences function almost as many ways as there are different geopolitical locations. These differences relate not only to the thematic foci of research actions, but also to the applied theoretical frameworks, methods and rhetoric of the interpretation of the results. As we will see later in this book, these cultural, epistemic and rhetorical differences between geopolitical locations do not result in a diverse, inclusive and pluralistic global academic field, but instead help to develop an elitist, Westernized world-systemic structure of knowledge production. In this transnational academy, central agents have substantive control over the whole system, and though this control, they systemically exclude the non-elite social classes and the geopolitical periphery from global knowledge production. These phenomenon is labelled by many names, such as knowledge colonization (Mignolo 2011), academic imperialism (Mignolo 2018) or simply knowledge hegemony and exploitation (de Santos 2018). But the fact that this phenomenon happens within academia has a significant importance because, unlike other societal subfields such as politics, law or economics, the academic field presents itself as a meritocracy, with equality and independence from any interests and values other than the strictly academic. Consequently, it is extremely important to shed light on systemic inequalities, unfairness and biases within the field, to criticize them and to, as much as possible, fight against them. In this way, we are neither pessimists nor optimists, but activists. Over the last few years, I have had several opportunities to discuss the basic ideas of the present book in front of numerous scholars at prestigious international events such as the annual conferences of the Development Studies Association or the Human Development and Capabilities Association. At almost every occasion, I had to explain a very important pivot of the above delineated criticism, since my usual anti-­ elitist critique could be easily misunderstood or, what is worse, be considered as a personal assault against different members of the central elite. Thus, I would like to state as a principle in this introductory chapter that my anti-elite and, in some cases, anti-establishment criticism never means that we have to fight against the members of the ruling elite as individuals, in contradistinction to the peripheral agents of the global system of knowledge production. I explicitly think that global academia should be

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the societal field in which the global community can show that overcoming current hegemon structures are just as important for the members of the academic elite as for the oppressed peripheral actors, despite the fact that—as is the case in all fields of society—hegemon structures work for the elite and against the periphery. All the necessary changes should be performed and obtained from both the center and the periphery in parallel, because the global community should recognize that the academic field, insofar as it seeks to uphold its self-definition as a meritocracy, must abolish its center/periphery structure, make every talent visible regardless of geopolitical position, educational trajectory and social class, and it should do everything in its power to apprehend global processes in their totality. In this book I argue that, in the shadow of the material capital accumulation, a different type of capital, namely academic or knowledge capital, is also continuously being accumulated and disseminated. In this process, the world is divided into central, semi-peripheral and peripheral knowledge domains that could be matched with both geopolitical locations and social classes. In the course of the accumulation of academic capital, the center maintains and even strengthens its hegemony by, mostly, the exploitation of the periphery, but the periphery also contributes to this process by the self-stigmatization of peripheral or non-core knowledge. This self-stigmatization (Goffman 1963) incorporates the constant downgrading of non-Western epistemic traditions, methodologies and academic cultures by emerging peripheral agents and institutions as they aim to perfectly assimilate to their Western counterparts (de la Garza 2018). As a result, self-stigmatizing peripheral agents of the world-system of knowledge production could be, at most, very good imitations of central academics. As theoretical frameworks, I will use a specific alloy of field theory (Bourdieu 1988), dependency theories (Prebisch 1959) and world-systems theory (Wallerstein 2004), and I will explain the geopolitical and societal inequalities of the academic field through the lenses of these perspectives. However, I should confess, already in this introduction, that I will not faithfully follow any of these theories, but will instead try to give a new perspective on the dynamics of global academia in the light of former approaches. In other words, I will use and apply field theory, world-systems theory and dependency theories, rather

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than extensively discuss or develop any of them. What is more, I present my own simple model in Chap. 2 in which both societal stratification and geopolitical positions could be equally represented. I should note however that this present work does not seek to pose itself as a theoretical novelty, but rather aims, on the one hand, to empirically prove those critical assertions that have been already made in other research fields— typically in decolonization studies—but without accurate empirical demonstrations. On the other hand, this work is deliberately critical, as it aims to call out the questionable aspects of current global academia through extensive empirical analysis and thus calls not only for reflection, but for substantial changes as well. As it is due to the systemic operation of global academia that these questionable aspects in question relate to fundamental parts of the world-system of knowledge production, epistemic and cultural racism within the field cannot be altered without systemic and substantive reforms.

The Structure of the Book The book—apart from the technical Appendix—consists of two parts that include seven chapters. Part I includes this Introduction and two theoretical chapters that position the empirical results discussed in Part II. Chapter 2 introduces the main theoretical frameworks of the book, namely the Bourdieusian frame theory and the Wallersteinian world-­ system theory. We will see how international scholars collect academic capital or, in other words, transnational human capital by acquiring central degrees, credentials, research grants and, ideally, more and more central positions in the form of elite affiliations. I have constructed a three-dimensional model in which to analyze both the social stratification of Bourdieu and the geopolitical center/periphery relations of the world-systems research in a common framework. Thus, the empirical data will be discussed in the newly developed model introduced in this chapter. I will provide a comprehensive picture of the main concepts such as agents, field, capital, habitus, center, periphery and intellectual hegemony and, through our three-dimensional model, I will directly apply them to the industry behind global knowledge production. We will see

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that the hegemon structure of global knowledge production is a very complex one where geopolitical hegemony (in the form of the rule of elite central institutions) is tightly interwoven with societal (class-based) stratification since, as I will show, even those peripheral knowledge producers who succeed in acquiring some central capital are from the upper class of their native society. These are individuals who have access to the highly privileged and extremely expensive “center-within-the-periphery” institutions where they could collect global capital in their homelands. On the other hand, we have the “periphery-within-the-center” phenomenon whereby those coming from a lower social class are less likely to collect central academic capital even if they were born and live in the center. Chapter 3 deals with the dynamics behind the problem of inequality by discussing economic, epistemic, moral and institutional problems, including those directly linked to global academia. I will also discuss the main processes that have historically led to a core/periphery structure in international science. After a brief historical outline of the development of the aforementioned structure, I will link my theoretical considerations to the colonization/decolonization discussion that takes place in the field of global knowledge production. By “economic problems”, I mean the problems due to the uneven accumulation global academic capital which could lead to a serious fallback in knowledge production, and I will propose calculations that show how to maintain optimal growth in productivity. The discussion on moral problems entails issues related to the self-definition of science, i.e. that academic merit (such as talent and diligence) should be the only currency in the field of science. All inequalities, including bias based on social class and geopolitical position, run contrary to this principle, and thus raise serious ethical and moral issues. I will also present the problems of the epistemic monoculture, as described in the relevant literature: the so-called standards of global science tend to exclude all those—typically peripheral—epistemologies that are different, although they are not, as I will argue, inferior to the central episteme. Finally, under the topic of institutional problems, I will discuss the network-­based operation of the elite institutions through which they systematically overvalue each other’s academic capital, thereby creating an

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exclusive elitism similar to Bourdieu’s notion of State Nobility, which could be termed Global Nobility in this case. Part II includes those chapters dealing with the Global South’s participation in the field of international science. Chapter 4 begins with the categorization problems of the world of science. I will argue that, while semi-peripheral and peripheral regions are different both historically and culturally, from a world-systems perspective, they all could be considered as peripheries of the world-system of global knowledge production. As a case study, I will present the situation of Eastern Europe: how its Soviet oppression led to the Sovietization of the region and how it could be compared with imperial colonization. I will show that, as polity theory suggests, central cultural hegemony leads to the peripheralization of all regions other than the Anglo-American ones, and I will also argue that this cultural imperialism goes hand in hand with the uneven distribution of material resources such as publishing houses, journals, research grants and international associations. After defining (and slightly modifying) recent categorization patterns, the book discusses the dynamics behind the uneven distribution of global academic capital by using the theoretical framework developed in Chap. 2. This chapter also introduces the current academic capital of the Global South in different disciplines. This in-depth analysis deals with publishers, journals, editorial boards, universities and international associations in a global context, and I will make comparisons with Global North institutions to show the striking degree of inequality. I will argue that the so-called international character of the sciences cannot be proven through empirical analysis. On the contrary, this analysis shows a clear division of the field between a few winner and many loser countries. The situation is very much the same in the case of the most important gatekeepers of global publishing: the national diversity of editorial boards. Research shows that the national or regional composition of journal editorial boards significantly correlates with the national or regional diversity of the articles published in those journals. Thus, the more diverse an editorial board is, the more diverse the authorship of the journal will be. Currently, research shows that the editorial boards of top-tier journals are often exclusively made up of central scholars. In this chapter however, we will be able to differentiate between peripheral world regions, since some are more successful in terms of

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scientific autonomy and independence. We will show that a Latin hub has evolved with a relatively strong academic presence and, with China and India as leading countries, an Asian hub has also started to emerge. On the other hand, neither Eastern Europe nor Africa have been able to find a leading country and to establish a relatively strong scientific network. Also, in this chapter, I demonstrate some practices that Global South regions have used to try to break away from the center. These attempts include establishing regional networks and periodicals, but detrimental practices like publishing in fake, semi-predatory or predatory journals might also occur. Based on the fact that different agents of the world-system of knowledge production interact with each other to a great extent, some peripheral regions have recognized the “rules of the global game” and found ways to strengthen their positions in the field. As case studies and representatives of good practice, I will present formerly peripheral periodicals that have succeeded in reaching a leading or at least a very prestigious position in the global field. I will show how language policy, topical selectiveness and conscious citation universe building could lead to global recognition without central assistance. I will also present the effort of central agents to stop or, more frequently, to absorb these emerging peripheral periodicals by coemption and thus making them part of the hegemon academic center. On the other hand, I will also show how the emerging fake publishing practices have become double-­ edged swords that work against developing world regions by making peripheral institutions and agents more suspect in the eyes of central gatekeepers. Chapter 5 presents a great volume of empirical data from my previous research on the science output of different world regions in social sciences in general and in communication and media studies in particular. I will show that the visibility of the global South is under 1% in both Scopus and Web of Science, and I will also discuss the network of successful countries in the field. I will also show comparative data and I will contrast the uneven distribution of academic capital in different scientific disciplines such as the social sciences, psychology, communication, philosophy, chemistry, physics and mathematics. We will see that while each discipline has a different distribution of academic capital, the center/periphery structure of the field of knowledge production is rather

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similar in the case of all disciplines with the absolute hegemon position of the US, the UK and other developed countries of Western Europe. Moreover, we will see that academic collaborations hardly overstep the borders of regional or, more precisely, center/peripheral networks: central scholars tend to collaborate each other strategically, while center/periphery collaborations are very rare and almost always hierarchical in nature. The chapter also shows how emerging scholars from the Global South collect academic capital and boost their careers by earning Global North degrees, fellowships and, finally, tenured positions. On the other hand, I will also show that elite institutions systematically exclude agents without the appropriate reeducation, that is, without central academic capital. As a case study, I will present the results of my former research in which we analyzed the career paths of more than 3000 academics at elite universities and found that there was not one without central re-education. I will also argue that this exclusion of the South and the excessive brain drain and reeducation practices maintain Global North hegemony to a great extent, while also causing even the most successful peripheral authors to lose their authentic voices. As counterexamples, I will present the more adaptive, state-funded tactics of BRICS countries that have succeeded in raising their visibility without losing their talented people. In this chapter I will also argue that institutional development in university structures has an effect on the performance of individual academics. Moreover, I propose some approaches that could reduce or even eliminate the bias against peripheral knowledge producers. Chapter 5 also sets out to study the characteristics of the network of global academia by showing and explaining the most important connections between publishers, universities, authors, professional organizations, as well as some external economic and political factors. I will show the manifest and the hidden (latent) interests of the participants, and will argue that their largely predictable behavior serves as a barrier not only for peripheral participants, but also for global science itself. From an evolutional point of view, a social field (considered as a niche) is the healthiest when it is the most diverse. But unfortunately, in the case of global elite science, the selection pool is almost exclusively limited to those elite central scholars from elite institutions and central countries. This leads to an enormous amount of wasted talent and the emergence of a sort of “academic

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freakishness”. We can already see its first signs: in leading periodicals, we can often read mainstream, standardized, seemingly machine-produced articles using with mainstream methods, on mainstream topics, and with virtually no surprising or controversial results. In this chapter, the dynamics of the world-system of knowledge production will be analyzed by the (mostly economic) theories of profit maximization and capital accumulation and I will show that science, as a subsystem operating in the world-­ system of global capitalism, is no exception from this rule. Chapter 6 presents the most important considerations behind editorial policies. I will concentrate here on the so-called invisible motives, and I will argue that since editors have to maintain or, preferably, raise the rank of their journals, they will encounter issues concerning the Matthew effect, topical and thematic biases, preferential attachment or the rich get richer effect. Based on the literature and my own empirical research, I will argue that, in order to be published, even peripheral scholars have to adapt to Western epistemology, central methodology and have to prefer mainstream (i.e. central) topics as well. In accordance with the operation of the world-system of knowledge production, the center provides theories and methodologies while the role of the periphery is, in most cases, reduced to that of data provider. Moreover, in many cases, peripheral phenomena have to be investigated by central scholars in order to be published in leading periodicals—a process that could justly be called academic exploitation. As we will see, many structural features of the world-system of knowledge production interact against the emergence of the periphery: journal rankings, publishing practices and standards, epistemic and methodological requirements, language issues and even topical preferences work against peripheral scholars and in favor of their central peers. Chapter 7 sets out to study the characteristics of the network of global academia by showing and explaining the most important connections between publishers, universities, authors, professional organizations and some external economic and political factors. This final chapter also poses the question as to what should be done. As a possible answer, I will discuss the failure of centrally initiated de-Westernization processes in knowledge production and I will propose an Easternization or peripheralization project which entails Global North professionalism without

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westernizing Global South values. I will also argue that Global South agents should learn the game that international scientists play in order to use and subsequently modify current biased rules. As a minimum requirement, I propose that selection processes should be transparent and anonymized in a way that only the product itself could be known by gatekeepers like editors, reviewers, and selection committee members. As in the case of gender and race, where, ideally, the color or the gender of an applicant cannot play any role in the selection process, I will argue that the same must be done regarding center/periphery positions. Thus, it would be desirable that the current affiliation and even the place of the degrees of a potential author or candidate remain unknown for journal editors or selection board members until they make their decision. In this way, peripheral knowledge producers would not be coerced to mask, hide or even eliminate their authentic voices, episteme and academic culture. Beyond the narrow professional readership, I intend for this book to serve all those readers who are interested in the global processes of knowledge production, or who take an interest in cultural exclusion, the downside of globalization, or who want to learn more about academic inequalities in general. Consequently, I have tried to limit technical jargon and details in the text. For those readers who are interested in the empirical bases supporting the argumentation, I offer, on the one hand, the technical Appendix in which I introduce the methodologies of source selection, data collection, coding, calculations and the technical bases of interpretation, and, on the other hand, frequent references to my journal articles that cover all the necessary technical details, from sampling to data analysis.

References Ake, C. (1982). Social Science as Imperialism. The Theory of Political Development. Ibadan: The Ibidan University Press. Aman, R. (2016). Delinking from Western Epistemology. En Route from University to Pluriversity via Interculturality. In R. Grosfoguel, R. Hernández, & R. E. Velásquez (Eds.), Decolonizing the Westernized University (pp. 95–115). London: Lexington Books.

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Amin, S. (1997). Capitalism in the Age of Globalization: The Management of Contemporary Society. London: Zed Books. Amin, S. (2011). Global History. A View from the South. Dakar: Pambazuka Press. Arunachalam, S. (2002). The Global Research Village: A View from the Periphery. The University of Arizona Campus Repository, Tucson. Retrieved from http://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/handle/10150/105377 Ávila Reyes, N. (2017). Postsecondary Writing Studies in Hispanic Latin America: Intertextual Dynamics and Intellectual Influence. London Review of Education, 15(1), 21–37. Bandyopadhyay, J. (2017). “Development” and “Modernity” in the Global South. Why a Science and Technology Studies Perspective is Important. Economic and Political Weekly, 52(34), 34–37. Bazerman, C. (2016). The Brazilian Blend. In E. G. Lousada, A. D. O. Ferreira, L. Bueno, R. Rojo, S. Aranha, & L. Abreu-Tardelli (Eds.), Diálogos brasileiros no estudo de gêneros textuais/discursivos (pp. 645–650). Araraquara: Letraria. Bourdieu, P. (1988). Homo Academicus. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1996). The State Nobility. Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Oxford: Polity Press. Canagarajah, S.  A. (2002). A Geopolitics of Academic Writing. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. de la Garza, S. A. (2018). Challenges of De-/Pre-colonial Ontologies. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 13(3), 226–231. de Santos, B. S. (2018). The End of the Cognitive Empire. The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South. London: Duke University Press. Goffman, E. (1963). Stigma: Notes on the Management of a Spoiled Identity. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. Ha, L. (2016). Olympic Champions and Successful Scholars. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 93(4), 725–727. Heilbron, J., Sora, G., & Boncout, T. (2018). The Social and Human Sciences in Global Power Relations. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Keim, W., et  al. (2014). Global Knowledge Production in the Social Sciences. New York: Routledge. Kiely, R. (2016). The Rise and Fall of Emerging Powers. Globalisation, US Power and the Global North-South Divide. London: Palgrave. Kuhn, M., & Vessuri, H. (2016). The Global Social Sciences. Under and Beyond European Universalism. Stuttgart: Ibidem Press. Mignolo, W. D. (2011). The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Mignolo, W. D. (2018). On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxia. Durham: Duke University Press. Navarro, F. (2020). The Unequal Distribution of Research Roles in Transnational Composition: Towards Illegitimate Peripheral Participation. In C. Donahue & B.  Horner (Eds.), Teaching and Studying Transnational Composition. Modern Language Association. Navarro, F., Ávila Reyes, N., Tapia Ladino, M., Cristovão, V.  L. L., Moritz, M. E. W., Narváez Cardona, E., & Bazerman, C. (2016). Panorama histórico y contrastivo de los estudios sobre lectura y escritura en educación superior publicados en América Latina [Historical and Contrastive Panorama of Higher Education Reading and Writing Studies Published in Latin America]. Signos, 49(S1), 100–126. Parnell, S., & Oldfield, S. (2014). The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South. London: Routledge. Prebisch, R. (1959). Commercial Policy in the Underdeveloped Countries. The American Economic Review, 49(2), 251–273. Rigg, J. (2007). An Everyday Geography of the Global South. New York: Routledge. Rushton, J.  P., & Jensen, A.  R. (2005). Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 11(2), 235–294. Shi-xu. (2009). Reconstructing Eastern Paradigms of Discourse Studies. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 4(1), 29–48. Soederberg, S. (2004). The Politics of the New International Financial Architecture: Reimposing Neoliberal Domination in the Global South. London: Zed Books. Wallerstein, I. (2004). World Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham/London: Duke University Press.

2 The Stories Are Written by the Victors: Theoretical Considerations

There is a rather prestigious—at least, it is for Eastern European scholars—conference in Central and Eastern Europe, the Central and Eastern European Communication and Media Conference (CEECOM). We had the 10th anniversary CEECOM conference in 2018 and the theme was, among others, the position of communication and media studies in Eastern Europe. As a participant myself, I was rather astonished when I realized that amongst the four keynote speakers who had been invited to shed light on Eastern European communication scholarship, none were Eastern European. Distinguished scholars from an international (American), a French, a Finnish and an English university had come to tell us how things go in Eastern Europe. And of course, all this has been organized by Eastern European academics, who apparently had not been able to imagine that there was at least one Eastern European communication scholar who could say a word on Eastern European communication studies. This self-colonialization is, in my view, a rather characteristic feature of the structure that maintains existing hegemonies of global academia. Sometimes also called self-stigmatization, it is an aspect that the Global South will have to reckon with if it hopes to face a better future (Goffmann 1963). © The Author(s) 2020 M. Demeter, Academic Knowledge Production and the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52701-3_2

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Besides the above-mentioned inner barriers which are rarely discussed in the literature, Global South academics also have to face the much more frequently mentioned external barriers (Bonitz et  al. 1997). Whenever they apply for an academic job at a distinguished central institution, they will be certain to be greeted with a message of friendly inclusiveness: it does not matter who you are, but what you know. Your color, gender, religion, and sexual orientation do not matter anymore: all that matters is your product. Unfortunately, however, when we compare what these institutions say and what they do in reality, we will find a less welcoming attitude. As many of my former research papers clearly show (Demeter 2018b, 2019a), most departments in different subdisciplines of social sciences employ Global North educated academics almost exclusively, irrespective of their production in terms of scientific output, despite the fact that scientific output is almost the only objectively measurable indicator of scholarly productivity. In Chap. 5, I will show that even if Global South educated academics are able to show much better performance than their centrally trained peers, selection committees might prefer the latter ones. How can this be happening in a quasi-rational domain of the social world, namely, the so-called meritocratic field of global academia?

 Bourdieusian Perspective: Collecting A Academic Capital The notion that science is a game that scientists play according to well-­ established rules has a long history in the sociology of science, but it was Pierre Bourdieu who made a whole conceptual universe based on this assumption (Bourdieu 1998). By participating in this game, scientists internalize the existing rules of the field and transform them into inner habits which then determine their professional actions. Researchers who are the most successful in internalizing rules into habits gain more academic capital, while their less prosperous peers might suffer serious disadvantages. The original Bourdieusian ideas of different forms of capital have been expansively used by later social scientists to conduct descriptions of various fields of social phenomena (Bühlmann et  al. 2017;

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Gouanvic 2005; Wacquant 2018). Economic, social, cultural and symbolic capital were investigated in Leung’s research (2013), while Bauder analyzed different types of capital in academic research (2015). Bourdieu’s notion of capital could be roughly conceived as the extension of the economic sense of the concept, since Bourdieu’s purpose is to extend the sense of the term “capital” by employing it in a wider system of exchanges whereby assets of different kinds are transformed and exchanged within complex networks or circuits within and across different fields. He is attempting to relocate the narrow instance of mercantile exchange away from economics into a wider anthropology of cultural exchanges and valuations of which the economic is only one (though the most fundamental) type. It is important to note, however, that other forms of capital such as cultural and social can be seen as “transubstantiated” forms of economic capital. (Grenfell 2008, p. 102)

Thus, academic capital is a form of capital that can be acquired, accumulated and used in the field of academia. For Bourdieu, any kind of capital can be institutionalized, embodied or objectified. In the case of the academic field, the institutionalized form of capital can be acquired in the forms of certificates, degrees, diplomas, research grants, fellowships and so on. Embodied forms of academic capital include language skills (in a global context: typically, the knowledge of academic English) or the skill of knowing how to write research proposals; while objectified academic capital consists of features like owning scholarly books, or, more typically, owning professional software and having access to expensive databases like Web of Science or Scopus. One kind of capital has been already mentioned, since linguistic capital plays a crucial role when it comes to publication success in a field controlled by the English language. It means that proficiency in English is an inevitable prerequisite for an international career, and one which can almost only be acquired through mobility, that is, a Global North education (Horn 2017). As mobility is the most important factor when Global South academics wish to raise their academic capital, it is expected that more mobile authors will collect more capital. Amongst the most obvious examples of entry-level academic capital like BA, MA or

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Ph.D. degrees obtained in the Global North, scientists are in these cases able to collect advanced types of capital in the form of Global North postdoctoral research experience, international grants, Global North affiliations and, mostly, publications in leading periodicals (Hanssen et  al. 2017). Networking, collaboration, and co-authorship are also sources of measurable academic capital in terms of both citation and publication output (Ronda-Pupo and Katz 2018). According to Bourdieusian field theory, different types of capital are often interchangeable, meaning, for example, that academic capital can be converted into economic capital. It follows that scholars with more academic capital find better positions in the field in terms of not only symbolic, but economic capital as well. As Zdenek (2018) puts it, one of the most important conditions for international success, as represented in tenure and hiring decisions, is based on high-quality publications in leading peer-reviewed journals. However, the prerequisite for such publication is, in most cases, proficiency in English and a Global North education. Since we can assume that internationally recognized Global North institutions offer much better salaries and working conditions than their less exclusive Global South counterparts, we can see how academic capital becomes economic capital. Another type of symbolic capital—and one which, according to current research, is systematically—is the elite degree. The fact that elite degrees can be acquired almost exclusively in the Global North also intensifies mobility from periphery to center. Many researchers have even stated that the prestige of the affiliation of a given candidate’s Ph.D. school may determine her chances for a tenure track position to a much greater extent than her productivity (Baldi 1994). The function that the prestige of the alma mater plays in the career trajectories of future academics is extraordinarily important: Burris showed that “the prestige of the department in which an academic received a Ph.D. consistently ranks as the most important factor in determining the employment opportunities available to those entering the academic labor market” (Burris 2004, p. 239). This results in a process whereby elite institutions mutually hire one another’s candidates while systematically excluding academics with non-top degrees, often disregarding their merits, despite the fact that future productivity can only be predicted on the basis of past

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productivity, and not on the basis of the prestige of the past academic degrees (Fumasoli et al. 2015). Thus, at the analytical level, we should distinguish between institutional capital and human capital. While the former refers to the reputation of an institution (like the label of being part of the elite), the latter refers to the symbolic capital of an individual which is incorporated or objectified in university degrees from elite universities (Gerhards et al. 2017). It is obvious then that agents can partake in institutional capital by being educated there as they receive transnational human capital—in this respect, human capital proceeds from societal or institutional capital.

The Bourdieusian Concept of the Field Pierre Bourdieu extensively analyzed many institutions of social reality in general and power relations in the field of academia, in particular in his Homo Academicus (1988). His main terms, including the field, capital and habitus, have become the focal point of wide scholarly discussion, and his later followers have conducted heroic efforts to maintain the significance of field theory in the description of various phenomena of social life (Grenfell 2008). In this chapter, I am not attempting to position myself as a post-Bourdieusian scholar, neither do I want to set myself up as a renderer of field theory. I have to emphasize the interpretative nature of my discussion here, since my aim is not to simply summarize or recite the orthodox Bourdieusian theory, but to consider the basic concepts of field theory as tools that can be used in a flexible manner. Moreover, I will extend the Bourdieusian perspective in order to include global issues. For this end, I will also use many considerations from Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system theory. In my view, the most fundamental concept of the Bourdieusian field theory is the concept of the field itself. Bourdieu conducted significant efforts to emphasize the role that the field of forces plays in academic life, and his later followers dedicated an enormous amount of research to this topic (Bauder 2015; Bauder et al. 2017; Grenfell 2008; Gouanvic 2005; Hadas 2016; Hilgers and Mangez 2015; Leung 2013; Recke 2011; Rothenberger et  al. 2017; Wacquant 2018; Wiedemann and Meyen

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2016). According to the original Bourdieusian idea, the field is “the space of the relations of force between the different kinds of capital or, more precisely, between the agents who possess a sufficient amount of one of the different kinds of capital to be in a position to dominate the corresponding field (Bourdieu 1988, p. 34).” The field of forces (the original, le champ, is sometimes translated as a field of power or simply force field) has the well-established institutions of the Kuhnian normal science (Kuhn 1962). The field of forces—as the place where normal science takes place—is conservative by nature, and its efforts aim to maintain or even strengthen existing power relations. Prestigious institutions (in our case: universities, publishers, research committees, and so on) use every endeavor to entrench their top-tier position, but also keep their eyes on the emerging but presently peripheral agents of the field. A good example of the former is when prestigious institutions tend to hire candidates from other elite institutions, or, as is quite common, from their own institution even when there are better applicants in terms of science production (see Chap. 5). With this attitude, leading academic institutions recruit the “next generation” of agents directly from the in-­group who will not query existing power structures. An example of monitoring the periphery for emerging agents is when successful international (that is, Global North) publishing houses look for prosperous journals from the Global South, which they try to buy up in order to make them part of the in-group. In this way, as we will see in Chap. 6, the core tries to annex presumably successful emerging agents from the Global South in order to forestall the possibility of peripheral agents establishing alternative core regions or academic hubs. Actually, as we will see in Chap. 4, this does not always succeed, as a consequence of academic countermovements in certain parts of the Global South. Turning back to the concept of the field of forces, one can enumerate many social agents in the field that contribute to the maintenance of existing hegemonies. Unsurprisingly, one of the most important social agents is the language itself, which is, in our case, the unquestionable authority of (mostly American) academic English (Horn 2017). Research shows that leading periodicals, especially in the social sciences almost exclusively publish English content (Lauf 2005). Even if they do succeed in being published, non-English articles suffer from lower citation scores

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than English papers (Bonitz et al. 1999). It is obvious that these aforementioned facts result in a serious bias against non-English authors, since they have to make an extra investment in learning a second language on a professional level, and since they presumably read and write slower in English than their native English peers. Moreover, besides the language itself, they must also master the Anglo-Saxon rhetoric and academic writing skills. In systematic research on data from 27 interviews and more than 400 surveys, researchers found that “paper submissions are usually judged according to Anglophone norms of communication—a situation that would seem to privilege good English, and thus, often, although not always, privileges native speakers”(Horn 2017, p.  779). The authors emphasize that most authors from non-English countries believe that they cannot deal with Global North community expectations, and they often worry about unfair treatment in the form of sociolinguistic discrimination. The interview details from Horn’s research give an extremely interesting insight into the mentality of the native reviewers when they are assessing the anonymized papers. As a reviewer, it is usually pretty apparent if the author is a non-native speaker of English. Actually, near to the point of whether the authors are East-European, East Asian, or from a Spanish-speaking country. Those things stand out pretty quickly. Social sciences are writing disciplines, and whether that is fair or not, considerations of good communication have to be part of the review process. It is certainly a privilege being an English native speaker when it comes to publishing. The term “international” just means writing in English.

On the other hand, non-native interviewees reported on the extensive disadvantages they have to face because of their non-English background. One of my co-authors is from country x (anonymized). In one of our papers, we list the countries we are familiar with. My co-author thinks we should not do this because reviewers will think that we are not native speakers. When my manuscript deals with a sample from a European country (anonymized), the reviewers usually comment on its reliability and

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g­ eneralizability because of its country focus. I doubt that authors received the same comments when such a study was conducted in an Anglophone context.

From the latter comments, we could see that being non-Anglophone is not just a linguistic issue: it is tightly interwoven with being peripheral in terms of epistemology, culture and politics. Instances are reported when authors had to remove their non-English references because, without this trick, reviewers would easily recognize the authors as peripheral academics (Moustafa 2015). In short, as overlapping opinions of some native and non-native academics, language plays a crucial role in assessing the perceived quality of a proposed paper and thus favors Anglophone—i.e. Global North—academics. I have to mention, as a positive and progressive example, that there are journals, even very prestigious ones, that encourage the submission of non-English articles. Current Sociology is a good example. They do not require authors to send their first submission in English; instead, they go through the review process in their native language, if the editorial board can find referees with the appropriate language skills (Martin 2017). Other anti-bias actions have made Current Sociology to be one of the less biased journals: in fact, in comparison with sociology journals having the same level of prestige, it has a fairly high proportion of Global South authors. It comes perhaps as no surprise that its editor-in-chief is a self-­ professed Global South academic without a Global North education (Martin 2015). Other subfields of the field of forces also wield some institutional power. Selection committees, for example, hold very important power roles in global academia. They can decide the career paths of individual researchers by setting the price of entry and tenure conditions (Bourdieu 2004). In, for example, the case of communication studies, international communication scholars should, early in their career, publish at least one or two papers in leading periodicals, preferably in International Communication Association or National Communication Association journals in order to ensure a successful tenure application at any acknowledged institution (Pooley and Park 2013). But as we will see later in Chap. 4, the amount of Global South authors in these top-tier

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periodicals is under 1% and there are even journals that simply have no Global South content. Ever. Because of their almost absolute power in determining the career possibilities of young researchers, selection committees play the role of gatekeepers at the field of forces. By showing favor towards candidates with a Global North education and with articles in top-tier journals (whose content, as it has been mentioned, is frequently made up of 99% Global North articles) selection committees not only maintain, but also strengthen the existing bias against Global South academics. It is almost impossible for them to obtain Global North affiliations because they do not have articles in journals that almost exclusively publish articles from authors with Global North affiliations. Beyond all question, this is a vicious circle: in order to become part of the core, competitors from the periphery should already be part of the center, which is a contradiction in terms. As I will show in Chap. 5, ambitious candidates from the Global South are well aware of this, so they begin to act like Global North academics as early as possible in their careers. Sadly however, being talented and ambitious is far from being enough to develop the required career trajectory since, even more than at the Global North, elite (i.e. international) education is only accessible to upper-class families of the Global South. Thus, global academic inequalities are exacerbated by class inequalities in terms of education and, consequently, future carrier possibilities. Besides language and selection criteria, the field of forces also determines the preferred thematic clusters. Empirical research shows that in communication and media studies, that is, one of the most biased disciplines in the social sciences, some orthodox topics of research are preferred, typically those with an American focus, while research conducted with quantitative social science methods is easier to publish than that written on non-Western topics and conducted in accordance with non-­ mainstream approaches (Freelon 2013). The characteristic clusters in communication and media studies are interpersonal communication, race and media, parasocial interaction, multimedia, political communication, hostile media, the psychology of communication and agenda setting. Moreover, all these clusters have their “citation universes” and received methodologies. In order to be published, most early career

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scholars tend to conduct their research in the orthodox thematic clusters, with the orthodox methods and based on the orthodox literature. This leads to, again, a very strong bias against the non-orthodox, and thus against non-Western scholars. I can vividly remember each time I have had to make a presentation on any Hungarian issue at an international conference, and my peer peripheral colleagues have reported similar experiences. If you are from the periphery, you always have to begin from the basics: you have to introduce your region, its political, cultural or economic features and so on. If you are lucky, you end up with three minutes to present your actual research. By contrast, American colleagues can simply introduce their topic as follows: “In this presentation, I will talk about the election”, in which case everyone might, or even should, know that it is the American presidential election and that they should know all its participants and processes including historical and structural features. But this is not the worst problem. Usually, if they are able to provide serious justification, Global South academics can attend international conferences and present their projects (at least partly). The situation is not the same in the case of international publication possibilities, where thematic clusters are more strictly delineated than in the case of conferences; not surprisingly, of course, if we consider that, in the case of the giant annual international conferences, there can often be thousands of presentations, while top-tier journals only have space for a few dozen articles annually. Science policy and state strategies work on the macro-level, and their effects on the field of forces increase with the decline of the relative autonomy of the sciences. When the state abandons the sciences by cutting funding, as has been the case in Russia and many other Eastern European regions, the most mobile researchers will try to move towards more prosperous regions in order to earn a living. The opposite is true: when the state deliberately invests in academic institutions and research programs, as it does in China, this results in strengthened academic life and in a much better power position (Asheulova and Dushina 2014). University rankings and journal rankings like Scopus or Web of Science’s SSCI list play also an important role in organizing the field of forces, since international students and the most mobile international scholars will target the top-ranked universities (Pietrucha 2018). In the case of the

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Shanghai Ranking, research output is one of the most important categories with extraordinary emphasis on SSCI papers. Other rankings like the QS World University Ranking or the Times Higher Education World University Ranking also use the publication output of faculty in their calculations. Lecturing at the top-ranked universities and publishing in the top-ranked periodicals result in prestige and a great amount of academic capital. Finally, besides selection committee members, publishers, editorial board members and reviewers also play the role of gatekeepers in the field of forces, since they can determine the publication output of international researchers.

 he Criticism of Bourdieu’s Theory: T Going Global However profound the Bourdieusian analysis of the field of science was in his age, his theory, and especially its application to the field of science, can be criticized in many ways. From the point of view of this chapter, the most important point to criticize is that Bourdieu suffered from a so-­ called epistemological and empirical nationalism as he primarily analyzed the field of French academia and did not especially concern himself with international science as a complex system. Thus, current researchers have extended the framework of his field theory so that it can handle international issues, typically globalization. Gerhards and his colleagues developed the concepts of transnational field and transnational human capital, referring to the global context in which academics should operate. (Gerhards et  al. 2017). However, I should mention that accusing Bourdieu of nationalistic bias is unjust, since, as he emphasized many times in his global lectures, for example at Toda and East Berlin in 1989, his theory is structural and empirical. This means that the structure of the French academic field, to name a particular case, might be very similar to the structure of the Japanese or the German academic fields, despite superficial differences on phenomenological level (Bourdieu 1994). Notwithstanding, Bourdieu did not directly deal with global science or

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transnational knowledge production, thus later followers should develop the field-theoretical perspective into this direction. But what is transnational academic capital? In order to be able to answer this question, we should first consider the query as to whether the distinction between national and transnational academic capital can and should be made at all. One could assume that, since science is by definition global (or at least international), a distinction of this kind might be meaningless. But when we prefer practice to theory, it will be obvious that, except for the most powerful countries in terms of soft power, national academic capital is clearly different from its global counterpart. Based on their empirical analysis, Wu and Zha (2018) counted four types of internalization, each of them marking typical world regions and national tactics. The first type includes the United States and, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom, where national science coincides with international science. As we will see in the following chapters, most so-called international forums of global science are, in fact, American, and top-tier international periodicals are typically published either in the US or the UK. American and UK degrees are widely accepted worldwide, so, with American or English institutionalized academic capital, one should manage to get along at both the national and the international levels of academia. The second type consists of those relatively powerful and populated developed countries where the international and national fields of science are equally important, but are also different social realms, meaning that they are conducted in parallel. The typical examples here are France, Germany, Japan or, to some degree, Spain, where a successful academic can collect national academic capital or she can accumulate transnational academic capital, since both the internationalization of science and the cultivation of the national academic tradition are equally respected career trajectories. In these countries, however, national academic capital does not boost international career paths in the way it does in countries of the first type. In a relatively early stage of their academic life, researchers of the second type should decide which career trajectory—national or international—they would like to follow, and have to start accumulating academic capital in the light of their decision.

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The third type includes those smaller, but still developed countries where science means almost exclusively international science. In countries like Switzerland or the Netherlands, academics must produce international achievements in order to be respected in both their national and international academic communities. With the exception of a relatively small number of nation-specific fields of research, scholars in these countries work on international research projects and publish in international journals. Moreover, despite the fact that the higher education of these countries is generally considered to be of high quality, it is very hard to convert purely national academic capital from these countries into international positions, so researchers with plans for an international career typically get their PhDs from the countries of the first type. Finally, we have the overwhelming majority of countries where it is very difficult to engage in international science, and academic life is almost completely reduced to national science. In these economically less developed countries of the periphery, researchers may wish to be partners in international communication and co-operation, but face obstacles in doing so because they tend not to be considered partners on equal terms (Wu and Zha 2018). Junior academics with the appropriate family background and ambition tend to emigrate as soon as they can, and are unlikely to ever return to their homeland (Gerhards et  al. 2017). Moreover, as I will argue later, this mobility in order to collect transnational academic capital is, almost exclusively, the privilege of upper-­ middle to upper-class students; thus the international mobility of students and junior researchers not only affirms, but also reinforces class-based social inequalities (Fuse 2018; Golden 2006). It is obvious from the above-delineated categorization that a very clear center/periphery structure is characteristic of global academia with semi-­ peripheral regions and even contested peripheries (Boatca 2006). As Chase-Dunn ascertains, interconnected societal fields such as economy, culture, politics and communication should be analyzed from a global rather than a local perspective, and as we have seen, global academia is no exception (1999). By applying the world-system theoretical perspective to the field of global science, we can not only extensively broaden the use of the concepts of Bourdieusian field theory in order to describe global issues, but we can also provide a theoretically underpinned explanation

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for the experienced international inequality in the field of international soft power from a global perspective.

The World-System of Knowledge Production According to Wallerstein, a world-system is a multicultural and international network in which different necessities flow (1974). This network is such that it entails different nations with different cultures, norms, languages, institutions, values and so on. Chase-Dunn et al. defined world-­ systems as “intersocietal networks in which the interactions (e.g. trade, warfare, intermarriage, information) are important for the reproduction of the internal structures of the composite units and importantly affect changes that occur in these local structures” (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997, p.  28). Another inherent feature of world-systems is that they develop a typical core/periphery structure through regional variations in accumulation of capital (Wallerstein 1983). Thus, in the case of the world-system of global social science, we have to measure its structure in terms of centrality and connectedness, and we also have to measure the global distribution of academic capital. World-system theoretical approaches are most frequently used when discussing global political or economic issues, but have been applied to the field of science as well. While Schott’s research (1998) is one of the most emblematic analyses dealing with global science, and besides its clear and obvious virtues, it also has two weak points. I will briefly discuss the most illustrative positive aspects of the above-mentioned inquiry and then I will sketch out some critical insights. First of all: Schott observed correctly that global science could be conceived as a network of its agents, and world-systems theory is a perfect explanatory framework for the analysis of the main ties between the participating actors. He pointed out the most important processes whereby the field of global academia maintains its hegemonic structure, and he also successfully identified the differences between the capital accumulation of the central, semi-peripheral and peripheral regions of the world. For this reason, Schott deserves to be mentioned as the founder of the world-systems theoretical analysis of global science that was previously analyzed by, in most cases, the methods

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of the sociology of science (Saurin 2016), scientometrics (Siversten 2016) or, most recently, by network science (Demeter 2017). Nevertheless, Schott’s research has two major deficiencies, the first of which relates to the fact that he concentrated solely on the natural sciences, as he used data from SCI Web of Science. But as it is well known, regional differences in the social sciences are far greater than in the natural sciences. As opposed to hard sciences, the soft disciplines are carriers of cultural, epistemic, political and ideological features that make their global distribution the exact representation of transnational soft power (Heilbron et al. 2018). As the reader may have already noticed, I use the expressions “soft power relations” and “global social sciences” interchangeably, which is not common in the literature, since soft power as it was introduced by Nye (1990) more typically refers simply to the cultural dominance of the US. In my usage of soft power, however, I am refering to the fact that ideologies, policies, cultural trends and many other means of soft power relations come directly or indirectly from the social sciences. It is obvious then, that the social sciences are very much subject to hegemonic biases since they can be successfully used as a means of global control. Accordingly, researchers have found much greater inequalities in the social sciences and humanities than in the case of natural sciences. In terms of regional diversity, the most biased picture was found in the cases of psychology, social sciences, communication and media studies, followed by philosophy, while serious but still significantly smaller imbalances were found in the cases of hard sciences when mathematics, physics and chemistry were measured (Demeter 2019b). The second deficiency of Schott’s analysis is that he overemphasized the role of the so-called international standards by which more central academics have more achievements, while he underestimated the role of the exploiting methods by which the world-system of global academia aims to maintain its power relation structure. He wrote that The community of scientists is not a community of equals because scientists differ in their accomplishments, and its network is not a uniform grid. Indeed, an accomplished scientist attracts many ties while a novice is typically ignored. Ties are especially dense between some participants and particularly sparse between some nodes. Ties are dense within a country and

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sparse between different nations. Ties within and to a periphery are sparse. The accomplishments of the center attract more ties, both from within the center and from peripheries. (Schott 1998, p. 116)

In my view, this statement fails to take a critical stance towards the fact that social system hegemonies are unlikely to be constructed on a purely meritocratic basis, as the building blocks of any societal system serve for the maintenance of the current power structure. It also neglects a fact that is clear to scholars in education research: central places in education are, most of all, carriers of academic capital by which they are able to maintain their power positions (Bourdieu 1988; Golden 2006). Later in this chapter, I will argue that this situation leads to a double-edged Matthew Effect that confronts peripheral academics with two serious impediments: the problem of poor infrastructure, including poor education, on the one hand, and with their systematical devaluation by more central academic agents on the other hand.

 Three-Dimensional Model for Representing A Academic Inequalities I will now delineate a three-dimensional model that contains both the horizontal center/periphery relations that world-systemic approaches mostly deal with, and the Bourdieusian vertical center/periphery relations that shows social class representation in a coordinate system is based on the different capacities of the agents for accumulating academic/symbolic capital (Demeter 2019c). In Bourdieu’s system, the vertical stratification could also be separated into a left-wing and a right-wing dimension, from which the agents of the left wing (typically university professors, artists and other members of the intelligentsia) collect symbolic capital, while the agents of the right wing typically collect economic capital. For Bourdieu, it is more important for the members of the intelligentsita to collect symbolic capital through elite education than it is for the owners of economic capital, because in the absence of economic power, the accumulation of symbolic capital is essential for the intelligentsia (Bourdieu 1994).

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The horizontal dimension of center/periphery relations is based on geopolitical features. In this sense can we talk about Western hegemony, or the central position of the Global North, or Anglo-American dominance. In the horizontal dimension, we can talk about the geographical core and geographical periphery. On the other hand, we have the periphery within the core (Kristensen 2015) and the core within the periphery phenomena, where the first refers to the institutional stratification inside a given location or nation, and the second refers to the presence of international elite institutions at the periphery. This vertical dimension shows that there are marginalized communities within the center (subordinate ethnic, class, and gender groups and institutions without prominent reputations) that are made to serve the interests of the dominant groups of their societies. Similarly, there are elite groups in the periphery that sustain their relative dominance by aligning with center elites and suppressing the minority and marginalized groups in their own local communities (…). Through the elite groups in the periphery, the center dominates these communities. (Canagarajah 2002, p. 39)

But this vertical core/periphery relation is too complex to be reduced to a unidirectional model. While the existence and, in many cases, the dominance of the epistemological North in the Global South is the typical pattern, we also have occurrences of the epistemological South in the Global North in the form of struggles against colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism (Santos 2018). Table  2.1 below delineates the main dimensions of the model I propose, with some suggestions and examples. While Table 2.1 below describes the main feature of the different core-­ periphery positions in our proposed model, Fig.  2.1 below shows the structure of the model. The horizontal plane represents core/periphery relations in a geopolitical sense, while the vertical axis represents social stratification, which will be represented in a more detailed way below the complex model. The positions of the different academic agents could be represented three-dimensionally: they are at the intersection of their horizontal (geopolitical) and their vertical (social) positions.

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Table 2.1  The three-dimensional model of power relations in global academia Vertical centrality

Vertical peripherality

Horizontal centrality

Horizontal peripherality

US elite institutions like Ivy League universities Elite universities in the United Kingdom (Oxbridge, UCL, LSE) International associations founded in and governed by the West The (inter)national elite of the Global North Leading publishing houses (situated, without exception, in the West) Community colleges in the US Small state schools in the West Mass education as it is (as opposed to elite schools) The lower classes of the Global North Underprivileged groups in the Global North

American elite universities in the Global South like the CEU in Hungary or the American University in Cairo Global South countries with very strong ties to American elite institutions (Israel is the typical example, but also Hong Kong and Singapore) The international elite of the Global South

Ordinary Global South HEIs National publishing houses and periodicals of the global South The lower class of the Global South Underprivileged groups in the Global South

Source: Demeter (2019c)

The social stratification dimension could be conceived as a matrix in which the level of accumulation of different kinds of capital (typically symbolic and economic capital) could be represented. In this sense, we can differentiate between the intelligentsia, whose members typically accumulate symbolic capital, and the economic elite that mainly collects economic capital. This distinction originates from Bourdieu, who posits that accumulating different levels of (different kinds of ) capital have turned social stratification into a class system in which different agents with different positions can be represented (Bourdieu 1994). From our point of view, we have to concentrate on two things. First, the vertical axis of this societal dimension refers to the level of accumulation in

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Fig. 2.1  The structure of the three-dimensional model of academic stratification. (Source: Demeter 2019c)

general, irrespective of the type of capital. Second, the horizontal axis represents the type of capital. Thus, a societal position of a given agent can be represented by its position as an intersection of capital accumulation level and type of capital. This position represents the societal dimension of a given agent of the field, while its geopolitical position is represented on the horizontal dimension of the complex model (Fig. 2.1, above) (Fig. 2.2).

The Agents of the World-System I will concentrate here on three special agents of the field of forces, namely the triumvirate of authors, reviewers and editors. However, it should be noted that almost all participants in the field can be called agents in the sense that they have an impact, or at least are capable of having a significant impact on other agents. No one is a simple participant in the strict sense. In this way, selection committees, administrative staffs, editorial boards, conference organizers and committees are collective agents, just

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Fig. 2.2  Stratification of capital accumulation on the social dimension of the model

like research institutions, universities, funding boards and even whole nation states with defined science policies. For example, the most striking feature of peer review is that, while it is intended to assure the unbiased assessment of academic research, it is one of the most biased processes in academia. In theory, and this is the original reason behind the so-called double-blind peer review, the author(s) and the reviewers are anonymous vis-à-vis one another. This aims to exclude potential gender or racial bias, as well as (far from infrequent) cases of personal enmity. But in reality, we have two problems here. First, editors are always familiar with the identity of the authors, including information on their affiliations, and second, anonymized papers can reveal the identity of their authors. In some cases—it is quite common in elite sociological journals like the American Sociological Review or the American Journal of Sociology—authors of research articles must even report the institution from which they obtained their PhD. This practice

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is deleterious and exclusionist in at least two ways. First, it excludes everyone without a PhD, despite the fact that a PhD is not a guarantee of excellence in research, and that, conversely, researchers without a doctoral degree can also write excellent papers. Second, it gives rise to the assumption that the editor will be biased towards authors with an elite PhD. Consequently, the obligation for the author to report the institution having granted their PhD cannot be justified by any reason, except exclusionism and elitism. The first problem with the so-called double-blind peer review process is that editors are well aware of the authors of the so-called anonymized papers. When researchers propose their articles through international publication platforms like Manuscript Central, they have to indicate their affiliations. The consequences are well known: Editors are ultimately humans. They could be biased consciously or unconsciously in favor or against an article when they recognize the author’s name, his gender, country or institution, etc. In the same way, an article can be rejected upon initial screening without further consideration just because an editor has an impression about the author’s name, his gender, his previous work, his country or his affiliated institution, despite the potential merit of the submitted material. (Moustafa 2015)

What is equally important and yet underemphasized is the fact that, in almost every case, authors are informed of the reviewers’ opinion through a letter from the editor, so the whole review and decision process is far from being transparent. Authors are not given the uncut version of the reviewers’ comments, only the edited version and the decision of the editor. As Petersen puts it, journal editors play a crucial role in the dissemination of scientific knowledge, as they make the first and final judgment on acceptance or (desk) rejection of submitted manuscripts. By selecting and shaping what gets published in and distributed via journals, they act as opinion formers, gatekeepers, and arbiters of disciplinary values. (Petersen 2017, p. 256)

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I have already mentioned some aspects of the second problem, viz. that the paper reveals a great deal of information on the author’s identity, even if the manuscript is anonymized. Language itself shows whether the author is from an Anglophone or from a non-native English part of the world. Other features, like the national characteristic of the topic, the territory of the research sample and the reference list may confirm the nationality of its author. What is more, editors tend to choose reviewers by taking a look at the reference list of the paper (DeVaney et al. 2017), which results in an obvious correlation between the manuscript, the reference list (citation universe) and the reviewer. For example: as we have seen earlier, authors tend to hide non-Anglophone references, since it makes it obvious that the author is not a native English speaker from a developed country. This means that an author will presumably have Anglophone references, thus the editor will select Anglophone reviewers. Moreover, if the reviewer is on the reference list, he or she might know that, were the paper to be published, it would certainly cite his or her work, which might bias that reviewer’s comments. One can easily imagine which article would gain the goodwill of the editor and the reviewers: the one from Harvard by a distinguished professor, or the one from a developing country, written by a PhD candidate? In order for global academia to obviate these biases, it would have to promote the (still infrequent) practice of triple-blind peer review where authors, reviewers, and editors are all unknown to each other (Moustafa 2015). In 2018, Publons, a new provision of Clarivate Analytics, issued a global research report on peer review practices. Its results show an extremely biased and unequal pattern (https://publons.com/community/ gspr). They found that the US dominates absolute contribution to peer review, and that all central regions review more than emerging regions relative to their respective article output. Another key finding was that editors are disproportionately selected from the Global North, and, since earlier research has shown a significant positive correlation between the nationality of editors and editorial board members and the nationality of the affiliations of the published papers (Lauf 2005; Demeter 2018c), we can reasonably surmise that global academia is highly biased against Global South agents in terms of both editors and published papers. There are only two countries in the world where the “supply and demand ratio”

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for reviews is positive, meaning that they write more reviews than articles. These two countries, namely, the US and the UK, review much more articles than they produce, indicating that they have very strong power positions. In this respect, all the other countries are on a negative axis: they need external reviews, while the US and the UK are able to review much more articles than they produce. The most significant difference between the number of published and reviewed papers can be found in the cases of China, India, and Iran. These developing countries have a significant share in publication output, but their scholars are invited for review with disproportionate infrequency. The authors of the Publons Report draw a very vivid picture of power relations in the global academia by providing data on publication rates, review rates and editor rates of the Global North and South (Table 2.2). The level of inequality is, beyond question, striking. We can see from the data that reviews written by Global South academics are rather infrequent (less than 20%) in spite of the fact that they are more willing to accept invitations to review than their Global North colleagues and that they also write their comments earlier. But the most astonishing fact is that, in terms of editors, the most powerful control agencies, the Global North is represented by no less than 96.1%. In addition, one should note that these calculations are for all disciplines, and that inequalities are much more pronounced in the social sciences than, for example, in natural sciences or engineering (Demeter 2019b). Publons’ data also emphasizes these differences: while it clearly shows that while there are disciplines in which some emerging regions (typically Table 2.2  Key statistics for the Global North and South by Publons Web of science publication output Reviews Reviews per submission Median review time (days) Review invitation agreement date Review length (words) Editors

Global North

Global South

66.1% 78.1% 1.95 16.4 49.5% 527.5 96.1%

29.3% 19.1% 0.66 15.1 56.6% 249.9 3.9%

Based on the calculations of Publons: Global State of Peer Review 2018 Report. Retrieved from https://publons.com/community/gspr

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China) could have a fair share in terms of review volume, its contribution in other disciplines is still almost unnoticeable. Typical examples for the former are chemistry, computer science, materials sciences, physics, and multidisciplinary research; while examples of the latter category in which there is no significant Global South contribution are social sciences and psychology.

Norms The role of norms in the Bourdieusian theory was extensively investigated by Rothenberger and his colleagues (Rothenberger et  al. 2017). Accordingly, instead of extensive theorization, I would relate norms directly to the field of global academia. There are a bunch of norms that play a crucial role in assessing a scholar’s work: importance, theoretical integration, methodology, completeness, normative connection and originality. Based on their extensive analysis on peer review decisions, Neumann and his colleagues found that the most important norms are clarity (of the research paper), methodology and theoretical integration, while importance, originality and normative connection turned out to be marginal as selection criteria (Neuman et al. 2008). This does not mean that they are unimportant, rather that, in most cases, reviewers describe papers as important and original, irrespective of their other comments. Thus, calling a research paper “important” is more likely a gesture of courtesy than a substantive appraisal. The most important norms are related to the theory used. As Neumann and his colleagues put it, they have “come to the conclusion that theory is king. Without a clear connection to an identifiable theoretical corpus and providing an original contribution to that corpus, pristine prose or magnificent methods do not provide the key to scholarly recognition” (Neuman et al. 2008). These underlying norms determine the prospect of scientists to publish their articles in prestigious journals since, in order to be published, they have to be familiar with basal norms. To a lesser extent, the opposite could also be true, for scientific communities could affect serious methodological or epistemic change (Estrada et  al. 2018). It is noteworthy

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that publishing in leading periodicals is not optional, but a requirement when a researcher plans an international career, for the most important condition for professional success represented in tenure and hiring decisions is based on publications in leading peer-reviewed journals (King et al. 2017). Since most norms are learned through education, and leading journals are published exclusively in the Global North, authors educated in the Global South face significant challenges when trying to publish their research in the most prestigious periodicals (Lauf 2005). Acquiring and internalizing these norms through mobility and having a Global North education is, therefore, essential to a successful research career (Meyen 2012; Wiedemann and Meyen 2016). In other words, especially for those academics from the Global South, mobility turns out to be the most effective habitus for collecting academic or symbolic capital (see Chap. 5 for a detailed discussion on this topic).

 he Field of Struggle: Heterodox T and Orthodox Scholars The field of struggle is the “place” where scientific revolutions start to develop through the nonconformist activity of heterodox scholars (Bourdieu 2004). As in the case of any sciences, we can differentiate between push and pull activities in the social sciences: while the former involves the (mostly critical) activities of still peripheral “heterodox” scholars, the latter relates to the (mostly conservative) activities of more central “orthodox” agents. Heterodox scholars, therefore, frequently criticize the publication bias towards Global South authors. Typical theoretical frameworks for explaining the phenomenon of scientific inequalities are dependency theory (Ferraro 2008; Prebisch 1959; Thomas-Slayter 2003;) and the Mertonian theory based on the concept of the Matthew Effect, especially the theory of the Matthew Effect for Countries (Bonitz et al. 1999). Since I will provide a more detailed discussion on these theories later in Chap. 5, I will concentrate here only on the main findings that are relevant for our current line of thought. The concept of dependency dates back to Raul Prebisch, who has a Marxist conception of the

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global economic system. His most important statements were that (1) the center derived (at least partly) its wealth from the periphery, (2) the relationship between subdominant and dominant states is an enduring one, and (3) the only chance for a dependent area to become a center is that it break away from the old, dominant center (Love 1980). As an addition to the existing bias against Global South authors, we have the Matthew Effect for Countries that says that even if Global South authors succeed in publishing their work in leading journals, they will be less cited that their counterparts from developed countries: A minority of countries, expecting a high number of citations per scientific paper, gains more citations than expected, while the majority of countries, expecting only a low number of citations per scientific paper, achieves fewer citations than expected. In the spirit of Merton, we called this effect Matthew Effect for Countries. (Bonitz et al. 1999, p. 408)

Authors from different regions of the Global South have investigated the nature and possible causes of these inequalities. There are in-depth analyses on this topic from Latin America (Jalata 2013; Perez 1990), from Africa (Amadi 2012; Onyancha 2016), from Asia (Hung 2016; Myrdal 1974), and from Eastern Europe as well (Bruszt and Greskovits 2009; Bruszt and Langbein 2017; Demeter 2018a). But with the socalled de-Westernization theories of some Global North scholars, the “pull effect” has also started to play on the field of struggles (Rothenberger et  al. 2017; Waisbord 2015b; Waisbord and Mellado 2014). De-Westernization means, at least theoretically, the critique of the West-­ centrism of the field: The critique of Euro-American centrism in communication theories has in recent years led to calls for Afrocentric/Asiacentric approaches to research, and the emergence of geocultural theories. The discussion has underscored the urgency for us to re-examine the way cultural differences are handled in academic discourse. (Wang 2014, p. 373)

According to Waisbord and Mellado, de-Westernization should be related to scholars, topics, themes, ideas, methods, experiences,

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epistemologies, theoretical perspectives and academic cultures. Silvio Waisbord, current editor of the International Communication Association’s (ICA) flagship Journal of Communication (JoC) clearly expresses his conception regarding de-Westernization in his 2015 editorial: JoC also needs to reflect the globalization of ICA and the field of communication. […] It needs to give visibility to arguments that invite us to rethink conclusions largely drawn from studies conducted in the United States and a few countries in the West. JoC needs to be embedded in the globalized academia to enrich analytical perspectives, broaden research horizons, and connect diverse academic cultures of communication scholarship. (Waisbord 2015a, pp. 586–587)

Notwithstanding, if we take a look on the national diversity of Journal of Communication’s publication output before and after the above discussed de-Westernization plans, we cannot find any significant changes in this respect (Table 2.3). The data show that the contribution of the Global North is around 90% in both time periods, and that the Global South failed to raise its publication output. The contribution of the US decreased slightly, but mostly in favor of other Global North regions (typically Western European countries) and not for the benefit of Global South authors. The inequality between different regions of the Global South still holds: developing Asia (mostly China) and Latin America have a certain contribution, but the participation of other regions like the Middle East, Africa, and Eastern Europe was and still is virtually absent. It must be conceded however that, since we do not have data on the number of articles submitted but only on those published, we could not tell whether this disparity is due to the lack of submissions or if it is the result of high rejection ratios towards authors from this region. Nevertheless, even if we cannot yet ascertain the exact causes, it can still be concluded that the de-­ Westernization aspirations of the center did not increase the contribution of the Global South in this case. Beside leading periodicals like the Journal of Communication, international academic associations have also recognized the importance of

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Table 2.3  Contributions of world regions to the Journal of Communication for 2013–2014 and 2016–2017 Global North 2016–2017 US

South America 59 Chile

UK Germany

Eastern Europe

Asia 3 China

Middle East

Africa

2 Poland 1 South 1 Turkey 1 Africa 2 1

12 Mexico 2 Singapore 11 Colombia 1 Hong Kong Netherlands 8 Philippines 1 Israel 6 Australia 4 Austria 4 Spain 4 Belgium 3 Finland 2 Switzerland 2 Canada 1 Iceland 1 Norway 1 Sweden 1 119 6 6 2013–2014 US 80 Chile 2 Korea 3 Germany 12 China 2 Netherlands 9 Singapore 2 Austria 3 Hong 1 Kong Switzerland 3 Taiwan 1 Australia 2 Belgium 2 Israel 2 Italy 2 Denmark 1 UK 1 117 2 9

1

1

1

0

0

0

Source: Demeter (2019c)

de-Westernization (Meyen 2012; Wiedemann and Meyen 2016; Zelizer 2015). Nevertheless, their research shows that most fellows of the International Communication Association (ICA) have an exclusively American background, and all fellows have very strong ties, typically

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through educational institutions, to the Global North. From the data, it seems that it is almost impossible to become an internationally recognized scholar in communication and media studies without a massive measure of Global North capital. Today, ICA’s international leadership is located in world regions closely linked to the United States and educated at U.S. universities or heavily influenced by North American research traditions, even if it includes numerous contributions from other associations and alternative approaches […]. National academic environments in U.S.-affiliated countries became Americanized, especially via ICA fellows serving as role models to get scientific capital. Thus, ICA’s efforts to expand its leadership are assumed to have an unintended effect of conserving the power structures in the field. (Wiedemann and Meyen 2016, p. 1489)

It is noteworthy that Wiedemann and Meyen mostly deal with de-­ Americanization, that is, they considered the career paths of non-­ American ICA fellows and found that they have extensive connections with the US. But their data shows an even more striking fact, namely, that there are no Global South scholars whatsoever amongst all ICA fellows, former and current presidents. Among the 112 distinguished ICA fellows, 86 are from the US, followed by Germany (4), the UK (3), Canada (3), Israel (3), Australia (2), the Netherlands (2), Singapore (2), and 1 fellow from each Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, South Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong. As the authors accurately observed, “for ICA going international means going to rich, economically strong countries” (Wiedemann and Meyen 2016, p. 1496). As a conclusion, we can say that center-based pull efforts or de-Westernization attempts in the field of struggle have not succeeded in increasing the contribution of the Global South. There is no significant change in the number of Global South articles in leading periodicals, and the participation of Global South fellows in the most prestigious academic associations is virtually nonexistent (Wiedemann and Meyen 2016). Social scientists—similarly to their peers in other disciplines—tend to function in an unreflective way. Norms, and through norms, habitus are unconsciously internalized by culture, role models and education. The

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fact that academics collect academic capital to get better positions in the field of forces could be obscured by popular narratives on the purity and unselfishness of science: this is why Bourdieu wrote that we should not only listen to what scientists say, but also observe what they actually do. He maintained that, in contrast with the naïve and ideal picture of the academic field, it is an ordinary social realm that is very similar to other social fields that focus on power, capital and the struggle for both of them; put simply, it is governed by interests (Bourdieu 1990). Through the norms which control the field of forces, many one-sided practices have crystallized, resulting in significant biases against agents outside the field of forces. In spite of the fact that the so-called de-­ Westernization attempts strive to reduce Global North/Global South inequalities, there have been no significant changes yet. Accordingly, being familiar with the operations in the field of forces might be very useful for not only those peripheral scholars seeking to raise their prospects, but also for all agents in both the Global North and South that strive for a more equal and unbiased field, in other words, for a more equal and inclusive global academia. Nevertheless, one might ask why it is necessary or even important for the global community of highly skilled workers or at least the field of the global academia to be equal and inclusive. In the next chapter, I will delineate the dynamics behind the problem of inequality through a discussion of economic, epistemic, moral and institutional problems, including those directly linked to global academia.

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Part II Empirical Evidences and Practical Considerations

3 The Dynamics Behind the Problem of Inequality: The World-System of Global Inequality in Knowledge Production

In the spring of 2019, an internationally broadcasted media storm broke out as a consequence of a “revelation” that many American celebrities, including film stars, had paid a significant amount of money to elite American universities in order to ensure admission for their children. ABC News called it a smashing scandal, and it was largely condemned by the public, as these allegations went against the myth that elite universities (with admissions rates under 10 or even 5%) operate in a merit-based fashion and select their students based on characteristics such as talent and diligence. The possibility that there might be a connection between admission to elite universities and the economic capital of students (or of their families) was shocking to the general public. It is noteworthy that even the founding father of the sociology of science, Robert Merton (1968), was under the sway of the myth of meritocratic science to some extent. Since his time, the delusion that academia is a merit-based societal field has been supported by academic circles and beyond. But, as Bourdieu puts it (1990), it is extremely naive to accept the self-definition of a societal field like science, since it is, similarly to other societal fields like politics or religion, about capital, power relations and the struggle to maintain or change the current establishment. It was also Bourdieu © The Author(s) 2020 M. Demeter, Academic Knowledge Production and the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52701-3_3

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(1998) who claimed in his The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power that modern higher education, as a network whose main role is to reproduce the elite, never was an agent of building meritocracy, but always an impediment to social mobility (Demeter and Tóth 2020). Elite schools play a very important role in maintaining the cultural and epistemic hegemony of the elite, and the separation politics of schooling start from nursery school, which is the first place where the elites demarcate their children from those of the lower classes (Gerhards et al. 2017). A legion of research papers prove that selection committees systematically select elite students, and these students have been trained to be enrolled in elite universities from Russell Group, the Ivy League or the Hautes Ecoles from a very early age (Burris 2004; Cowan and Rossello 2018; Creat and Musselin 2010; Golden 2007). Bourdieu himself likened education to Maxwell’s demon who makes a selection from students from different backgrounds. Thus, the education system maintains and even reinforces existing hegemonies by separating students with high cultural capital from those from families with less cultural or symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1998). Thus, the education system draws borders that are quite similar to those which once separated nobles from commoners, and in this way, the education system produces a permanent categorization. It designates the chosen ones for a lifetime by ascertaining that they are the alumni of an elite university, and this classification certifies that elite people with elite education substantially and legitimately differ from the common people (Golden 2007). The chance for a student from the lower classes to be admitted to an elite college is very low, especially considering that they should be highly represented at universities, given that the lower classes are much more populous than the elites. Moreover, as it is well documented by both Bourdieu (1998) and Golden (2007), in order get a top position after graduation, having an elite diploma is mandatory. Consequently, elite diplomas literally work like titles under feudalism (Enders 2001). In line with the exclusive nature of the elite, despite the fact that the number of university degrees offered for common people has drastically increased in the last few decades, the number of elite degrees has not increased at all (Gerhards et al. 2017). In the so-called knowledge society or, as it is sometimes called, in the knowledge economy (Unger 2019), there is no such a thing as social mobility. It is a mere illusion (or

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delusion) that since more and more people get some sort of university degree, society has become more mobile and provides mobility opportunities to people from the lower classes. The increasing number of educated people means only one thing: the elite needs more educated people to serve them in lower positions, while the former maintain their elite positions. The elites established mass education for the lower classes, while they could easily make distinctions between different universities and different diplomas (Bourdieu 1998). For a better understanding of the extent of this elitism, I will show empirical evidence in Chap. 5, where I present my analysis of the CVs of more than 3000 sociologists working at the top 100 sociology departments of the world. From these thousands of sociologists, there are no scholars without elite education, which has negative consequences on our knowledge about society. Let us consider elite students are educated on the basis of their elite education, which was based on elite education, and so on. In sociology, this means that the elite systematically reproduces elitism, not only in terms of the student body, but also in terms of curriculum. Both the people and theories from the lower classes are systematically excluded in the market of sociological knowledge production, which means that people all over the Western world are indoctrinated with the theories selected and disseminated by the elite. In this case, it pertains to not only elite students, but to the students of mass education as well, because the curriculum according to which all students are educated is more likely to originate from academics working at elite colleges and not from “commoner” scholars affiliated with universities designed for mass education. Another example of reproducing elitism can be presented by the example of Milestone Institute, located in Hungary—a semi-peripheral Eastern European country. In Hungary, there are no universities that are listed among the top 500  in sociology. Thus, Hungarian elites must have their children educated abroad. Milestone Institute is deliberately designed for this purpose: it serves as a jumping board to help elite students get admitted to Oxford, Cambridge and other Russel Group universities. In metaphoric terms, Milestone is the Eton College of Hungary. Of course it is not that Milestone Institute asks for a pedigree from its applicants: instead, the very high tuition fees, the expectation of fluent English and the fact that people from lower classes (due to a lack of the appropriate social network

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and social capital) typically are not even aware of the existence of this institution, are all sufficient to ensure that only members of the elite apply. Together with the above mentioned problems, one could still think that, besides ensuring the continuance of the elites’ social capital, elite schools provide superior knowledge. Based on this assumption, one could even think that elite schools have nothing to do with the elite’s capital accumulation and differentiation from the masses, but that elite students want to acquire knowledge of higher value. Since top positions need superior knowledge, the idea that students from elite schools that provide superior knowledge then get top positions seems to be totally reasonable. This creates a closed circle of justified elitism: top positions should be filled by agents with superior knowledge, and since it is the elite that has knowledge or academic capital, it should also have those power positions by which they can invest and circulate academic capital. We can raise several objections against this popular narrative. The simple fact that the members of the elite are willing to pay hefty sums to get their children admitted to elite schools shows the capital nature of education. As the 2019 admission scandal showed, millions of dollars are involved. Why are celebrities willing to pay a sum like that? Is it reasonable to think that, in a networked world where almost any kind of knowledge can be obtained from digital libraries, software, databases, podcasts, masterclasses, distance learning facilities, webinars and online seminars, elite universities provide knowledge that is worth millions? Since the focus of this book is social science, we can also exclude those differences between the technological supply of a rich elite university and a poor regional college that could be significant in the area of natural sciences. I argue that it is more reasonable to think that elite parents do not buy their children superior knowledge, but academic and social capital. They consider degrees from elite universities as a kind of passport that can guarantee their children entry to top positions. As a matter of fact, the results of many empirical studies that will be presented in the empirical chapters show that this latter assumption seems to be closer to the truth. Many research papers show that future productivity can be predicted by past productivity, and not by the place of education (Fumasoli et al. 2015). Other studies find that, although the place of the diploma does not correlate with future productivity, it correlates highly with future career

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success (Burris 2004). This phenomenon can be perceived on the field of global knowledge production as serious bias against candidates without an elite education. It is much more likely that an elite university will hire a candidate with elite degrees but without a significant publication record than a candidate with a considerable publication record but no elite education (Long 1978). Empirical studies also show that it is almost impossible to be hired by an elite university without elite education. As a consequence, candidates from the Global South are frequently willing to re-educate themselves, by enrolling in central universities and getting their MAs and PhDs again. As a result of these features of the elite educational system, it is easy to find faculty members with elite degrees but without any significant scholarly contributions. However, there are no faculty members without an elite education or central re-education, even if they have a significant publication record. It also means that elite diplomas tend to place their holders in top positions almost without any reliance on their scholarly merits. In this sense, as has already been mentioned, elite diplomas bear more resemblance to the titles of the nobility than to mere certificates that testify to the merits of their bearers. It does not mean, of course, that holders of elite diplomas are not talented or hardworking—it only means that, for every talented elite student, there might be hundreds of talented students from the lower classes who would never have a chance to reach top positions, including power positions in the field of knowledge production. This feature of global academia is in line with Robert Frank’s views in his Success and Luck (2017), whereby achieving economic success and top positions depends more on luck than on work and talent. Frank’s work, which provides very basic and important facts about the reality of social mobility and the false mythology behind success, lacks however the critical observation that the luck factors he mentions are by no means random; on the contrary, they are socially determined. Social features like the family into which people are born, or the neighborhoods they live in, and what healthcare they can access may be seen as a matter of luck from an individual point of view, but in a broader perspective, they are socially coded and determine facts that have nothing to do with luck. As we will see later in this book, the position one can achieve in the world-system of global knowledge production in the culturally determined disciplines, typically in the social sciences, is not a

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question of luck, but the result of social and geopolitical hegemonic power relations into which people are born, independent of their will. The exclusivist nature of elite universities, allowing access to outsiders only in exceptional, well-defined cases—typically with outstanding sports achievements—also explains why parents who invest so much money need not worry that their children, whose admission to prestigious universities was secured through great sums or even by fraud, would fail to graduate. They know very well that once a door opens, there is no turning back: elite universities with very high selection rates have to demonstrate that their admissions procedures are working well, otherwise we might wonder how an extremely selective process could result in the admittance of a student who is unable to graduate from university. The elite nature of these universities is further reinforced by the fact that the capitalizable nature of their diplomas is ensured by the network of elite universities, since they are very keen to re-employ the former students of the connected elite network (Golden 2007). Further empirical analyses support the capital-like behavior of elite diplomas, as research shows that during the first eight years of an academic career, the various admissions committees focus primarily on the educational background of candidates, and productivity is less important (Maliniak et al. 2018). Elite diplomas seem to be a one-way road to paradise: the world of top positions—but only for those who, in terms of their social background, come from there already (Tomlinson and Freeman 2018). We can be annoyed, of course, that rich people can buy the possibility for their children to enter elite education, sometimes even resorting to fraudulent means and corruption. But there is a more important structural problem: these diplomas, although not always in the form of lump-­ sum bribes, are actually bought by everyone through expensive preparatory trainings, private tutors and foundation money, which only paid the upper middle classes and above can afford. Elite university places, in a much more complicated way, but one which is at least as unfair as paying bribes, are almost always purchased, not awarded as a result of fair competition. As long as elite institutions are crowded with upper-class children, and while key knowledge-producing and gatekeeper positions cannot be filled without these diplomas, there is no way to break the

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exclusionary and elitist vicious circle of global knowledge production. The extreme overvaluation of the academic capital acquired at elite universities assists in maintaining a system in which hegemonic positions are occupied by people from the social elite, almost independently of their merits, while even the most talented and most productive candidates with a lower social background have no chance to occupy a central position in the system of knowledge production. This not only gives rise to ethical concerns, but is also problematic in terms of the knowledge economy, because with the elitism of knowledge production, the vast majority of society is excluded from the dominant positions. As a result, the talent which is, according to every conceivable assumption, equally distributed amongst people from different social backgrounds, is largely wasted. The outrageous phenomenon that the rich sometimes obtain places for their children at elite universities, even at the cost of fraud, is nothing more than a symptom of a more general system-wide corruption. The inequalities in knowledge production, as we will see later in the empirical chapters, do not only occur in education but also in science communication. All the international patterns found in elite education networks can be matched with elite journal publishing networks, which also show clear center/periphery relationships. This means that global inequalities in the production of knowledge are almost identical in the input (education) and output (publication) stages of the process, and these distorting processes mutually reinforce each other. In this introductory chapter, I would like to refer to a single current process, which, despite its seemingly positive intentions, might cause the consolidation and further strengthening of the hegemonic situations prevailing in science communication, under the guise of a more equal world. The initiative in question, known as Plan S, intends to help make scientific knowledge accessible. It is known that in the classic scholarly publication model, although authors do not have to pay for publication (nor do they receive any royalties), the published articles are placed behind a paywall, that is, they can only be read by institutional or individual subscribers (Haug 2019). Articles can be downloaded individually in the humanities and social sciences for an average sum of between 30 and 100 dollars (Demeter and Istratii 2020). This creates a situation in which richer universities in richer countries are more likely to make their global

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knowledge production accessible to their employees than poorer universities in poorer countries. Plan S wants to change this system—and there is no reason to disagree with the need for change. The initiative proposes that authors should publish the results of their publicly-funded research through the open access model, in which the reader has immediate and free access to the content of the published research papers. At first glance, the proposed reform and the initiative behind it seem to be a positive intervention to reduce global inequality, as mandatory open access publishing may eliminate the above-mentioned inequalities of accessibility on the reader’s side. Unfortunately, on the knowledge-producing side that is the defining side of the hegemonic relations in the world-system of knowledge production, Plan S does not reduce inequalities (Istratii and Demeter 2020; Istratii and Porter 2018) but directly increases them (Demeter 2018). When talking about “strict quality criteria”, Plan S actually talks about enforcing Western standards, which many (otherwise excellent) peripheral journals cannot meet for purely financial and institutional reasons. This results in the exclusion of a number of regional periodicals from the list of eligible journals, because they are unable to meet certain conditions, typically the criterion of publishing regularly and in a predictable way. More importantly, in the open access model, the very high publication fee suggested by Plan S (around 2000 USD) is simply unaffordable for peripheral researchers. Therefore, even if, despite all their disadvantages, they can publish their work, it cannot reach as wide an audience as their colleagues at richer universities, where the institution can easily pay for the publication fees. The publication disadvantage caused by the geopolitical inequalities translates into a science communication disadvantage. Researchers in peripheral regions are already at a disadvantage in the international publishing competition, and now their disadvantages will be further aggravated due to their financial situation, since they will not be able to publish their accepted papers within the open access model. The introduction of Plan S would create a system that would deliver a double-hit to peripheral authors, while giving diplex preference to central authors, who not only have easier access to the publishing space at elite journals but also have free access to the public through open access publication. In addition, researchers in the center have a significant advantage in that their institutions provide better

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infrastructure support to their staff than peripheral ones. In the West, and especially in elite Western universities, there are usually separate institutional teams to help apply for research funding, both in administration and management. In contrast, for African, Asian, Latin American or even Eastern European researchers, applying for research funding is a major problem, not only because there are very limited domestic funding possibilities available, but also because they do not have professional support staff to help them navigate highly bureaucratic and rigorous international grant application processes (Beaudry et  al. 2018). Most higher education research facilities in peripheral regions simply do not have the capacity to meet the Western expectations of institutions and researchers for funding international projects. Without appropriate and necessary structural changes in the funding and research development system, the introduction of Plan S would further widen the gap between the central and peripheral regions of knowledge production. In summary, even well-intentioned but centrally initiated action plans are unable to identify and critically analyze the systemic problems of knowledge production that they intend to solve in order to develop a fairer scientific field. In addition to the systemic distortions discussed in this book (the disproportionate accumulation of academic capital, the dysfunctional overvaluation of elite education, and the Western hegemony of publication at elite journals), the initiators of Plan S are introducing another inequality, this time in science communication. Central authors and institutions have already controlled the international field of knowledge production through academic power demarcation by defining elite training and the appropriate publishing practices for elite journals and publishers. If they now also gain the benefits of science communication, it would be a crushing blow for the periphery, and detrimental to the international scientific community as a whole. In this new situation, the freedom of science would mean the freedom of silent listening for the periphery, without being able to make its voice heard. From now on, the periphery will be limited to consuming Western-specific knowledge, Western theories and methodologies as well as topics of importance to the West—free of charge. At the same time, the periphery might be forced to restrict its own topics, methods and interpretations to the regional level or, at most—according to the labeling of the so-called

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international, in fact Western scientific community—to categorize these under ethno-science, having only regional importance (Ake 1982). Throughout this book, I argue that this detrimental tendency is already gaining prominence in a variety of areas of international science, and that strategic actions are needed to counter it. As a concise yet accurate summary of what has been said so far, I quote Emily Callaci’s (2020) critique of the characteristic of global academic elitism, according to which almost only one type of human being is allowed to reach elite status in academia, the West-educated, Western-­ working, independent and mobile, usually white man. According to the author, some lifestyles are better received and valued by global academia than others. The acknowledgments at the beginning of academic books clearly show what types of people our institutions value and serve, who have access to research resources, and which is the preferably working style. A typical future member of the academic elite is someone with elite Western education, who can be awarded scholarships, often announced for Westerners or even for Americans only, and who have few—or, ideally, no—dependent relatives and thus can easily break away from their local communities for long periods of time. They have passports that make it easy to travel anywhere. Either they have no dependent children at all or are able to take care of them by the aid of their partner—typically a female partner—or by employing a nanny. The ideal researcher of the current academic elite is independent, mobile and flexible, so their larger family cannot count on them when it comes to long-term care for infants, elderly or sick relatives. Of course, the author does not say that there is any problem with such researchers—the question is what we lose in terms of perspectives, intellectual contributions and creativity if only this type of human being gets admitted into the world of elite academia (Akiko 2018; Jack 2019).

Struggle for Equality: Ethical Dimensions It is well known from the history of the struggle for social equality that dominant groups generally consider the existing system which guarantees, maintains and even enhances their hegemony, to be just and equitable. Members of the elite tend to attribute their privileged position to

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their merits, hard work, talent and (less often) luck (Frank 2017), and are almost always blind to the underlying social structures that provide them various privileges. One of the most illustrative metaphors in the field of international science is, in my opinion, the discourse that compares the competition on the field of academic knowledge production to the Olympic Games. Maybe the best expression of this metaphor is associated with Louisa Ha (2016), editor-in-chief of the prestigious Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly. This is the oldest journal in my narrower research field (communication and media studies), but in almost 100 years, I am the first Hungarian to have a published article in a regular issue of the journal (Demeter 2019a, b, c). As this article was devoted to exploring the scandalous inequalities in communication research and associate disciplines, Louisa Ha organized an invited forum following the article, published in a later issue of the journal (Ang et al. 2019). More recently, she invited me to join the editorial board of the journal, and also asked me to edit a virtual theme collection that deals with articles relating to Eastern Europe. When collecting the articles from the past 10 years, I found that (besides my own papers), there was only one paper published in the prestigious journal that was written by an Eastern European author who still works in the region. While there were five more articles from originally Eastern European authors, these scholars have very typical carrier trajectories: after their BA, all of them emigrated to the West, typically to the US, to get their MA and PhD degrees. After that, they remained in the host countries and are still affiliated with Western universities. This re-education is a typical pattern: in order to be acknowledged in an international field, scholars have to go West and undertake Western education. Moreover, among the aforementioned scholars, most obtained their BA degrees from an American university in their home country. In these cases, it was the American University in Bulgaria, but other center-within-the-periphery institutions could be found in many regions of the periphery. To mention a few: the Central European University in Hungary, the American University of Beirut or the American University in Cairo have the same goals: to collect talent from the periphery and lure them to the center. In Chap. 5, I will show that these career paths are not just extremely common amongst scholars from the

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periphery that aim to make an international career, they are apparently the only way for them to have such a career. The basic idea behind the Olympic game metaphor introduced by Lousia Ha is that the Olympic Games and the knowledge production market are similar in that both areas are subject to international competition overseen by external judges. Under this analogy, both fields are characterized by rules that are clear, predictable, fair and subject to objective review processes. The counterparts of the judges assessing Olympic competitors are the journal editors and reviewers who assess the submitted papers, the selection committee members who assess the candidates that apply for various academic positions and the members of expert panels that assess academic projects seeking external funding. But unfortunately, it is quite clear to a scholar engaged in the study of international academic life that there is little truth to this attractive image of global academia. As we will see later, the scientific field—and this is especially true for the humanities and social sciences—resembles an Olympic Games where more than 90% of the gold medals are guaranteed to be won by American and Western European athletes, and where there are only American and Western European judges and referees. To win, any competitor should wear American or Western European clothes, because if they appear to be outside the elite team, they can forget about the Olympic podium. Discernibly non-Western athletes are disqualified in these hypothetical Olympic Games before they step onto the field, so peripheral athletes have to be as similar to their Western counterparts as possible. Readers familiar with sport politics may well argue that the spirit of fair play that outsiders generally attribute to sport do not always prevail at the Olympic Games. Financial and prestige issues, soft power relations and even a multitude of political attitudes play into how a country performs at the Olympics. It is not surprising that economically and politically strong states are in a very good position on both the imaginary “hall of fame” of knowledge production and the Olympic medal rankings. Still, in the field of sports, there are exceptions at least. For example, Hungary ranks eighth in the Olympic medal charts, which is a very high position, and Romania, Cuba or Poland have better positions than many rich Western countries such as Norway, Denmark or Switzerland.

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Ethiopia ranks better on this list than Austria, and Israel, ranked very high on the academic rankings, lags behind Uganda, Zimbabwe or Cameroon in terms of the number of Olympic medals. Such exceptions cannot be found at all on the imaginary Olympic list of global knowledge production: as we will see in more detail later, not a single non-Western country appears in the top 20 on the list of social science publishing production, and peripheral regions are severely underrepresented even in the top 50. The world of global knowledge production is fundamentally different from the world of the Olympics, and while the latter is not devoid of various distorting mechanisms, the field of knowledge production is fundamentally based on distorted, hegemonic systems. In her The long read on decolonising knowledge (2019), Romina Istratii counts three types of epistemic colonization by which the center maintains its hegemon position: Western theory making, the dominance and internalization of English language and the Anglophone standards dictating mainstream and so-called universal knowledge production. Moreover, Istratii also points out that international research funding typically favors Western countries, since funding agencies prescribe rigorous and Western-specific application standards that are hard to meet by authors from countries with poorer infrastructural and economic conditions.

Struggle at the Periphery and the Camouflage Identities In this book, I argue that the world system of global knowledge production (which includes the publishing industry and higher education) is a highly exclusive, hegemonic system in which not only the members of the hegemonic group (the central agents of the field), but also the oppressed scholars are maintaining or even reinforcing the exclusionist, oppressive nature of the system. I will argue that through a kind of self-­ stigmatization, peripheral agents tend to develop a type of character that I call “camouflage identity” in order to be accepted and acknowledged by the international scientific community. I consider camouflage identity to be a culturally and culturally destructive phenomenon, leading to

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assimilation, homogenization of knowledge and loss of authentic voices, and which—especially in the social sciences—fatally impoverishes diversity. In my view, members of the academic periphery should (instead of developing camouflage identities) develop an attitude that could be called systemic protagonism that aims for more equal knowledge production in both the geopolitical and socioeconomic senses. In other words: the field of global academia needs an emancipatory movement that advocates a more decentralized production of global knowledge (Mignolo 2018; Santos 2018). An important result of the movement would be if peripheral scholars were able to discard their camouflage identities and instead show their authentic, autonomous and non-Western academic selves. I argue that a global, world-systemic discrimination occurs in the field of global knowledge production (Efranmanesh et al. 2017). The structure and procedures of global academia favor central agents to a great extent (Heilbron et al. 2018). The mere fact that academic English has become the only interlingua of international scholarship guarantees the advantage of native English academics over those who need to make additional efforts to master this language (Curry and Lillis 2018; Lillis and Curry 2015). The role of language in global academic hegemonies is well-­ documented in the literature of academic literacy/second-language writing (Cargill and Burgess 2017). Habibe and Hyland (2019) dedicated a special edition to the problems that young non-native English researchers face in publishing international journals because of language barriers. Cademan argues that there might be a “causal relationship between the global dominance of English for ‘international’ publication and the suppression of alternative knowledges” (Cademan 2017, p. 33). Qi (2015) even states that, through English language and Western theoretical dominance, the center develops an intellectual knowledge hierarchy. The same can be said about central methodologies, epistemic values and the central determination of current research directions (Istratii 2020; Walter et al. 2018). Thus, it is obvious how difficult it is for a non-Englishspeaking peripheral agent who has not been educated at a central elite university to publish in leading journals where central standards prevail. In addition, in a global context, the quality of applicants’ scientific output is measured by their publications in elite central papers, both in the context of job applications and in research funding applications (Clauset et al. 2015).

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As a result, a peripheral position as well as the lack of knowledge of English and central methodologies means direct exclusion from the elite of the international academic community. The ideology behind this kind of cultural racism is based on the illusion of the existence of a global, universal academic norm or standard, and it gives the agents of the center the opportunity to disqualify the results of peripheral knowledge production by saying they do not meet the universal (in fact, central) expectations. Empirical research largely confirms that these exclusionary practices are widespread in the centers of global knowledge production (Canagarajah 2002). Of course, the unjust situation described above can only be altered through the active involvement of both the center and the periphery. The decentralization of academic knowledge production and the rehabilitation of peripheral knowledge can only occur if the critique of central hegemony is prioritized at both the center and the periphery. Until then, we can reasonably assume that the central elite that accumulates a disproportionately large part of global academic capital will make every effort to maintain its hegemonic status (Schott 1998). In the definition of “institutional racism”, whether the term is used literally or epistemically, the oppressed groups need not be numerically in the minority (Pilkington 2011). All that matters is the structure of power relations, as it leads to a situation in which virtually no members of the oppressed group can be found in top positions, despite the fact that they may otherwise be in the majority in the global or local community. This phenomenon can be clearly observed in higher education: power relations in the world-system of knowledge production are demonstrated by the fact that members of non-white minorities are extremely underrepresented in elite universities and tend to be concentrated in newer institutions with significantly less prestige than the older universities (Shiner and Modood 2002). Minority students have a much lower chance of being admitted to the classical elite universities, and of course this is reflected in the significant narrowing of their future career prospects (Parekh 2000). Empirical data corroborate Bourdieu’s earlier observations to the effect that the ruling elite systematically distances itself from the masses through education. This practice leads to the formation and maintenance of a global academic nobility, typically composed of white,

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upper-class people educated at the elite universities of the center. In addition, as shown by the empirical results of Shiner and Modood (2002), peripheral researchers, even in central positions, must continually compensate for their background in order to feel secure in their positions. Carter’s research (2003) shows an even sadder picture: people from minority groups are not only significantly underrepresented in academic positions, but are more likely to be hired on temporary contracts than their peers from the hegemon social group. In addition, in the system of global knowledge production, cultural racism increases with the prestige of the positions: the higher an academic position is, the less likely it is to be filled by a peripheral researcher (Carter 2003). As Pilkington’s empirical research reveals, within the academic sphere, at least 20% of minority candidates have encountered explicit racism, either during job interviews or in connection with promotions. The exclusionary structure of elite higher education has been studied and demonstrated by a number of further studies (Davies et al. 1997; Jary and Jones 2006; Reay et al. 2005). As a summary, Pilkington concludes that the results of empirical research thus pose serious challenges to those who still consider universities to be meritocratic institutions. As I will demonstrate in the empirical chapters later, global publication patterns accurately reflect educational inequalities: elite journals are full of Western authors, while hardly any peripheral authors can be found in them, and there are virtually no major international publishers operating outside the Global North. The discrimination against noncore agents in the field of education goes hand in hand with discrimination on the labor market—in our case, on the field of knowledge production. From an ethical point of view, we should consider whose ethics we should follow when discussing global inequalities in knowledge production. What is typical in any field of society is that the members of the hegemonic group are considered normal and prototypical, while the members of the oppressed group are described in terms of their observable deviations from the prototype, which always involves some form of devaluation. We can see exactly the same phenomenon in the world of knowledge production, where scholars and gatekeepers at elite centers so often talk about international, global standards in both education and the publishing industry, emphasizing the normative character of these

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standards, while these are actually standards of certain capitalist Western countries, typically those of the United States. Consequently, divergent cultural standards are not interpreted as alternative ways of conducting scholarship, but as degraded, imperfect variants of the alleged international (in fact central) standards (Canagarajah 2002). Thus, it must be emphasized that the center does not generally claim that peripheral academic cultures have different standards, rather that there is only one global standard that is observed in the West, but not in the peripheries. Moreover, external oppression frequently results in internal self-­ stigmatization and the development of a subordinated habitus. As Bourdieu (2001) observed, members of the subdominant group tend to exclude themselves from central positions, often even after external barriers have been removed. This self-stigmatization is no doubt true for many scholars in the periphery. As Canagarajah argues (2002), peripheral authors may tend to use Western knowledge exclusively for at least two reasons. The first reason is practical: sometimes peripheral scholars are technically unable to print and copy their works, while Western science is, at least in part, accessible to the peripheries thanks to widespread Western imperialism. The second reason is directly related to the above mentioned subordinated habitus. Peripheral agents may strategically use Western literature to become acceptable to their central peers, or even because they consider their own knowledge (including the knowledge of their geopolitical region) to be inferior to that of the center, at least in terms of knowledge production. Another common perception by the dominant central community is that they implicitly consider some scholarly activities to be too low to be performed by members of the hegemonic group. Research has shown that certain activities are maintained exclusively for central agents, while lower status (and consequently much less well-paid) jobs are outsourced to the periphery. For example, publishing cutting-edge research results, theory building, or developing research methodologies are typically central activities, while data collection, data analysis and assistant work (such as layering) tend to be concentrated in the Global South (Demeter 2019a, b, c). As we read in the literature of world systems analysis, the global labor market specifically defines central and peripheral positions, creating strong centers and dependent peripheries. It is the systematic,

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institutionalized nature of dependence itself that severely limits the capabilities of peripheral countries and reproduces inequalities in the world-­ system (Jacobs and Van Rossem 2016). The decentralization of global knowledge production would require nothing less than the cessation of peripheralization of the field, the elimination of the devaluation of knowledge from the South. Decentralization here is not about homogenization, but about recognizing different traditions as equals (Freedman 2002). In the field of global knowledge production, this means that peripheral perspectives should be valued as much as their Western counterparts. While homogenization would mean that the periphery should also follow the standards of the center, the recognition of equal values means that the international scientific community must treat peripheral epistemologies on an equal basis.

 he Image of the Non-central Scientist: T A Showdown with Camouflage Identities Different emancipatory waves may have similar elements. At the first stage of these movements, the oppressed group wants tolerance without questioning the status quo and the legitimacy of the hegemonic group. At this stage, members of the subjugated group tend to develop camouflage identities in order to keep their original characteristics (based on which they are oppressed) hidden. Emancipatory movements desirable in a world system of knowledge production are currently in this first phase: researchers from the Global South can—while significantly less likely to do so than their Western counterparts—hold elite positions and appear in high-profile journals, but only if they appear to be central. Since the academic field is not classically but epistemically racist, we are thinking here not of external similarity but of having central capital, typically a central (Western) education, in order to be taken into account internationally. For peripheral researchers, camouflage identity means making your CV look like that of a Western scholar. Similarly, peripheral scholars tend to use almost exclusively Western literature. However, it would be a serious injustice to claim that the proliferation of Western authors in

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peripheral works can be solely explained by the phenomenon of self-­ stigmatization. When peripheral authors try to publish their work on the international scene, they may think—not without reason—that the editor wants to see familiar (that is, Western) references. Emancipatory movements can only succeed if they find supporters among members of the hegemonic group. But before that happens, advocates of emancipatory movements must find a common position from which they can emerge as an integrated and increasingly powerful power in a given social field. They have to discard camouflage identities and develop autonomous and authentic identities. Therefore, instead of masking themselves through Western re-education, non-central agents of global knowledge production should express themselves as non-Western scholars who are proud of their epistemic values, topics and rhetorical/ communication traditions.

References Ake, C. (1982). Social Science as Imperialism: The Theory of Political Development. Ibadan: The Ibadan University Press. Akiko, F. (2018). Needs of Students Seeking Carriers of Communication Sciences and Disorders and Barriers to Their Success. Journal of Communication Disorders, 72, 40–53. Ang, P.  H., Knobloch-Westerwick, S., Aguaded, I., Munoz-Uribe, J.-F., Wasserman, H., & Athique, A. (2019). Intellectual Balkanization or Globalization: The Future of Communication Research Publishing. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 96(4), 963–979. Beaudry, C., Mouton, J., & Prozesk, H.  E. (2018). The Next Generation of Scientists in Africa. Cape Town: African Minds. Bourdieu, P. (1990). Animadversionis in Mertonem. In J. Clark & S. Modgil (Eds.), Robert K. Merton: Consensus and Controversy (pp. 297–301). London/ New York: Palmer Press. Bourdieu, P. (1998). State Nobility. Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (2001). Masculine Domination. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Burris, V. (2004). The Academic Caste System: Prestige Hierarchies in PhD Exchange Networks. American Sociological Review, 69(2), 239–264. Cademan, K. (2017). Introducing Research Rigour in the Social Sciences: Transcultural Strategies for Teaching ERPP Writing, Research Design and

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Resistance to Epistemic Erasure. In M. Cargill & S. Burgess (Eds.), Publishing Research in English as an Additional Language: Practices, Pathways and Potentials (pp. 33–54). Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press. Callaci, E. (2020). On Acknowledgements. The American Historical Review, 125(1), 126–131. Canagarajah, S.  A. (2002). A Geopolitics of Academic Writing. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Cargill, M., & Burgess, S. (Eds.). (2017). Publishing Research in English as an Additional Language: Practices, Pathways and Potentials. Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press. Carter, J. (2003). Ethnicity, Exclusion, and the Workplace. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Clauset, A., Arbesman, S., & Larremore, D. B. (2015). Systematic Inequality and Hierarchy in Faculty Hiring Networks. Science Advances, 1(1), 1–6. Cowan, R., & Rossello, G. (2018). Emergent Structures in Faculty Hiring Networks, and the Effects of Mobility on Academic Performance. Scientometrics, 117, 527–562. Creat, B., & Musselin, C. (2010). Academic Hiring and Inequality. In G.  Goastellec (Ed.), Understanding Inequalities in, through and by Higher Education (pp. 75–90). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Curry, M. J., & Lillis, T. (2018). Global Academic Publishing. Policies, Perspectives, and Pedagogies. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Davies, P., Williams, J., & Webb, S. (1997). Access to Higher Education in the Late Twentieth Century: Policy, Power and Discourse. In J. Williams (Ed.), Negotiating Access to Higher Education. Buckingham: SRHE/Open University Press. Demeter, M. (2018). Open Access Movements: Emancipation or Hypocrisy? KOME: An International Journal of Pure Communication Inquiry, 7(1), 126–127. Demeter, M. (2019a). Open Access Movements: Emancipation or Hypocrisy? KOME: An International Journal of Pure Communication Inquiry. Demeter, M. (2019b). The World-Systemic Dynamics of Knowledge Production: The Distribution of Transnational Academic Capital in Social Sciences. Journal of World-Systems Research, 25(1), 112–144. Demeter, M. (2019c). The Winner Takes It All. International Inequality in Communication and Media Studies Today. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 96(1), 37–59. Demeter, M., & Istratii, R. (2020). Investigating the Relationship between Journal Impact Factor and Article Processing Costs in Open Access Publishing & Implications for Global Knowledge Production (in print).

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Jacobs, L. M., & Van Rossem, R. (2016). Political Prominence and the World System. In I. Wallerstein, C. Chase-Dunn, & C. Suter (Eds.), Overcoming Global Inequalities. London: Routledge. Jary, D., & Jones, R. (2006). Overview of Widening Participation Policy and Practice. In D. Jary & R. Jones (Eds.), Perspectives and Practice in Widening Participation in the Social Sciences. Birmingham: C-SAP. Lillis, T., & Curry, M. J. (2015). The Politics of English, Language and Uptake: The Case of International Journal Article Reviews. AILA Review, 28, 127–150. Long, J. S. (1978). Productivity and Academic Position in the Scientific Career. American Sociological Review, 43, 889–908. Maliniak, D., Peterson, S., Powers, R., & Tierney, M. J. (2018). Is International Relations a Global Discipline? Hegemony, Insularity, and Diversity in the Field. Security Studies, 27(3), 448–484. Merton, R.  K. (1968). The Matthew Effect in Science. The Reward and Communication Systems of Science are Considered. Science, 159, 56–63. Mignolo, W. (2018). On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham: Duke University Press. Parekh, B. (2000). The Future of Multi-ethnic Britain. London: Profile Books. Pilkington, A. (2011). Institutional Racism in the Academy. A Case Study. Sterling: Trentham Books. Qi, J. (2015). Knowledge Hierarchies in Transnational Education: Staging Dissensus. London: Routledge. Reay, D., David, M., & Ball, S. (2005). Degrees of Choice: Social Class, Race and Gender in Higher Education. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books. Santos, B. (2018). The End of the Cognitive Empire. The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South. London: Duke University Press. Schott, T. (1998). Ties between Center and Periphery in the Scientific World-­ System: Accumulation of Rewards, Dominance and Self-Reliance in the Center. Journal of World-Systems Research, 4, 112–144. Shiner, M., & Modood, T. (2002). Help or Hindrance? Higher Education and the Route to Ethnic Equality. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 23(2), 209–232. Tomlinson, G., & Freeman, S. (2018). Who Really Selected You? Insights into Faculty Selection Processes in Top-ranked Higher Education Graduate Programmes. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 42(6), 855–867. Unger, R. M. (2019). The Knowledge Economy. London: Verso. Walter, N., Cody, M. J., & Ball-Rokeach, S. J. (2018). The Ebb and Flow of Communication Research: Seven Decades of Publication Trends and Research Priorities. Journal of Communication, 68(2), 424–440.

4 The Rise of the Global South

This book’s empirical part, which begins with this chapter, focuses on the scientific output of various regions of the world and other processes of major importance to the functioning of global academia as a world-­ system. In order to present the center/periphery characteristics of knowledge production processes, we must first clearly define which regions of the world we consider to be central and which are part of the periphery. Some researchers define the regions of the center or the Global North by economic factors, typically by per capita GDP. According to this categorization, the center includes the United States, Canada, Western Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia, New-Zealand, Israel and developed Asian countries (Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong) (Ferraro 2008). In my previous research, I have demonstrated—as this chapter will discuss in more detail—that there is indeed a correlation between certain economic indicators and scientific output (Demeter 2019). In this respect, the economic division of the world system seems applicable to the field of science production. In addition, critical economic theories (such as world-systems theory and dependency theories) also bring relevant insight to the reality of science production because, in addition to the classic indicators of modernization such as urbanization, © The Author(s) 2020 M. Demeter, Academic Knowledge Production and the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52701-3_4

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infant mortality, or life expectancy (Bruszt and Greskovits 2009) the share of different regions in global knowledge production is also an important indicator of development (Ataie-Ashtiani 2017). In this book’s analysis of inequalities in global knowledge production, I focus primarily on the social sciences, but take most of the empirical material from my narrower field: communication and media studies. According to empirical research, communication studies is a discipline with extremely strong center/periphery relations, and it represents a very high degree of Western hegemony (Demeter 2019). The fact that these inequalities are striking, even when compared to other social sciences, is clear from Lauf ’s 2005 study, which shows a clear American dominance and an almost invisible contribution from the periphery. According to Lauf, this radical inequality in knowledge production stems primarily from the linguistic dominance of the center. This is somewhat naive, but it draws attention to the prominent role of language in the functioning of the global cultural system, including global knowledge production. Subsequent research has confirmed Lauf ’s findings and extended them to other social sciences and added new aspects to the analysis. Delgado and Repiso (2013) compared various indexing databases in terms of their representation of center/periphery hegemonic relationships. Their research found that the more exclusive a database is, the more biased it is against peripheral authors. In the most prestigious databases, Scopus and the Web of Science, more than 80% of the listed journals are published in the United States or the United Kingdom, while the contribution of the same countries in the less selective (and thus less prestigious) Google Scholar Metrics was only 54%. Several studies have confirmed that the disadvantages faced by non-­ Western authors in the humanities and social sciences are much greater than in the natural sciences (Demeter 2019; Gumpenberger et al. 2016). Other scholars have also shown that the social sciences are inherently less international than natural sciences, in the sense that international cooperation is rarer and that multi-author articles are generally less frequent in the former than in the latter (Moody 2004). There are many reasons for these differences, the most important of which is that linguistic, epistemic and cultural differences matter much less in mathematics, life sciences and natural sciences than in the humanities and social sciences. In

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my own research (Demeter 2019), I have analyzed the regional diversity of different disciplines in terms of science output in the most exclusive databases, SCI (natural sciences) and SSCI (social sciences) (Table 4.1). Based on empirical data, we can see three kinds of disciplinary tendencies. The first is most typical in the natural sciences, with Western Europe in the lead during the period under review (1997–2017) followed by the United States. This is followed by a much smaller share of Asia (between 18% and 23%), and the contribution of Eastern Europe is also relatively high (between 6% and 8%). The tailenders are Oceania, the Middle East and Latin America (with 3% each) and Africa (around 1%). The second pattern pertains to philosophy and classical social sciences, and is very similar to the first, except that the contribution of the US and Western Europe is almost equal, accounting for nearly 70% of total knowledge production. The contribution of Eastern Europe in philosophy is much stronger (7%) than in social sciences (2%), and the participation of other peripheral regions is extremely low (between 1% and 3%). Finally, the third pattern, with the strongest bias, can be found in communication and media studies and psychology. Here, American dominance is very significant, accounting for about 50% of the total output, followed by Western Europe with 34%, which means that Euro-American knowledge production accounts for over 80% in these disciplines. In terms of center/periphery relations, we can see that the center accounts for 93% of scholarly contribution in these latter disciplines. In mathematics and communication studies, for example, the vast majority of articles between the 1970s and the 1990s came from the United States, but the American contribution has declined slightly since the 2000s up until the present. However, American papers were not replaced by articles from the periphery, but mainly by articles from economically stronger Western European countries, as well as from Asia, particularly in mathematics, but not in the social sciences. In social sciences, including communication and media studies, the contribution of the periphery has hardly changed in recent decades, despite the global explosion of communication technologies (the internet, online databases, online journals and so on). Slight changes in power positions have followed the globalization process almost exclusively with shifts within the center, manifesting in an increasing science production of Western

Mathematics

43 31 18 7 4 4 2 1

Calculations by the author

Western Europe North America Asia Eastern Europe Oceania Middle East Latin America Africa

35 27 22 8 2 3 3 1

Physics 28 27 20 6 3 3 2 1

Chemistry 32 49 4 3 5 2 3 1

Psychology 36 39 8 2 7 3 3 2

Social Sciences 38 39 6 7 5 2 4 1

Philosophy

31 49 7 3 6 3 2 1

Communication

Table 4.1  Contribution of world regions in different disciplines from 1975 to 2017, by the affiliation of authors of research articles indexed in SCI/SSCI WoS

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Europe together with a slight decline of American hegemony. Meanwhile, peripheral regions—Africa, developing Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Latin America—continue to show only a slight increase, but mainly through the establishment of strategically important local networks, and not due to an increasing participation in international scholarship. If we take a look at the contribution of the peripheries in knowledge production longitudinally (Table 4.2), that is, if we pursue the inquiry as to whether globalizing science goes hand in hand with increased pluralization, we get very interesting results. The table below contains data on communication studies since, as we have seen above, this is one of the most unbalanced disciplines in terms of geopolitical diversity. Like in other disciplines in social sciences, communication scholarship has experienced several power shifts over the last decades, but most of them have occurred within the Western center. The decline of American dominance is clear in parallel with the strengthening of Western European communication scholarship. From the Global South, it is Asia that has been able to significantly raise its share in the past decades. There has been no fundamental change in the dominance of Western communication scholarship however, as it totals over 85% in both time periods. Table 4.2  Longitudinal representation of the contribution of different world regions in communication studies

Western Europe North America Asia Eastern Europe Oceania Middle East Latin America Africa

Region’s share in publication output between 1975 and 2012 (%)

Region’s share in publication output between 2013 and 2017 (%)

20

26

69

56

6 Less than 1

11 1

3 Less than 1 1

5 Less than 1 1

Less than 1

1

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Table 4.3  Distribution of humanities journals from different world regions in 2000

Africa Asia Eastern Europe Latin America Middle East North America Oceania Western Europe

% of journals

% of journals in the most prestigious quartile (Q1)

0 Less than 1 Less than 1 Less than 1 Less than 1 34 Less than 1 63

0 Less than 1 Less than 1 Less than 1 Less than 1 48 Less than 1 52

Scimago Journal and Country Ranks, calculations by the author Table 4.4  Distribution of humanities journals from different world regions in 2018

Africa Asia Eastern Europe Latin America Middle East North America Oceania Western Europe

% of journals

% of journals in the most prestigious quartile (Q1)

Less than 1 2 9 3 Less than 1 24 1 59

Less than 1 1 1 Less than 1 Less than 1 35 Less than 1 63

Scimago Journal and Country Ranks, calculations by the author

Let us now turn to some of the data about the elite hotspots in the science production market: the most prestigious journals. Based on Scimago’s data, we can say that central dominance is as characteristic today as it was 20 years ago. Table 4.3 shows the share of world regions in the humanities in 2000, while Table 4.4 shows their share in 2018. The data of the two tables above show that Eastern Europe was able to significantly raise its contribution in Scopus-indexed journals, although the share of the center is still above 85% in 2018. The same proportion in 2000 showed an almost exclusive central dominance of over 97%. It is noticeable that in the case of the most distinguished journals (categorized as Q1), the share of the central region was still 98% in 2018. While Eastern Europe, for example, had 10 times more Scopus-indexed journals in 2018 than in 2000, accounting for nearly 10%, it improved very little in the category of the most important journals, and still has only a 1% share of Q1-ranked periodicals. Accordingly, we can easily draw a

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Table 4.5  Distribution of social science journals from different world regions in 2000

Africa Asia Eastern Europe Latin America Middle East North America Oceania Western Europe

% of journals

% of journals in the most prestigious quartile (Q1)

Less than 1 2 2 1 Less than 1 40 1 54

0 Less than 1 Less than 1 0 Less than 1 45 Less than 1 54

Scimago Journal and Country Ranks, calculations by the author Table 4.6  Distribution of social science journals from different world regions in 2018

Africa Asia Eastern Europe Latin America Middle East North America Oceania Western Europe

% of journals

% of journals in the most prestigious quartile (Q1)

Less than 1 3 7 3 1 31 1 54

Less than 1 Less than 1 Less than 1 Less than 1 Less than 1 35 Less than 1 63

Scimago Journal and Country Ranks, calculations by the author

conclusion that is very similar to what has been said about elite education. Although the number of journals has increased dramatically and the share of the periphery as a whole has increased, in the elite field—among Q1-ranked journals, in the top quartile—the center’s exclusive share has remained the same over the last 20 years. Tables 4.5 and 4.6 show similar patterns in the social sciences. The pattern in social sciences is very similar to that seen in the humanities, but the elitist exclusion is perhaps even more dramatic, as no peripheral region has been able to raise its share of Q1-ranked Scopus-indexed journals over 1% in the past two decades. If we consider the regional division of journal authors instead of journal ownership (Tables 4.7 and 4.8), we can observe very similar, trend-­ like processes in both the human and social sciences.

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Table 4.7  Distribution of authors from different world regions in 2000 and 2018 in Scopus-indexed humanities journals Humanities 2000 North America Western Europe Oceania Developed Asia Israel Africa Latin America Eastern Europe Developing Asia Middle East

Humanities 2018 48% 38% 4% 3% 1% 1% 1% 2% Less than 1% Less than 1%

North America Western Europe Oceania Developed Asia Israel Africa Latin America Eastern Europe Developing Asia Middle East

30% 41% 5% 3% 1% 2% 4% 8% 4% 2%

Scimago Journal and Country Ranks, calculations by the author Table 4.8  Distribution of authors from different world regions in 2000 and 2018 in Scopus-indexed social science journals Social sciences 2000 North America Western Europe Oceania Developed Asia Israel Africa Latin America Eastern Europe Developing Asia Middle East

Social sciences 2018 49% 33% 5% 4% 1% 1% 1% 2% 3% Less than 1%

North America Western Europe Oceania Developed Asia Israel Africa Latin America Eastern Europe Developing Asia Middle East

29% 35% 5% 4% 1% 2% 5% 6% 10% 3%

Scimago Journal and Country Ranks, calculations by the author

The most visible trend in humanities is the drastic decline in American dominance: in a narrow two-decade period, the American share has fallen from nearly 50–30%. Western European publication output has risen slightly, putting the region in the lead by 2018, while the other central regions—Israel, developed Asia and Oceania—have about the same share in 2018 as they did 20 years ago. But the really interesting changes are happening in the Global South. In 2000, developing Asia with its most productive countries (China, India and Malaysia) had less papers than Israel (with its population of less than 10 million), but in 2018, it had produced four times the Israeli output. Latin America and Eastern Europe

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also quadrupled their share, while Africa and the Middle East doubled their contribution. We can say that all peripheral regions have shown much more robust development over the last two decades than any central region, but this should not lead us to draw overly optimistic conclusions about the pluralization of global knowledge production. In fact, even in 2018, the center accounted for 80% of global knowledge production, while the share of the strongest peripheral region was under 10%. In the social sciences, the strengthening of peripheral regions is even more intense than in the humanities, and as a result, central hegemony, measured in scientific output, has dropped somewhat in the social sciences (Table 4.8). Just as in the case of the humanities, the emergence of developing Asia is the most important phenomenon in the social sciences as well. If we compare the two Asian blocks in 2000 and 2018, we see that 20 years ago, the westernized part of Asia (including Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea) produced more papers than developing Asia, including China and India with a combined population in the billions. This situation changed radically by 2018, when developing Asia accounted for two and a half times more papers than the developed Asian countries. Eastern Europe has doubled its share over the past 20 years, while the share of Latin-America is five times greater in 2018 than it was in 2000. Over the same period, the central regions showed only slight advancement (Western Europe), stagnation (Israel, Oceania and developed Asia) or even drastic decline (North America). In line with the Wallersteinian conception, however, the change in the patterns of global knowledge production processes not only depends on changes in global economic power relations, but the former almost perfectly reflects the latter. The direct correlation between economic indicators and knowledge production thus also shows that the economic world-system’s influence on the academic sphere leads to the creation of structural barriers that are almost insurmountable for economically less productive regions seeking to gain a greater share of global knowledge production (Ang et  al. 2019). Indeed, empirical research has found a strong correlation between a country’s economic performance and academic output, although the interpretation of the results is more complex than it appears at first. In one of my research

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papers on this topic, I demonstrated the correlations between certain economic variables and research performance (Demeter 2019). Scientific output correlates most closely with GDP per capita, which clearly shows that the highest scientific output comes from rich countries, where wealth is calculated not on the size of the country or its population, but on productivity per capita. This also explains that scientific output correlates much less with GDP than with GDP per capita, and not at all with the size of the population. It is not uncommon in the social sciences that small countries like Switzerland, the Netherlands or Israel can produce much more papers than extremely populous and geopolitically significant countries such as China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Russia or Iran, or sometimes more than all of these countries altogether. If both output and population are taken into account in the calculations, we find that China, India, Brazil and Russia are less productive, as they have a very low knowledge production impact compared to their huge populations. In terms of population-adjusted output, we have also found relatively low productivity in Germany and Japan, which are otherwise noticeable countries in academic output, but their knowledge production is surprisingly inefficient compared to the size of their population. The opposite is true of the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands and Australia, where the academic contribution is quite high relative to their population. On the whole, the strongest knowledge producers are the countries with high production efficiency and a considerable population. This category includes in particular Great Britain and the United States. It is interesting to note that there are also countries—such as Cyprus and Slovenia—that have a relatively strong publication output, even though they are not economically significant. In summary, a definable domain of well-being, expressed in per capita GDP (rather than in nominal GDP, for example) and the number of publications per capita, significantly correlates with the scientific output of a given country or region. If these conditions are not met, the country or region should look for alternative ways to increase its visibility. At the same time, it should be noted that there is no single, well-­ defined variable that determines the success of a given region in knowledge production, as there are many very specific factors that can be decisive, even independently of economic indicators. For example, in the

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case of Israel, the strength of institutional-academic relations with the US manifests not only in Israel’s privileged position as a knowledge producer, but also in its frequent co-operations with American research institutions in joint publications and common research projects. Another example could be the Netherlands, which has a strong tradition of scientific publishing and, through Elsevier or Springer Netherlands, makes a significant contribution to the social sciences, even above 5% in some areas. The regions of the periphery, which historically have almost always been part of the exploited, invaded or colonized world, generally do not have the same academic capital as, for example, the Netherlands. They are thus faced with the task of forging a path in the jungle of the transnational academic world if they are to increase their visibility.

The Academic Capital of the Global South As has been demonstrated in previous chapters, the hegemony of the global center over the knowledge workers of the periphery can be demonstrated through both world-system analysis, field theory analysis and empirical data analysis. The most powerful academic agents in the Global North, especially in the humanities and social sciences, also act as idea brokers (Ruddock 2018). It is not just that central agents are net exporters of epistemology, but they are also the ones who determine what the periphery—usually through Western intermediation—can bring to the center. The so-called major academic spaces—elite journals, scholarly associations, leading conferences—tend to be concentrated in a very small number of central countries (typically the United States and the United Kingdom). In contrast, the role of the periphery is reduced to following the rules set in the center, imitating Western scholarship, and at worst, all peripheral scholarly activities are reduced to the uncritical mimicry of Western science. Of the modes of globalization defined by Gunaratne (2009)—independent globalization, cluster globalization, or hegemonic globalization—the globalization of knowledge production seems to have followed the third mode, although, as we will see in this chapter, some regions of the periphery have begun successfully developing their own clusters. As

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Christopher Chase-Dunn, one of the leading scholars in world-systems analysis, once put it, peripheral regions are capable of resisting or even rebelling against hegemonic globalization (Chase-Dunn 1999). Regarding this phenomenon, we can observe at least two interesting trends in the world-system of knowledge production: the Latin-American and the Chinese trends. In Hall and Chase-Dunn’s generalized model (1999), Latin America is an important example of the semi-periphery. According to the hypothesis of semi-peripheral development, transformational changes are mainly brought about by the actions of individuals and organizations within polities that are semi-peripheral relative to the other polities in the same system (Chase-Dunn and Morasin 2013). Semi-peripheral regions are relevant in the understanding of the world-system’s operation since, as mediating agents, they produce both systemic acts whereby they tend to move along with the center, and anti-systemic counter-movements (Robinson 2008) through which they try to resist central influence (Wallerstein 1990). According to both empirical measurements (Kentor 2000, 2008) and historical analysis (Frank 1967; Mahoney 2012), Latin America counts as a semi-periphery in the world-system, meaning that its countries share important semi-peripheral commonalities including low to middle GDP per capita, high to moderate economic dependence, indigenous rebellions, anti-colonial struggles for independence and autonomy, foreign intervention, and so on (Carmagnani 2011; Halperin Donghi 1998; Martin and Wasserman 2011). Still, the Latin-American region has a huge advantage over other peripheral regions, which is mainly linguistic: Spanish is spoken by hundreds of millions of its inhabitants in several countries, and it is even learned by a large number of international scholars as a foreign language. In this respect, the Spanish language is quite different from Chinese which, although undoubtedly increasing in popularity, is not typically spoken outside the Chinese empire. While Spanish cannot compete with English at present to become the interlingua of international knowledge production, it is still widely used by both Spanish and the very populous Latin American communities. As a result, Latin-American countries and Spain can consider the fact that many of their Spanish or Spanish/English

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bilingual publications have been indexed on both the Web of Science SSCI and the Scopus/Scimago lists as a strategic success. In addition, and this can be also interpreted strategically, articles in Spanish-language journals quote a great deal of other Spanish-language articles, and as a result, the calculated prestige of Spanish-language journals and their scientific rating in indexing databases have grown significantly over the past few years. If we look at the share of Spanish-language journals in global knowledge production, there has been a very strong improvement over the last 20 years, even if this emergent Latin-American sub-center still accounts for nowhere near the share of the central regions such as the US and the UK. In the humanities, the combined proportion of Spanish and Latin-American journals in the Scopus database was only 2% at the turn of the millennium, but by 2018 this proportion had increased to over 8%. More importantly, as a result of the aforementioned strategic citation patterns, the number of Spanish and Latin-American Q1-ranked elite journals has increased significantly. In 2000, Spain had only one Q1 journal and there were no Latin-American journals in the first quartile. By 2018, no less than 22 Spanish and 16 Latin-American journals had been indexed in the Q1 quartile, increasing the number of Q1-ranked journals in the Hispanosphere by nearly 40 times over less than two decades. In the social sciences, the Spanish and Latin-American shares of Scopus-indexed journals were below 2% at the turn of the millennium, while the hispanophone hub had a total of two Q1 papers, both from Spain. The region’s share of social science journals rose to 6% by 2018, and today Scopus lists a total of 19 Q1-ranked journals from the region, 12 from Spain and 7 from Latin-American countries. China seems to have adopted a completely different strategy, since when we analyze its output in central databases like the Web of Science or Scopus, we do not see a rise similar to the Spanish-speaking hub in either the humanities or the social sciences. China’s visible share in the humanities is minimal: Scopus registered three Chinese journals in 2000 while the number of Chinese periodicals was 11 in 2018 with only two Q1-ranked journals. Even some very small and economically weak countries such as Hungary have a better share than China, as Hungary currently has three Q1 journals in Scopus. China also has not made a great

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leap forward in the social sciences. It had a total of six journals in Scopus in 2000, none of which are Q1-ranked. This situation changed slightly in 2018, when, although China had 24 indexed journals, there was only one Q1-ranked Chinese periodical in Scopus. So it can be seen that China is not trying to create a Chinese hub in global knowledge production—at least not as obviously as Latin America is. This does not mean, however, that China does not seek to reduce central hegemony, or perhaps to obtain a central position itself, but the Chinese methods are far more sophisticated than competing on the Western field with Western methods. It is important to note that this applies only to the humanities and social sciences, because generally (summing up all disciplines), China is clearly becoming the most significant publisher, overtaking Britain in 2018 and approaching the publication output of the United States. China is currently the second strongest publisher in the world, but according to current trends, it will certainly overtake the US in a few years. Meanwhile 20 years ago, Chinese publication output was not only less than that of the United Kingdom, Germany and France, but also of Japan. In certain hard sciences, China is now firmly in the forefront. In chemistry, China publishes twice as many scientific papers as the United States. China ranks first, ahead of the US, in many important areas including computer science, decision theory, earth sciences, engineering, environmental sciences, materials science, mathematics, pharmacology, physics and astronomy. All of this shows that Chinese publication output has been able to grow tremendously in areas where cultural and ideological aspects do not play a decisive role. This also means that the central Western elite can successfully counteract the Chinese advance in places and positions where cultural, epistemic and other soft power dimensions play an important role.

Academic Institutions in the Global South Academic institutions are the primary agents forming the global capital that underpins the knowledge production of the present world system. In Chap. 5, I will deal with educational inequalities in more detail, but this

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subchapter addresses a narrower topic, as we now focus specifically on the contribution of the peripheral regions. Taking an essentially empirical approach, I will analyze how the universities of the peripheral regions fare on different rankings of higher education institutions, and what longitudinal patterns can be seen when we consider the contribution of each peripheral region. University rankings are important factors when analyzing the potential capital formation function of each institution, as both regional and international students are well aware of the rankings as they seek to maximize their career prospects. Elite students systematically gravitate towards elite universities, because demarcation is one, if not the main, function of elite higher education. It is through higher education that a narrow elite group is able to maintain its economic and cultural hegemony over the masses. Therefore, the geopolitically interpreted changes within university rankings provide us with very important information regarding the evolution of power relations within the world system of knowledge production. There are many university rankings, but we should focus here on those that are widely publicized, as they are of particular importance in terms of admissions. The most important rankings in this regard are the ARWU or the Shanghai list, the Times Higher Education ranking (THE) co-produced with Elsevier, and the QS list (also partnered with Elsevier). Although the rankings are not completely parallel, there are very few methodological differences. The rankings for each of the three lists largely depend on three factors: the prestige of the institution, the scientific output of the institution and educational/international indicators. Generally, the highest-rated metric is related to publication output, so universities seeking to move up on the university ranking lists should focus on increasing their number of published papers in elite journals. Of course, according to the dynamics of the world system, the lists favor the elite universities of the rich regions, meaning that if peripheral countries want to increase their visibility on these rankings, they have to invest significantly in higher education. For example, the number of qualified publications can only be significantly increased by drastically reducing the number of teaching hours of faculty members capable of doing this job and by employing them as researchers, to the detriment of their teaching.

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The consequence of this is that new faculty members have to be hired to provide primarily teaching tasks, which is an additional expense. In addition, universities can use a highly controversial method to raise their positions on international rankings: hiring researchers (usually from central countries) with a high publication output, in order to link their production to the university. This practice is clearly harmful and unethical, but if a university can import enough professors with high publication records, it can significantly improve its ranking positions. Improving the teacher/student ratio in order to get the university a better place on the rankings also entails considerably increased personnel costs. Finally, internationalization is also unthinkable without a significant increase in expenditure, as extensive international marketing efforts are needed to attract international faculty and students to the institution. In the light of the above considerations, it is clear that those countries and regions that have been able to increase their visibility on international higher education lists have had to implement a serious funding strategy to achieve those results. By contrast, these strategies were not used by the regions lagging behind. The empirical data described below were prepared by taking into account the presence of world regions in both the ARWU, THE and QS university lists. For the sake of a better comparison, I have tried to use the earliest and the most current data sets in the case of all three lists. As the structure of the databases did not allow us to work with the same annual data for each list, the above strategy meant the following. For the ARWU list, data for 2019 and 2003 were compared for both the general university rankings and the rankings for social science education. The THE list made it possible to compare 2020 and 2011 data, both in the case of general university rankings and social science rankings. Finally, the QS list shows 2020 data for the general university rankings and 2019 data for the social science rankings, but unfortunately data from previous years are no longer available. All in all, in the longitudinal comparison, current data can be compared to that of a decade ago. The ARWU list shows that American dominance has fallen by about 20% over the last decade, but even so, half of the top 100 universities are still North American universities. They are followed by Western European universities, which increased their share from 21% to 25%, followed by

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UK universities with a slightly declining share, currently around 8%. Australia shows the biggest development, raising the number of its top 100 universities from 2 to 7 since 2003. The Global North’s share on the top 100 list is still 95%, a slight decline, as it was 100% in 2003, when there were no top 100 universities from the Global South at that time. But in 2019, there were one Russian and four Chinese universities on the top 100 list of ARWU, bringing the contribution of the periphery to 5%. In the social sciences, the ARWU list shows an even more pronounced central dominance, with 100% of the list being central universities both in 2003 and in 2019. There is only room for position shifts within the center, where we can see a radical decline in American dominance (from 76% to 62%) and a strengthening of Western Europe (from 7% to 18%). On the THE list we can observe an even slighter shift over the last decade. North America’s dominance is on the wane here, with a drop of about 20% on the general university list in the last 10 years. The UK’s performance declined to a similar extent, while Western Europe nearly doubled the number of its top 100 universities. THE currently lists 25 top 100 Western European universities, making it the second strongest region in the world after the US. The performance of developed Asia is also remarkable. There are nine Asian universities from the developed region at the head of the 2020 list, with Singapore, Japan and Hong Kong being the most prominent countries. From the Global South, it is only China that was able to place three universities at the top 100 list of THE. It is also an interesting development in Asia that even though the three Chinese universities were on the top 100 list of THE 10 years ago, they were in the second half of the list, behind the universities of developed Asian countries. By 2020, however, Chinese universities overtook most advanced Asian universities and placed in the top third of the list. The list of THE in social sciences is very similar to that of the general university ranking. Besides 98% of institutions from the central hegemony, two Chinese universities were able to get listed here. The largest advances in the social sciences have been achieved by universities in Western Europe and developed Asia. The latter has doubled the number of its top 100 universities over the last 10 years, since developed Asia had five universities on the top 100 list 10 years ago, and now has 10 institutions on the THE ranking in social sciences.

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As mentioned above, the QS list does not have data on previous years, thus we can see only a cross-sectional view. Notwithstanding, the QS ranking shows the most plural picture as regards the regional diversity of the listed universities: the Global North’s share is only 91% which represents the central regions in a fairly balanced way. On the top 100 list, there are 32 American universities followed by 19 institutions from developed Asia, while the list includes 18 universities from the UK and 14 from Western Europe. The strongest region of the global South is China with 6 top 100 universities, but there Latin America, Russia and Malaysia are also represented with one university each. The global South is even stronger in social sciences: there are 5 universities from China, 3 from Latin America, 2 from Eastern Europe and 1 from Malaysia on the QS top 100 universities list in social sciences, thus giving the global South a 11% share altogether. The general picture obtained from the analysis of the three lists shows quite clear trends, which have two distinct features. The first trend pertains to the shifts within the center and it clearly shows the decline of the formerly almost exclusive hegemony of American universities, while Western European and developed Asian universities are moving upwards on the global rankings. Of course, it would be a mistake to draw far-­ reaching conclusions from this trend, as American universities still clearly define the field of knowledge production and the accumulation of knowledge, with a share ranging from 32% to 62% on the lists of top 100 universities. Notwithstanding, the American hegemony is obviously declining. At the same time, power shifts within the center does not mean the decline of Western hegemony. In fact, the share of the Global North is over 90% in all three lists, and it is even 100% on the ARWU ranking in both the general and the social sciences lists. The other obvious trend pertains to China’s extremely dynamic rise in global production. We have already seen this trend on the level of global publishing, and we can see the same phenomenon on the level of higher education. Universities are the main agents of academic capital accumulation, and China is clearly investing in developing leading universities on a global scale. China is almost the only country representing the Global South on elite university rankings, and what we see in the top 100 lists is just the tip of the iceberg. Among the top 500 universities on the

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QS list, there are 24 Chinese universities. The emergent Chinese universities, together with the universities of other Asian countries as Japan, Singapore, Korea and Hong Kong, show the most dramatic growth of all regions of the world. Asian universities currently account for 25% of the QS top 100 university list today. If both developed Asia and China (together with India and Malaysia) maintain their tendency of prioritizing and financing higher education and research, a further significant emergence of Asia is predicted. It might radically reform the current Euro-American centered operation of the world-system of knowledge production, the consequences of which remain to be seen.

References Ataie-Ashtiani, B. (2017). Chinese and Iranian Scientific Publications: Fast Growth and Poor Ethics. Science and Engineering Ethics, 23, 317–319. Ang, P. H., Knobloch-Westerwick, S., Aguaded, I., Munoz-Uribe, J.-F., Wasserman, H., & Athique, A. (2019). Intellectual Balkanization or Globalization: The Future of Communication Research Publishing. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 96(4), 963–979. Bruszt, L., & Greskovits, B. (2009). Transnationalization, Social Integration, and Capitalist Diversity in the East and the South. Studies in Comparative International Development, 44, 411–434. Carmagnani, M. (2011). El otro occidente. América Latina desde la invasión europea hasta la globalización (2nd ed.). Mexico: Fondo de Cultura. (2004). Chase-Dunn, C. (1999). Globalization: A World-Systems Perspective. Journal of World-Systems Research, 5(2), 186–215. Chase-Dunn, C., & Morasin, A. (2013). Latin America in the World-System: World Revolutions and Semiperipheral Development. Paper presented at the Santa Barbara Global Studies Conference Session on Rising Powers: Reproduction or Transformation? Retrieved from https://irows.ucr.edu/ papers/irows76/irows76.htm. Accessed 22–23 Feb 2013. Delgado, E., & Repiso, R. (2013). The Impact of Scientific Journals of Communication: Comparing Google Scholar Metrics, Web of Science and Scopus. Comunicar, 21(41), 45–52. Demeter, M. (2019). The Winner Takes It All: International Inequality in Communication and Media Studies Today. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 96(1), 37–59.

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Ferraro, V. (2008). Dependency Theory: An Introduction. In G. Secondi (Ed.), The Development Economics Reader (pp. 58–64). London: Routledge. Frank, A.  G. (1967). Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America. New York: Monthly Review Press. Gumpenberger, C., Sorz, J., Wieland, M., & Gorraiz, J. (2016). Humanities and Social Sciences in the Bibliometric Spotlight. Research Output Analysis at the University of Vienna and Considerations for Increasing Visibility. Research Evaluation, 25(3), 271–278. Gunaratne, S. A. (2009). Globalization: A Non-Western Perspective: The Bias of Social Science/Communication Oligopoly. Communication, Culture and Critique, 2(1), 60–82. Halperin Donghi, T. (1998). Historia contemporánea de América Latina. Madrid: Alianza. (1969). Kentor, J. (2000). Capital and Coercion: The Role of Economic and Military Power in the World-Economy 1800–1990. New York: Routledge. Kentor, J. (2008). The Divergence of Economic and Coercive Power in the World Economy 1960 to 2000: A Measure of Nation-State Position (Working Paper No. 46). Retrieved from Institute for Research on World-Systems: https:// irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows46/irows46.htm Lauf, E. (2005). National Diversity of Major International Journals in the Field of Communication. Journal of Communication, 55(1), 139–151. Mahoney, J. (2012). Colonialism and Postcolonial Development: Spanish America in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martin, C. E., & Wasserman, M. (2011). Latin America and Its People (3rd ed.). Boston: Prentice Hall. Moody, J. (2004). The Structure of a Social Science Collaboration Network: Disciplinary Cohesion from 1963 to 1999. American Sociological Review, 69(2), 213–238. Robinson, W. (2008). Latin America and Global Capitalism: A Critical Globalization Perspective. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ruddock, A. (2018). Backstage in the History of Media Theory: The George Gerbner Archive and the History of Critical Media Studies. KOME: An International Journal of Pure Communication Inquiry, 6(2), 81–91. Wallerstein, I. (1990). Antisystemic Movements: History and Dilemmas. In S. Amin, G. Arrighi, A. G. Frank, & I. Wallerstein (Eds.), Transforming the Revolution: Social Movements and the World-System (pp. 13–53). New York: Cambridge University Press.

5 Collecting Academic Capital

In recent decades, academic pluralism, academic decentralization and academic de-Westernization have become real buzzwords. Many believe that, behind the trend, there is social and economic pressure stemming from the principles of a neoliberal, democratic society (Metz et al. 2016). In parallel with the increasing globalization of knowledge production, questions on the geopolitical composition of global knowledge are emerging as well. These inquiries, among others, question to what extent this so-called international knowledge accumulated in leading global academic institutions is geopolitically plural and diverse (Waisbord and Mellado 2014). There are many scholars that have been arguing since the early 1990s that the globalization of knowledge production should go hand in hand with a much more egalitarian academic field that is more representative of the diversity of world regions (Stephan and Levin 1991). Scholars focusing on global knowledge production generally agree that greater diversity within a discipline indicates the maturity of the field (Wasserman 2018). A more mature and established academic field guarantees that the discipline is capable of presenting multiple perspectives, both in terms of theoretical frameworks and empirical data, and at the

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same time of constantly challenging the knowledge monopolies represented by the elite in the field (Goyanes 2018). The above theoretical criticism is based on a great deal of empirical evidence. Dozens of analyses conducted in the field of communication and media studies alone show the astonishing degree of central hegemony. As early as the late 1980s, one of the leading journals of the field, Communication Research, dedicated a special issue to the subject (vol. 16(5)). The flagship journal of the International Communication Association, the Journal of Communication, also published three special issues (vol. 43(3), vol. 54(3) and vol. 55(3)) with articles analyzing the publication patterns in communication research and the diversity of the discipline. Most of the studies dealt with citation networks (Funkhouser 1996; Borgman 1989; Borgman and Reeves 1983; Bunz 2005), but significant research was also devoted to diversity issues, including geopolitical diversity (Walter et  al. 2018; Lauf 2005; Günther and Domahidi 2017). Other scholars have analyzed emerging popular topics and papers within the discipline and found strong central and especially American biases, including citing habits, research topics and the applied methodologies (Freelon 2013). Recently, both the journal of the Association for Education and Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, as well as the Journal of Communication have addressed the topic of diversity. The editor-in-chief of Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly emphasized that increasing diversity should not mean loosening quality standards—a statement that, while stating a laudable principle, is somewhat problematic, since it presupposes that a decline in American dominance would also lead to a deterioration in quality. We will discuss this sensitive topic in more detail soon, as one of the major international academic scandals of 2019 stemmed from similar statements. Writing in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Peng Hwa Ang, former president of the International Communication Association (ICA), called for mentoring programs to help peripheral regions catch up with international standards. In the same vein, Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, editor of Communication Research, pointed out that it is not only the lack of geopolitical diversity in publication patterns, but also in research trends that is problematic (Ang et al. 2019). A recent special issue of the Journal of

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Communication also addressed diversity, with 20 articles covering the hegemonic relationship between communication and related fields (Fuchs and Qiu 2018). The most radical article is perhaps the one by Chakravartty and his co-authors (2018). The authors explicitly accuse the discipline of racism and warn that white American men are still very overrepresented in knowledge production, not only in terms of publications and citations but also in gatekeeper roles such as editorial board memberships. Walter et al. (2018) also found that the level of diversity, both geographically and methodologically, is extremely low in communication studies and that non-American contributions were minimal. Carlson, Robinson, Lewis, and Berkowitz (2018) found similar results in journalism studies and Kraidy (2018) observed the same inequalities in global media research. As I mentioned above, the issue of diversity and the visibility (or rather invisibility) of the periphery led to one of the biggest professional scandals in 2019 in communication and media studies. It is worth discussing the story in some detail, as important arguments in the debate are very representative of the prejudices behind each position (Flaherty 2019). As we have already seen above, the most typical preconception is that allowing more non-American scholars to enter knowledge centers and elite journals would automatically result in a deterioration of quality. The debate itself began to emerge after many members of the association complained when they realized that virtually all (69 out of 70) of the distinguished scholars of the National Communication Association (NCA) were white. Many association members attributed this to the fact that members always elect new fellows themselves, and therefore proposed the establishment of a special committee to decide on the admission of new members. But the idea did not appeal to some members of the old boys’ club, and Martin J.  Medhurst, a professor at Baylor University and editor-in-chief of Rhetoric and Public Affairs, voiced the view that diversity could not be more important than quality. Medhurst expressed his deep concern that diversity, if it becomes too important, can divert attention from scholarly merit and even replace it. He went so far as to portray the issue as a choice between academic qualities and skin color. Of course, this statement made significant waves, not only in social media but also within the NCA itself. For example, Ragan Fox, a

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professor at California State University, called for an explicit boycott of Medhurst’s magazine, citing the editor’s above statements. Mohan J. Dutta, a professor at Massey University, called the contraposition of value and diversity a direct form of institutional racism. As we can see, the problem of diversity, which is essentially about the overrepresentation of the Western center and the invisibility of the periphery, is frequently raised not only in critical sociology or in the sociology of science, but also on a practical level when, for example, academic associations select new members. In the remainder of this chapter, I will demonstrate the extent of Western hegemony and the concentration of central academic capital, using a comparison between global publication data from two areas of social research: communication studies and development studies. In one of my previous research projects, I analyzed the publication trends in elite communication journals ranked by Scopus at the highest quartile (Q1) (Demeter 2017). The results show that over 80% of journals are published in the US or the UK, with the remaining 20% distributed in Western Europe including the Netherlands, Germany and Austria. It is interesting to note that journal ownership ratios are perfectly correlated with the cumulative H-index of a given country, where the disciplinary ranking established by the SCImago Country Rank is as follows: US, UK, Netherlands, Germany and Austria. The central hegemony is extremely strong here: it is not just that there are no peripheral journals at all in the top quartile, but that the three most powerful countries, the US, the UK and the Netherlands own more than 95% of Q1-ranked journals. In order to calculate international co-authorship, we first calculated an average author/article value. This value reveals important aspects of a discipline, because the higher the ratio, the higher the collaboration, and as a result, the discipline is likely to be more productive not only in terms of publication output but also in citation counts. For example, if there are five authors for an article, it is very likely that all five authors will cite the article at least once, which means a total of five citations. Consider the same calculation in natural sciences, where it is not uncommon that an article is written by hundreds of authors. Collaboration of this magnitude is unimaginable in the humanities and social sciences. For Q1

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communication journals, the average author/article quotient is 2.3, and the ratio correlates with the journal’s hierarchical position. For journals at the bottom of the list, this value can be only 1 (Journal of Politeness Research), so all articles published here are single authored. At the same time, we measured values over 4 in top journals: the Journal of Health Communication leads the list with an author/article average of 4.2. Basically, journals leaning more towards the natural sciences such as the Journal of Health Communication or the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication tend to publish multi-authored articles, while journals that are closer to the humanities favor single-authored papers. As mentioned above, the author/article values might have an impact on the subsequent citation of the articles and, consequently, can determine the position of the journals that publish articles with high or low average author/article values. Typically, journals with higher values will occupy top positions on the rankings, while journals with lower author/article values move downwards. This quantitative approach, which ignores the nature of the different disciplines, greatly favors quantitative social science and natural science journals, while unduly disadvantaging journals taking a humanities or critical/theoretical social science perspective. We can also look at the level of internationalization of a given field of research which refers to the specific proportion of articles produced in international co-production. The internationalization of a discipline can be calculated by two metrics: first, we can consider the proportion of international articles in a given journal. Second, we consider the diversity of international articles themselves. In this case, we calculate the number of countries represented by authors in the journal as a whole, which we divide by the total number of published authors (Demeter 2017). Overall, we found that internationalization is extremely volatile, as it may be as minimal or as non-existent as in the cases of Communication Reports and Communication Education, which published exclusively US articles during the period under review, or relatively high, as in the case of Text and Talk, where the degree of diversity is 0.66 (diversity values range from 0 to 1, where approaching 1 means very high diversity). However, the high internationalization of articles is quite different from the proportion of articles produced in international collaboration. For example, in the case of Text and Talk, the internationality of the

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journal is very high, in that its articles originated from many different countries. However, there are no international articles in the journal in the sense that there are no papers authored by several authors from different locations. Regarding general publication trends, almost half of the articles in Q1 Scopus journals have exclusive US authorship, followed by the UK and Western Europe. The peripheral regions (Eastern Europe, Africa, developing Asia, the Middle East and Latin America) all perform below 1%. More than 65% of the analyzed communication journals do not include articles from peripheral countries at all, and in the full sample, authors of peripheral regions, unless they work with a central colleague, reach a total of less than 3%. The percentage of peripheral researchers collaborating with central researchers is even lower, under 1%, but most of these co-­ authored articles are either technological in nature without considerable cultural content, or specifically regional in their focus. More importantly, even in papers co-authored by a peripheral and a central author, it is virtually always the central scholar who is the leading or first author. We found only one instance where the peripheral author led the article, putting the incidence of this author order at below 0.1%. Cooperative trends are governed by the principle of the Matthew Effect. Authors from the most successful countries tend to work with their own colleagues or with the authors from other successful countries. The size of the country is also decisive: rich, powerful and large countries, typically the US and the UK, publish a wealth of internal collaborative articles. The pattern of international co-operation (following the order: US, UK, the Netherlands and Germany) is almost identical to that of publication output and journal ownership. This reinforces the world-­ systemic nature of capital accumulation, as the same central regions are prominent in all areas of knowledge production. In one of my research projects (Demeter 2017), I analyzed 630 communication articles in the most prestigious, Q1 journals. The United States is by far the strongest country in domestic collaboration: almost 90% of multi-authored American articles are written without the involvement of anyone other than American coauthors. The proportion of domestic multi-authored articles is similarly high in Belgium (74%), the Netherlands (70%), Germany (58%) and the UK (50%). At the other end of the scale are

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those peripheral countries (such as Greece, Uganda, Cyprus and Hungary) that not only fail to produce articles in international, but even in national (multi-author) collaborations. The most powerful empires in global knowledge production, in terms of their share in Q1-ranked elite publications are the US, the UK, the Netherlands and Germany. They are followed by a number of central countries such as Spain, Italy, France, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Australia and Canada. Successful countries tend to develop strong connections to each other, with the most important axis between the US, the UK and Germany. The Netherlands is also connected to the axis, primarily through its frequent collaboration with the US, and also as a medial point that connects many other Western countries (such as Belgium, Austria and Denmark) to the center. China appears here as semi-peripheral agent, sharing collaborative articles with the center, rather than focusing on other Asian countries. The least successful countries are those peripheral countries which neither cooperate with the center, nor have connections with other peripheral countries. Typical examples of this latter kind are African and Eastern European countries. Finally, Israel is a unique case, since it produces almost all of its articles with an author from a central country, typically the United States. In one of my other research projects (Demeter 2018) I analyzed collaboration networks in the top quartile of communication journals indexed on the SSCI list of the Web of Science: the most selective list within the discipline, since it ranks only 79 communication journals of which only 19 are in the first quartile (Q1). The results show an extreme polarity: most of the articles were published by either American or British authors, while the peripheral countries were almost invisible. A typical Q1 article is written by two authors, while single-authored articles are almost as frequent, followed by those written by three authors. Only a few articles are written by more than seven authors, but some have 10 or more. The densest set of the distribution is obviously for articles with one to four authors. European countries collaborate exclusively with one another, and the same is true for North America, with the exception of the relatively frequent American–Asian collaborations. Despite claims that the field of communication and media studies is international, cross-cultural co-authorship is relatively rare, and

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developed countries rule almost the entire domain. More than 95% of Scopus-indexed journals in communication are owned by developed countries, and the ownership of a periodical determines the composition of its articles: Journals in developed countries typically publish papers from developed-country authors, while periodicals in dependent countries present almost exclusively dependent-country content. The same phenomenon occurs at the level of individual countries: Spanish, German, Mexican and Brazilian journals publish almost exclusively papers from their countries, while the United States and the United Kingdom almost exclusively publish content from developed countries. To overcome the “publish or perish” situation, authors from peripheral countries tend to develop alternative publication methods. First, they might try to publish in prestigious but thematic journals, such as the Chinese Journal of Communication or Communicatio: South African Journal for Communication Theory and Research. These journals that originate in central countries or that are thematically peripheral journals only exist at the Q3 and Q4 levels, but they maintain the center/periphery structure and hierarchy by determining the themes and topics in which a peripheral author can publish. A second option is to establish peripheral journals, such as Medijske Studije or Media Watch, in which authors from peripheral countries are overrepresented. Nevertheless, these Q3- and Q4-ranked journals are not real alternatives to the prestigious central periodicals, and because they lack authors from central countries, they cannot offer the possibility of international, cross-cultural dialogue. The third possibility occurs when a central journal has a guest editor from a peripheral country. This immediately increases the number of articles from peripheral authors, but these occasions are infrequent. The fourth opportunity could be what Spanish-language countries do so well: They create great hubs in which linguistically related cultures can collaborate. No fewer than 19 journals in the whole corpus (Q1-Q4) originate in Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking countries. Five Spanish journals are in Q2, so this hub has obviously advanced to the most prestigious periodicals. Finally, there are—ethically questionable—attempts to publish in developed-country journals for money, as seen in the example of Global Media Journal.

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Another area where we have analyzed the publication trends is development studies, a discipline that is extremely important for us because it has come to be defined by diversity and decentralization (Cummings and Hoebink 2016). Accordingly, we would expect it to be a significantly de-­ Westernized area with a very high degree of geopolitical and social diversity. Unfortunately, empirical data show that this is not the case. In her 2016 research, Sarah Cummings found a strong Western dominance in the top 10 development studies journals, both in terms of the ownership of the journals, the national diversity of the authors, and the international diversity of their editorial boards. In addition, Cummings found a strong degree of networking in the case of editorial boards, meaning significant overlaps in the editorial memberships of the most prestigious journals in the field. Moreover, there is a very limited pool of elite universities from which editorial board members are recruited. In the case of development studies, there are some elite universities in either the UK (the University of Oxford, the University of Sussex, the University of Manchester and some member universities of the University of London system) or the US (Cornell, Michigan State University and some members of the University of California system). Gender representation in editorial boards is extremely unbalanced, with male dominance ranging from 88% (Economic Development and Cultural Change) to 54% (Development Policy Review), with an average of 70%, and there are no journals with a female majority in their editorial board. As in communication and media studies, the diversity of authors in development studies journals shows a significant Western dominance. In the group of the 10 most successful countries in terms of development studies publishing, there is only one from the Global South: India. According to Cummings’ research, there is a strong American and British dominance, with the exception of journals that have a regional focus, such as the Canadian Journal of Development Studies, where most authors are Canadian, and the European Journal of Development Research, where Western European authors outstrip their American and British counterparts. Nevertheless, more than 13% of the total sample of articles comes from authors located in the Global South, which shows a far higher peripheral share in knowledge production than in communications research.

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My own research supports and also extends Cummings’ results. In my project Knowledge imperialism in global social sciences: The case study of development studies, I analyzed over 60,000 articles in 17 development studies journals in order to measure regional diversity in the discipline. I presented the results at the 2019 Conference of the Development Studies Association (DSA) in Milton Keynes, where I also had the opportunity to consult with Sarah Cummings. I found that all the analyzed journals were published in Western countries, with the biggest share being from the UK (51%), followed by the US (37%) and Western Europe (12%). Thus, in terms of global knowledge production—and in other respects, as we will see later—development studies are specifically British territory (Fig. 5.1). Analyzing publication trends over the last 50 years in development studies, I found that, after the 10% share of the periphery in the 1960s, there was a decline and, as a result, the share of the periphery dropped to 5% by the 1970s. The decline was followed by a slight recovery of the periphery, and the share of the periphery developed to 13–15% by the 2010s which still shows the picture of a very unbalanced field (Fig.  5.1). As in communication studies, major shifts have occurred 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 60s

70s

80s Global North

90s

2000s

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Global South

Fig. 5.1  Distribution of world regions in development studies publication output from the 1960s to the 2010s. (The author’s calculation)

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within the center, but not in the world-system of global knowledge production as a whole. The contribution of the United States decreased dramatically, down to 35% of its production in the 1960s, while Western Europe raised its share from 3% to 25% in the same time period. As in other social sciences, Asia has shown significant improvement in both its developed and developing regions, accounting for 12% of total output by the 2010s, compared to only 2% in the 1960s. Israel alone has the same contribution as all of Africa (5%), while the Middle East and Eastern Europe continue to perform below the almost invisible 1%. Finally, Latin America’s output has decreased significantly, from 7% in the 1960s to 3% in the 2010s. Education trajectories in development studies show the typical pattern of extensive brain drain. While we have some scholars originating from peripheral regions and who are educated there at the undergraduate level, most of them go to Western universities for an MA, and literally everyone gets their PhD in the center (Fig. 5.2). Figure 5.3 shows that the UK and the US were the most popular destinations that peripheral scholars chose to pursue their education in. Finally, cooperation trends in development studies (Fig. 5.4) are similar to those in communication research. Successful countries collaborate mainly on a domestic level, and international collaboration is even less frequent than it was in communication studies.

Collecting Academic Capital In Chap. 3, when I discussed the phenomenon called camouflage identity, I gave an overview of different practices used by Global South scholars to enhance their academic visibility and international success. Most of these processes are based on the assumption that it is very hard, if not impossible, to gain admittance to the elite club of international scholars, since global academy is highly biased against Global South competitors. Thus, instead of making tremendous efforts to get published in a prestigious international journal or hired by a top-tier Global North institution, Global South agents have begun to create their alternative universes with regional networks and allegedly international journals.

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80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 BA

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MA

PhD

UK

US

Western EU

Canada, Oceania

Developed Asia

Latin-America

Africa

Middle East

Eastern Europe

Developing Asia

Global North (%)

Global South (%)

100 50 0 BA

MA

PhD

Fig. 5.2  Distribution of world regions in educating development studies scholars. (The author’s calculation)

Although it is almost impossible to gain global visibility as a Global South scholar, one can pretend to be a Global North scholar by gaining sufficient deal Global North capital. In this subchapter, I will show why talented Global South competitors with the appropriate social background choose to study abroad and why Western education is— wrongly—considered as the only, infallible sign of future success.

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Fig. 5.3  Career trajectories in development studies by mobility. (The author’s calculation)

 areer Paths of Successful Academics C from the Global South While global science is usually thought of as being one of the fairest social institutions, many social scientists and philosophers of science have pointed out that science is not egalitarian in offering equal opportunities to everyone, irrespective of social (Saurin 2016) and personal background (Efranmanesh et al. 2017). Shenhav (1986), for example, describes the dependence of academic research on nonacademic, external factors such as politics, the economy, or the requirements of governmental or private clients. In addition to the fact that the scientific communities in different regions of the world use different methods and techniques, cultural, language and epistemological differences are also decisive factors (Toth 2012). It is not a surprise then that most committed students from the

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Fig. 5.4  Cooperation patterns in development studies by co-authorship. (The author’s calculation)

Global South try to master the so-called global (actually Western or Anglo-Saxon) standards. But it is also well known that Global North degrees—especially those from the most prestigious Western universities—act not only as sources of knowledge, but also as very valuable academic capital. As Robert Frank and Philip Cook put it in their The Winner-Take-All Society, The day has already arrived when failure to have an elite undergraduate degree closes certain doors completely, no matter what other stellar credentials a student might possess. Harvard’s graduate program in economics, for example, recently rejected an applicant from a small Florida college, despite her straight-A transcript and glowing recommendations from professors who described her as by far the best student they had ever taught. Her problem was that the committee also had a file drawer full of applications from straight-A students with strong letters from schools like Stanford, Princeton, and MIT.  On the evidence, the Florida applicant

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might have been as good or better than the others. But committees are forced to play the odds which tell us clearly that the best students from the best schools are better, on average than the best students from lesser schools. (Frank and Cook 1996, pp. 22–23)

Indeed, the place of education is hard currency on the labor market independently of later job performance. This initial inequality will even increase over time: most potential candidates without prestigious Global North education will find that the doors for many opportunities are closed to them, even when they perform much better than their Western colleagues. Consider identical twins with identical academic records except that, by some twist of fate, one teaches at an elite institution, whereas her sister teaches at a lower-ranked school. The first twin’s papers are more likely to be accepted by leading professional journals. Her books are more likely to be discussed in the New  York Review of Books. Her applications for research grants are more likely to be funded. She is more likely to enjoy lucrative consulting opportunities. If she writes a textbook, it will sell more copies. She is more likely to be invited to give lectures and be asked to join other leading scholars at professional conferences. And she is also more likely to enjoy the stimulus of working with gifted colleagues and students. (Frank and Cook 1996, p. 151)

What is more, elite education is not necessarily the result of personal excellence only, but, rather frequently, the outcome of having a supportive and upper-class family. As Nobel laureate economist Joseph E. Stiglitz puts it, education opportunity is rather a stark reflection of social inequality than a materialization of meritocracy (Stiglitz 2012).

 oosting Academic Career: Measuring the Role B of Global North Education Unsurprisingly, tenure committees tend to overestimate the role elite education plays in future academic performance in terms of science output. It is faster and easier to select resumes full of Ivy League institutions

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and reject those showing an educational history at little-known universities. As selection committees have to face hundreds of CVs for each job announcement, the pace of the selection process is an important factor that encourages them to prefer candidates with degrees from elite institutions and attribute undeserved extra capital to these applicants. In one of our still unpublished studies, we analyzed data on the faculty of the top 100 sociology departments. We also analyzed the educational paths and networks of core faculty members (n = 3325). Results show that a very biased Western monoculture prevails over the field and that voices of the periphery cannot be heard at elite central institutions. Moreover, a significant gender bias could be found throughout sociology departments, with strong male dominance in top tenured positions. When we analyzed the data on where these faculty members had obtained their degrees, we saw that even those rare scholars who were from the periphery would also strive to get Global North degrees as early as they could. While there is a very limited but still measurable proportion of faculty holding BAs from the Global South (an average of 11%), this amount declines with MAs (5%) and almost vanishes at the PhD level (3%). However, even this minimal contribution comes from sociology departments of the Global South (from China, Brazil, and Russia), and there are no fully Global South educated academics at central (Global North) sociology departments. We could also see that, although hiring academics from the same affiliation (18% average) and from the same country (73% average) is almost equally frequent in the case of BA, MA and PhD degrees, the most prestigious sociology departments tend not to employ their former students. On the other hand, less elite departments, especially those from the Global South, are more likely to hire their alumni. Generally, American degrees dominate the field by over 50% at the undergraduate, master’s and doctoral levels, and there is only one Global South country (China) in the club of top-10 educators at the BA level. However, in MA and PhD levels there are no Global South educators at all. The overall participation of the Global South declines to only 1% at the PhD level, but as was mentioned earlier, this is due to the Global South sociology departments of the list since central departments seem unwilling to accept Global South knowledge. Moreover, even if we have many Western countries in the sample, the US, the UK and Germany

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account for more than three-quarters of the total degrees at all levels of higher education. Mobility, that is, studying or working abroad, greatly improves the symbolic or academic capital of researchers, while immobility often results in narrowed career paths (Bourdieu 2004). The motivations driving mobility include simple economic features like higher salary or better material/technical conditions, but research shows that the promotion of scientific visibility—growth in publication output, coauthored international publications or the increase of citation indices—also play a very important role (Asheulova and Dushina 2014). To understand the significance of having degrees from central universities, we must first differentiate between academic capital, academic production and academic productivity. To start with, academic capital is symbolic capital accumulated in the form of certifications, degrees, fellowships, research grants and work experience (Bourdieu 1988). Academic capital that has been collected at the top of the hierarchy (typically in the US and other English-speaking countries) is much more valuable than those collected in peripheral countries (Bauder 2015; Bauder et al. 2017). Thus, academic capital is generally measured in terms of BA, MA and PhD certifications from Global North countries. As opposed to academic capital, academic production is measured by the number of high-quality publications. Given that, especially in the social sciences, almost all the leading journals are published in the Global North, academic production refers to the number of Global North publications generally indexed in prestigious international science databases like Scopus or Web of Science’s SSCI list. Based on the above-mentioned assumptions, we state that productivity is the quotient of production (measured in the number of high-­ quality articles) and capital (measured in Global North degrees and experience). Productivity =

Production ( number of articles )

Academic capital ( GN degrees and experience )



However reasonable it is that selection committees should use the above-mentioned formula when assessing candidates’ merits, the direct

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opposite calculation is being used when Global North education is added as a surplus to measure production (Cook 2009; Evers et al. 2005). This is a fairly ineffective way of calculating productivity, since it is well known that the main factor predicting future publication success is not education itself, but rather pre-selection productivity. Thus, the best predictor of future success is prior success in publishing academic research—and not education per se (Kaiser and Pratt 2016).

 xcessive Brain Drain: Academic Migration E from the South to the North In spite of the fact that, as we have already seen, Global North education does not necessarily boost the future academic production of Global South academics, selection committees still tend to view Global North degrees as the most important predictor of success. An equally important factor however is that ambitious Global South academics also think that a Global North education will either boost their productivity or gain them favor with selection committees. Accordingly, and irrespective of the empirical evidence suggesting there is no direct connection between a Global North education and future success in publication output, the most ambitious and talented Global South students are certain to go West to learn the so-called standards of academia. It is equally important to note that, besides being talented and hardworking, Global South students wishing to study abroad also need an extraordinarily supportive and well-informed environment—typically, an upper-class family. By pointing out that, first, a Global North education is largely the privilege of upper-class Global South families and, second, that a Global North education will unfairly upgrade the expected future academic output of scholars, we are also pointing out the inequitable nature of the entire process. It is not just that education fails to serve as a leveling institution and instead heightens the differences in social capital of members of different social classes, but also that the systematic overrating of the role of a Global North education in future academic productivity, selection committees further deepen the abyss between the social capital of lowerand upper-class candidates.

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Committed students with the appropriate family background tend to obtain a Global North education, preferably at one of those elite universities. In one of my earlier studies, I investigated the career paths of more than 400 academics from the Global South in order to find correlations between a Global North education and future production. Similarly to my other research projects, I analyzed the performance of communication and media scholars. As was mentioned in the Introduction, the research found that the most intense bias could be found in the social sciences and most typically, in communication and media studies. However this does not mean that the findings are only characteristic of communication scholars. The same patterns could be found in other social sciences, and the publication patterns in the natural sciences are similar, varying only in their extent. In order to have an overview of international cooperation between different world regions and countries, we made a network analysis of the data on the authors of all the Global South (co)authored papers in WoS’s SSCI communication between 2012 and 2017 (n = 426). The sample contains all the countries (n = 63, minimum degree = 1) with at least one author with a Global South coauthor(s). Then we analyzed the education and career paths of the Global South researchers: we made records of the source and target regions of all the individuals having Global South affiliations and a Global North education, postdoctoral position or second affiliation. With this, we could analyze typical interregional career paths. Our analysis clearly showed some major patterns in the field of global academia. First of all, the number of Global South authors was extraordinarily low. Second, even those from the Global South who succeed in publishing in leading periodicals had their education in the Global North. Thus 27% of Global South authors in our pattern had their BA from Global North universities, an amount which increases to 49% at the MA and 59% at the PhD level. More than half (53%) of Global South authors have Global North postdoctoral experience, and 35.5% of them even have a current Global North affiliation, meaning that the author works for both a Global South and a Global North institution. In addition, since 63% of Global South authors have Global North coauthors, the amount of “pure” cases (authors without any Global North connections) is only 16%. In fact, we even found so-called international

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journals that had never published any papers from the Global South (Demeter 2019). The amount of Global South participation was even less extensive when we considered only those pure (Global South educated) authors that published without a Global North coauthor. The proportion of published articles from authors from this category was less than 0.5%. Our results also show that the Global South is not uniform since different world regions have a different level of success in terms of science output. As Table 5.1 shows, Latin America is clearly the leading region, accounting for 40% of the Global South’s contribution, followed by developing Asia (25%), Eastern Europe (13%), the Middle East (12%) and Africa (9%) with a markedly lower, but still noticeable contribution. However, the role of leading countries cannot be neglected, and we will further analyze the sample later in this chapter. In order to better visualize international contribution patterns, we made network graphs showing individual countries as nodes and co-­ authorship as links between them. The links were weighted: in the case of one coauthored paper with authors from two different countries, the weight of the link connecting them would be one, but if there are two different papers by co-authored from the same country, then the weight would be two, and so on. Thus, we have 63 individual countries that have at least one mixed (GS-GN) coauthored article in the sample (Fig. 5.5). We also made clusters related to world regions (indicated with different colors). The analysis of the education and career paths of successful Global South scholars also led to the recognition of some typical patterns (Fig. 5.6). The strongest paths in career development are those that link Latin America to the United States, to Western Europe and especially to Spain. Developing Asian authors from the Global South prefer the United States and developed Asia, followed by Western Europe. Most Eastern European researchers selected Western European institutions for education, followed by US universities. Twice as many researchers from the Middle East chose the US rather than Western Europe. Finally, African academics prefer the old continent, both Western and Eastern Europe. If we compare the network of cooperation (Fig. 5.5) with the network of education (Fig. 5.6), we see that the international patterns

China India Philippines Thailand Bangladesh Indonesia Malaysia Vietnam Sri Lanka

Source: Demeter (2018)

Asia

Chile Mexico Brazil Colombia Ecuador Argentina Peru Venezuela Dominican Rep El Salvador Total

50 41 31 24 10 7 4 1 1 1 170

South America

106

76 13 4 4 4 3 3 2 1

Poland Czech Republic Slovenia Romania Russia Serbia Croatia Estonia Bulgaria Hungary

Eastern EU 13 11 8 5 5 4 3 2 2 2 55

Turkey United Arab Emirates Brunei Lebanon Iran Pakistan Kuwait Jordan Qatar

Middle East

Table 5.1  The number of Global South authors by world regions in the sample

47

29 5 4 3 2 1 1 1 1

South Africa Botswana Swaziland Ghana Egypt

Africa

38

33 2 1 1 1

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Fig. 5.5  Patterns of mixed (GN-GS) co-authorship in the sample. Thicker lines represent higher weights, which mean more frequent co-authorship between the linked countries. (Source: Demeter 2018)

are quite similar. The explanation might be that former education networks lead to similar cooperation patterns later in the scholars’ academic career. Our analysis on the career paths of successful Global South academics also showed something about the tactics of the most ambitious

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Fig. 5.6  Education and career paths from the Global South to the Global North (the width of the edges represents the frequency of a given path). (Source: Demeter 2019)

non-­Western scholars. It seems from the data that, in order to publish in leading international periodicals, the most adaptive habitus is to find Global North coauthors. More than 63% of our sample chose to follow this path, and it seems from the data that this is a quite rewarding method. Most top-tier journals on the analyzed field publish pure Global South articles only exceptionally, and there are periodicals that never publish Global South articles without a Global North coauthor.

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 election of Department Members: S A Systematic Elitist Bias The classical view holds that universities, or more precisely, selection committees hire an extraordinarily productive and internationally diverse staff (Burris 2004). But, as an extensive number of research projects have clearly shown, this conventional view is far from true. Instead of being a purely meritocratic selection process (Merton 1968), hiring turns out to be a social procedure full of nonmeritocratic factors (Clauset et  al. 2015). Many researchers ascertained, for example, that the prestige of the affiliation of a given candidate’s PhD school could determinate her chances for a tenure track position to a much greater extent than her productivity (Baldi 1994; Burris 2004; Clauset et al. 2015). The function that the prestige of the alma mater plays in the career trajectories of future academics is extraordinarily strong: Burris showed that “the prestige of the department in which an academic received a PhD consistently ranks as the most important factor in determining the employment opportunities available to those entering the academic labor market.” (Burris 2004, p. 239). Behind the above delineated positive discrimination towards candidates from elite educational institutions, current research found a twofold motivation. The first could be explained by the stratification hypothesis, whereby hiring patterns follow a strict hierarchy in order to establish a hierarchical hiring network between top universities. In this way, elite institutions play a win-win game where the sending university, i.e. the one from the candidates earned their PhDs, will be highly ranked due to the fact that another elite institution is willing to hire its PhDs. In return, the sending university also highly rates the terminal institution (the university to which its PhD is applying) because it considers it as a university worth working for. In short, with this bilateral positive assessment, top universities establish a top-tier core while excluding the rest (Clauset et al. 2015). Behind the second motivation, there is an assumption that the prestige of the candidate’s PhD institution and the prestige of candidates’ mentors will positively affect the future productivity of the applicants (Creat and Musselin 2010). However, empirical data clearly contradict this assumption. Williamson and Cable (2003) systematically analyzed every possible

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correlation between the constituents of hiring processes and found that neither the academic origin nor the dissertation advisor played a significant role in future productivity. In terms of future scientific output, the only predictive factor was the applicants’ past productivity—but, as it was shown a long time ago, “pre-employment productivity has little if any impact on the prestige of the first position even though it is the best predictor of future productivity” (Long et al. 1979, p. 818). From the above delineated two features of academic hiring, a picture of a very clear and presumably detrimental discrimination pattern stands out. Elite institutions mutually hire one another’s candidates with almost no regard for their merits in terms of productivity, while systematically excluding academics without degrees from top schools, again, irrespective of their merits. As a conclusion, in addition to the well-­known factors of serious disadvantages like non-Anglophone origin (Curry and Lillis 2018) or a working-class family background (Ball et al. 1995, 2003), we should add the disadvantages that result from not having been educated at top-tier universities, and research shows that this drawback is extraordinarily difficult to overcome (Cowan and Rossello 2018). As we have seen earlier, internalization might be an egalitarian process in theory, but empirically it could serve as an instrument to maintain or even intensify global inequalities (Ennew and Greenaway 2012). Amongst the top-ranked risks, researchers refer to brain drain (Mahroum 2001), a risk of losing cultural identities, commodification and the advent of degree mills, and it is also maintained that these risks primarily threaten the developing world (Altbach 2010). Moreover, overemphasizing the significance of elite degrees reinforces social class inequalities to a very great extent because elite education is largely the privilege of the upper-­ middle and upper classes, starting from as early as nursery school all the way to graduate education (Gerhards et al. 2017).

The Role of the State: BRICS Countries on the Move As a result of our former network analysis, we were able to point out the existence of some definable scientific hubs or main centers. The first notable hub is the US-centered graph of coauthors. All world regions (and

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most countries) have a direct connection to the US in terms of brain drain and publication co-authorship. But we also found that some alternative force fields are emerging. The first could be called Latin because it consists of Spain and many Latin American countries including Chile, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, Ecuador, El Salvador and the Dominican Republic. This is a very successful hub in terms of both the number of the countries and of the frequencies of their collaborations. The Latin hub is extraordinarily successful among the alternative centers because it is able to maintain a very important feature of science communication: the common language. Most periodicals from the Latin hub were able to resist the exclusive use of English and publish mainly in Spanish or both Spanish and English. In this way, the Spanish-speaking hub has built up a relatively strong citation universe for, and of, hispanophone scholars that, at least in the cases of some research fields, makes this hub competitive against the allegedly international core which is in fact centered around the US and Western Europe. Another alternative force field is the Asian hub with China and Asian countries of the Global North like Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Other Global South regions like Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe are not successful in developing regional or international centers. Considering not just the strength of the links between different world regions, but also the number of their authors, we will recognize that, at least in some Global South regions, there are countries that have taken on a clear leadership role. The typical example here is China, with its 76 authors, which is more than the total contribution of other world regions like Africa, the Middle East or Eastern Europe. With this, China accounts for 72% of the total contribution of developing Asia. We should mention here that the modern science policy in China supports academic mobility to a very great extent by supporting a Global North education for the most talented Chinese students, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, by attracting internationally recognized academics to China with various government-funded programs (Asheulova and Dushina 2014). As opposed to China, Soviet-type academia still endures in Russia, where international mobility is still very low, and inadequate research funding results in a non-competitive academic structure (Yurevich 2010).

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Thus, the “best practice” for an emergent academic culture is, beyond question, the one used by China. First, there is the issue of allocation: China’s annual expenditure on academic research has increased by 18% annually, resulting in an extraordinarily competitive academic environment. This allows China to attract foreign scholars as well as highly distinguished Chinese academics educated at the world’s best institutions. Second, China increasingly promotes mobility: in fact, the mobility of Chinese academics and students is commensurable with their American and Western European peers. But, and this is where China has been extremely successful, it is also able to attract expatriates with good salaries and working conditions (Asheulova and Dushina 2014). A similar alternative core function holds true for Turkey, which accounts for 62% of the contribution of the Middle East. Neither developing Asia nor the Middle East has any other key countries in terms of international contribution, making Asia and the Middle East strongly centralized regional hubs (the place of Israel, as part of the Global North, was discussed earlier). Similarly, Africa has only one central country, namely South Africa, providing 87% of Africa’s contribution. By contrast, Latin America has at least four leading countries, as Chile, Mexico, Brazil and Colombia have almost equally important levels of Global North collaborations. The same is true in Eastern Europe, where Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia were equally successful in publishing their research in Global North periodicals. In short, we can say that the nature of science networking can be described at two different analytical levels in our analyzed field. The first is the level of international networks, of which the biggest is the US-centered force field that connects all world regions to various degrees. Nevertheless, we also have two relative autonomous force fields: one for Asia, with China as its central hub and another for Latin America. Both networks have very good connections with almost all the regions of the Global North (especially with the US) but also have their own special Global North countries with which they have significant collaborations in terms of education paths and co-authorship (Spain in the case of the Spanish-speaking hub, and the developed Asian countries in the case of China). The second level is the intraregional level of the regional Global South networks, which could be either centralized or decentralized. A

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Table 5.2  Matrix of the main network features of Global South world regions Centered Decentralized

Autonomous

Dependent

Developing Asia Latin America

Africa Eastern Europe

centralized network has its leading country, like in the case of Asia (with China), Africa (with South Africa) and the Middle East (with Turkey). A decentralized network, on the other hand, has no leading country, like in the case of Eastern Europe and Latin America, where the science contribution is instead distributed between the countries of the region. Accordingly, we have two distinct features for the description of a given field of forces: the first is its (relative) autonomy and the second is its centeredness (Table 5.2). Thus, we have autonomous and centered force fields like the network of developing Asia, autonomous and decentralized networks like Latin America, dependent and centered networks like Africa and the Middle East and, finally, we have dependent and decentralized networks like Eastern Europe. The results of our analysis show, that—in accordance with common sense—the most successful networks in terms of publication output are the autonomous and decentralized networks, like Latin America. On the one hand, the hispanophone hub includes many, almost equally successful countries, and, on the other hand, it has very good connections with the Global North and especially with Spain. It is no surprise then that the Latin-American network has the most significant contribution in the Global South with more than 40% of the Global South’s full publication output. We have seen in this chapter that in the world-system of global knowledge production, the center/periphery relations are clearly visible at both the levels of publication output and of academic capital accumulation. Western countries own the most prestigious journals, hold the lion’s share of international publication output, and it is virtually impossible to occupy a position within global academia without an elite Western education. In the next chapter, I will discuss the role of the gatekeepers, namely editorial board members, who make this unequal system work in a way that it maintains or even reinforces existing hegemonies.

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Shenhav, Y.  A. (1986). Dependency and Compliance in Academic Research Infrastructures. Sociological Perspectives, 28(1), 29–51. Stephan, P.  E., & Levin, S.  G. (1991). Inequality in Scientific Performance: Adjustment for Attribution and Journal Impact. Social Studies of Science, 21(2), 351–368. Stiglitz, J.  E. (2012). The Price of Inequality. How Today’s Divided Society Endangers our Future. New York: W.W. Norton. Toth, J. (2012). The Dangers of Academic Bubble Economy from a Young Researcher’s Perspective. Acta Sociologica, 5(1), 61–67. Waisbord, S., & Mellado, C. (2014). De-westernizing Communication Studies: A Reassessment. Communication Theory, 24, 361–372. Walter, N., Cody, M. J., & Ball-Rokeach, S. J. (2018). The Ebb and Flow of Communication Research: Seven Decades of Publication Trends and Research Priorities. Journal of Communication, 68(2), 424–440. Wasserman, H. (2018). Power, Meaning and Geopolitics: Ethics as an Entry Point for Global Communication Studies. Journal of Communication, 68(2), 441–451. Williamson, I. O., & Cable, D. M. (2003). Predicting Early Career Research Productivity: The Case of Management Faculty. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 24, 25–44. Yurevich, A. V. (2010). Tenevaya nauka v sovremennoy Rossii [Shadow Science in Contemporary Russia]. Sociology of Science and Technology, 1(4), 154–170.

6 Gatekeepers of Knowledge Dissemination: Inequality in Journal Editorial Boards

In this shorter but important chapter, I will discuss the power positions of editorial board members. After offering some theoretical considerations, I will present data from empirical research that show to what extent different world regions participate in this kind of gatekeeping. The extraordinary role of editorial boards in knowledge production has been studied by so many studies that it has almost become an independent field of research (Demeter 2018a; Goyanes 2017, 2019; Lauf 2005). The role of editorial boards as gatekeepers is that, apart from some nuances to be discussed later, they have virtually exclusive power over the professional profile of a journal, the accepted methods, the subject matter and thematic foci of the accepted articles, and—since journal reviewers are usually selected from the pool of editorial board members—they often directly determine whether or not an article can be published (Metz et al. 2016). Editorial board members are also highly involved in maintaining and shaping the complex system of global knowledge production by defining the value of different kinds of academic capital, such as the values that the journal stands for, and thus also the values of higher education institutions and individual scholars. This complex system will be further explained in the final chapter, but here I would only like to © The Author(s) 2020 M. Demeter, Academic Knowledge Production and the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52701-3_6

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mention that the fact that editorial board members can determine publication trends leads to several consequences. For example, since universities are primarily valuated on the basis of their research output, editorial board members can have an indirect effect on the rankings of higher education institutes. The same holds for individual researchers, since the amount of their accumulated academic capital, resulting partly from their publication output, depends on the number of their publications in prestigious journals. Moreover, since editorial board members seek to improve journal ratings, they have a distinct preference for articles and authors that are expected to bring a lot of citations to the journal, thus either maintaining or—optimally—increasing its prestige. Moreover, since being an editorial board member of a higher-ranked journal means more power in gatekeeping, elitist selection strategies also further entrench the power positions of editorial board members. Canavero and his colleagues (2014) analyzed the processes whereby editors select papers expected to be highly cited and authors with a prominent reputation. They found that editors typically use two types of indicators in the selection process: the journal impact factor (measured in the number of citations) and the academic reputation of the author (measured with the Hirsch index). As a consequence of the well-known Matthew effect (Bonitz et al. 1999), highly-cited authors are more likely to generate a lot of citations in the future, and editors have a vested interest in publishing articles from already established scholars. In addition to the above theoretical considerations, we also have empirical evidence to show that the geopolitical diversity of editorial boards has a significant impact on the international diversity of articles published in a given journal. That is, the more central an editorial board is, the more likely that the published articles will primarily represent the center. For example, a journal with an almost entirely American editorial board will be very likely to mostly publish articles by American authors, an assumption which is supported by empirical research. Lauf (2005) argues that since an almost fully American editorial board is unlikely to be able to properly manage articles with a non-American focus or academic culture, it will be likely to reject these papers. It bears repeating that—excluding certain nominal editorial board members who are invited only because they contribute to the board’s prestige—board

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members have to review a given number of articles each year, so their competence regarding the assessment of the submitted articles is crucial. This is particularly important in the social sciences, where regional and cultural differences play a very important role: it is unlikely that an American professor will have sufficient experience to judge the scientific value of an article written in, say, a Central Asian or an African context. In one of my other previous research projects, I analyzed the structure and national diversity of editorial boards in communication journals. The first study of this kind was conducted by Edmund Lauf in 2005, analyzing the international diversity of the editorial boards of 40 communications science journals indexed by the Web of Science. First of all, he noticed that in these eminent journals, being “international” rarely goes beyond the names and rhetoric of the journal, as most of them were actually American in terms of their focus, editorial board and accepted papers. Lauf himself considered this phenomenon to be highly problematic, pointing out that if internationalization is desirable in communication studies and if we consider journals to be the main platform for disseminating research and theory, we should encourage researchers from all regions of the world to publish in international journals, and international journals should do their best to publish geographically diverse articles. However, for the time being, the journals analyzed are not international at all. All that has happened is that the leading American and other central journals have simply renamed themselves as international journals and promoted themselves as the only representatives of the international academic community. Lauf also found it problematic that the Web of Science itself is not international, in the sense that it primarily indexes American journals. In his 2005 article quoted above, Lauf, citing the Global Communication Research Association’s 2003 statement whereby international communication research organizations have already divided the world into a few over-represented central regions, as opposed to masses of under-­ represented peripheral regions. According to Lauf, the above-mentioned observation that the so-called international journals are full of central content is due to five reasons. In the first place, the American academic publishing culture is more advanced than in other countries, so it is probably the largest scientific market both in terms of the number of authors

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and of readers. Second, most of the elite journals are edited and published in America, which also has an impact on the geopolitical representation of the authors published. Third, American scientific standards define international standards, and because non-American authors are not necessarily aware of them, they start with a significant cultural disadvantage in the competitive field of knowledge production. Fourthly, what is said about standards applies to language, and as elite journals are all written in English, those who do not have English as their mother tongue suffer significant disadvantages. Finally, international journals prefer articles on American events and phenomena. However, for the purposes of this chapter, Lauf ’s most important contribution is the analysis of the editorial boards. Although the author admits that he has not been able to prove (in terms of causality) that the low diversity of journal authors is caused by the lack of diversity in editorial boards, he has succeeded in proving the relationship itself. He also observed that the total share of American members on the editorial board of journals is 84%, and one-third of the journals analyzed have no international (non-American) editorial board members at all, which raises the question of how these journals can assess international articles. While acknowledging the unequivocal value of his exemplary research, I had to correct Lauf ’s methods on some crucial points (Demeter 2018a). It appears that his division of the world into different regions unwittingly repeats the very same process that he rightly criticized: He overemphasizes the role of native English countries while labeling all other regions— with the exception of the EU and Asia—as “other.” Moreover, even his EU and Asia categories are problematic. First, it is not immediately obvious why non-EU member states in Western Europe (like Switzerland or Norway) should fall under the ambiguous “other” category, despite their close cultural, geographical, political and economic similarity to EU member states. By contrast, they have almost nothing in common with the other regions in the “other” category, such as Africa, Latin America, or the Middle East. Accordingly, I believe that all Western European countries should be classified under the same category. Another questionable category in Lauf ’s research is Asia, which includes China, Hong Kong, India, Japan and South Korea, while other Asian countries are counted under the “other” category. This representation of “Asia” seems

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problematic because the literature dealing with the economic, cultural, or even academic divisions of the world use quite different categories (Bandyopadhyay 2017; Bush 2007; Rigg 2007; Thomas-Slayter 2003). While one part of Asia (Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Singapore) counts as part of the Global North (Myrdal 1977), with these countries in the same category, the other part (including China, India, Thailand and other underdeveloped countries) counts as part of the Global South. The most problematic category in Lauf ’s research, in my opinion, is the one which he labels “other” and which merges utterly different regions such as Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, developing Asia and Latin America. It is not just that these regions have very diverse historical, political, cultural and academic features, they are also developing in very different ways (Erfanmanesh et al. 2017). In light of this criticism, I repeated Lauf ’s research in 2018 with a more detailed and thus fairer categorization and, of course, with current data (Demeter 2018a). I compared the results with those of Lauf in 2005 to make the analysis comparative and to see whether the classic and newer elite journals in communication studies have taken steps towards real internationalization or have remained essentially American journals. Recent results show that greater international diversity at editorial boards is represented primarily and almost exclusively by newly created journals: 7 of the 10 most diverse journals in communication studies are so new that they did not exist at the time of Lauf ’s 2005 analysis. Older high-profile journals like Communication Research, Human Communication Research, European Journal of Communication, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly or Journal of Communication are all in the second half of the diversity list. At the end of the list we can find Communication Monographs and Quarterly Journal of Speech with almost zero diversity and with an almost 100% American editorial board. Overall, the composition of editorial boards in leading communication journals was as follows: American editorial board members accounted for 58% of members, followed by 13% of Western Europeans, 7% from each Australia, Canada, developed Asia and the UK. Thus, nearly 95% of editorial board members at SSCI-ranked communication journals are from the world’s central regions. The participation of peripheral regions in the editorial boards is quite incidental: 93% of the analyzed journals have no

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editorial board members from developing Asia (including China and India), 81% have none from Eastern Europe, from Latin America (74%) or Africa (67%). Overall, the visibility of peripheries—both in terms of publication output and editorial board membership—is extremely low. This has only slightly changed in recent decades, despite the emergence of a growing discourse about academic inequalities in both the periphery (primarily as part of the decolonization discourse) and the center (stemming mostly from the de-Westernization discourse). Unfortunately, as we have seen in the light of the empirical data presented, in practice, these discourses have not changed the basic hierarchical relationships in the world-system of knowledge production and the field has remained extremely biased against the periphery. It is important to note that the lack of diversity in editorial boards not only represents global injustice, but also causes other inequalities. In a paper which I coauthored with Spanish scholar Manuel Goyanes (Goyanes and Demeter 2020), we investigated whether the diversity of an editorial board affects other features of the journal, and we found that journals with more diverse editorial boards are more likely to publish content from authors representing a geopolitically diverse range. After the analysis of 3483 articles from 84 communication journals, we also found that newer journals have more diverse editorial boards than older ones, and consequently publish content which is more diverse in terms of both the location of the authors and of the data collection site. Table 6.1 presents the distribution of data, authors and editorial board membership, broken down by world regions. As we can see, while the dominance of the US and Western Europe is significant in all the dimensions measured, important differences can be seen as well. The US clearly has the most powerful position as gatekeeper of ideas because it has far more editorial board members than all other world regions taken together, and its dominance in terms of editorial board membership is even greater than its share in the categories of data or author contribution. The exact opposite is true of peripheral world regions like Africa, Eastern Europe, developing Asia, the Middle East, or Latin America, who make a much greater contribution as data providers than they do as idea brokers, as illustrated by their number of editorial

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Table 6.1  Contributions of different world regions to global academia in communication and media studies in terms of data collection site, authorship and editorial board membership US UK Western Europe Australia Developed Asia Canada Israel Africa Developing Asia Eastern Europe Latin America Middle East Global North Global South

Data collection (%)

Authors (%)

Editorial board (%)

46 9 15 5 6 4 1 3 6 1 3 2 85 15

45 7 20 6 6 5 2 2 6 1 1 1 92 8

59 4 13 6 5 8 1 1 5 1 1 1 95 5

The author’s calculation

board members. The third type of contribution is represented by Western Europe, where author participation is the strongest form of contribution, followed by a fairly extensive share in terms of data field and a lesser but still significant contribution to editorial boards.

 ditorial Practices at the Periphery: A Case E Study from Eastern Europe We have already analyzed how central journals tend to exclude peripheral members from their editorial boards, but have not yet touched upon editorial practices beyond the Western world. As readers might suppose that Western journals prefer Western editorial board members due to their shared culture, rather than an agenda of hegemonic exclusion, we should also analyze peripheral editorial boards in order to have a comparative perspective. If the results show that peripheral journals also prefer to have editorial board members from the periphery, then it is a matter of cultural preference, not exclusion. Of course, this only applies if—just as in the case of central journals—peripheral journals explicitly refer to

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themselves as being “international”, since we cannot expect explicitly regional journals to recruit a geopolitically diverse editorial board. As a case study, we analyzed Eastern European communication journals in order to have a peripheral counterpart for the central sample analyzed above (Demeter 2018b). The history of communication and media studies in this region differs from its Western counterpart to a great extent. According to Siebert et al. (1963), the socialist countries of the region followed the Soviet model in the decades of state socialism. In Eastern Europe, state propaganda and the total control over journalists was not considered a deviation from journalistic ethics but an inherent feature of the profession. The socialist states controlled the media sphere, and demanded that the media serve the interests of the people, as defined by the state. This model of social communication and this concept of the media’s role were very far from the media concepts generally recognized by the international community of media scholars. Since the social sciences—and especially communication and media studies—are conducted in line with Western norms, they require a relatively free political atmosphere. As a consequence, it was only after Eastern Europe’s transition to a market economy that even the idea of a professional communication and media studies curriculum could emerge in the region. The first accredited programs in communication and journalism appeared in the 1990s, thus, compared to Western academic communication programs, Eastern European scholarship is relatively young and still consolidating (Lauk 2015; Perusko 2015; Stetka 2015). One sign of this is that there is still no Eastern European journal among the Web of Science’s ISI-ranked communication journals. The only exception was the former Slovenian journal Javnost—The Public that was bought up by Taylor & Francis (UK). Once the only Q1 Scopus-indexed journal in the region, it is now indexed as a British journal. Most communication journals in the region are not indexed in international databases, since most are published in national languages. Unfortunately, there is no comprehensive database listing all Eastern European journals, thus we can only approximate the number of communication journals published in the region. The Central and Eastern European Online Library (CEEOL) has a fragmented but still significant database with 598 titles in the social sciences, of which 15 titles are

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categorized as communication journals. Using a manual search with the keywords “communication” and/or “media”, we found 19 another titles. But these lists are far from being complete. In Hungary, for example, there are at least five academic journals in the field of communication and media studies. In Poland, the Central European Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities counts 11 communication journals. If we presume that all Eastern European countries similarly productive in terms of publishing communication journals, there could be between 150 and 250 communication journals in the region. Furthermore, if we consider that there are no Eastern European communication journals in the Web of Science’s SSCI list, and only seven titles in Scopus, we can conclude that more than 95% of Eastern European communication journals remain invisible to the international community. Regarding the publication output of these regional journals, we found that even those Eastern European communication journals that are indexed in Scopus generally overrepresent their own region (Table 6.2). Since we could only obtain data for papers published (not all papers submitted), this overrepresentation is either due to the fact that Eastern European journals mainly receive submissions from this region, or because they have a preference for Eastern European topics, methods and authors. These results show that, even if Eastern European journals overrepresent their own region, they are far from being exclusively regional. In the case of KOME, the number of American papers exceeds that of Eastern European papers, and, on an average, the proportion of Eastern European authors is around 50%, leaving substantial room for other regions. Contributions from Western regions account for more than 33%, and all world regions are represented to some extent. In an earlier study (Demeter 2018b) we used the communication journals of two allegedly international associations to compare the geopolitical diversity of their publication output with that of the Eastern European region. We found that, in the case of the 10 leading Western communication journals published by the International Communication Association and the National Communication Association, the representation of America was of 84% on average, and when combined with Western Europe, the representation of the center exceeded 95%. Two world regions, Africa and Eastern

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Table 6.2  Publication output of Scopus-indexed Eastern European journals, by world regions North America +  Australia and New Zealand Journal name (%) Inf in Ed (Lithuania) Psy of Lang and Com (Poland) Medijska Istrazi (Croatia) Medijske Stud (Croatia) Inf Társ (Hungary) KOME (Hungary) CEJC (Poland) Average (%)

Western Europe  + UK Asia (%) (%)

Eastern Latin America Africa Middle Europe (%) (%) East (%) (%)

9

27

7

8

2

5

43

15

16

8

1

1

1

59

3

13

4

0

0

0

80

8

37

0

2

2

0

51

4

5

4

0

0

1

87

45

18

9

0

0

5

23

11 11

25 23

0 6

0 4

0 1

0 3

58 52

The author’s calculation

Europe, accounted for less than 1% of publication output, and the total share of the Global South was under 3%. The above delineated results show the surprising fact that peripheral— here, Eastern European—journals are much less biased towards their own regions and much more diverse than the so-called international Western journals. The share of domestic authors is around 50%, as contrasted with the more than 95% regional (Western) publication output of leading central periodicals. Apparently, peripheral journals, even if they do not call themselves “international”, can have a much greater degree of internationalism than their central counterparts. They offer research that is more geopolitically diverse, and they represent the regions of the world in a much more balanced way than central periodicals.

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Table 6.3  Representation of world regions on editorial boards in Scopus-indexed Eastern European journals

Journal name Inf in Ed Psy of Lang and Com Medijska Istrazi Medijske Stud Inf Társ KOME CEJC Average (%)

North America  + Australia and New Zealand (%)

Western Europe  + UK Asia (%) (%)

Middle Eastern Latin Europe America Africa East (%) (%) (%) (%)

9 13

50 26

9 0

3 5

0 0

9 3

20 54

0

0

0

0

0

0

100

12

31

0

0

0

0

58

0 29 11 12

0 18 29 27

0 6 0 3

0 6 0 3

0 0 0 0

0 0 0 3

100 41 60 52

The author’s calculation

When we take a look at the diversity of editorial boards of Eastern European communication journals, we found similar results. Research has already showed that there is a significant correlation between the national diversity of the publication output of a given journal and the national diversity of its editorial boards (Demeter 2018a; Goyanes and Demeter 2020; Lauf 2005). As Table 6.3 shows, the diversity of world regions in editorial boards also correlates with the regional diversity of journal authors. Data shows that Eastern European editorial board members are highly overrepresented (mean > 60%) in most regional journals and there are two periodicals with exclusively Eastern European editorial boards. However, most journals have a significant proportion of board members from other—typically Western—regions. Table 6.4 clearly shows that the regional diversity of editorial boards correlates with the regional diversity of journal authors. Indeed, on average, the representation of world regions in editorial boards and in authorship is almost the same. As contrasted with Eastern European journals, the top Western journals in communication are far less diverse, not only in terms of

23 27

11

12

The author’s calculation

Average share in authorship Average share in editorial boards

North America +  Western Australia and New Europe +  UK (%) Zealand (%)

3

6

Asia (%)

3

4

Latin America (%)

0

1

Africa (%)

3

3

Middle East (%)

52

52

Eastern Europe (%)

Table 6.4  Average representation of world regions in journal authors and editorial boards in Scopus-indexed Eastern European journals

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authorship, but also in their editorial boards. An earlier study showed (Demeter 2018b) that, on average, leading Western journals have 95% Western editorial boards (72% from the US and 23% from Western Europe), besides 2% of members coming from developed Asia. Accordingly, the Global North’s share in the editorial boards of these journals is around 98%, while the other parts of the world (developing Asia, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe) share the remaining 2%. As we have seen in the case of the geopolitical diversity of authorship, Eastern European journals also proved to have much more international editorial boards than their allegedly international counterparts. In conclusion, we see that in the world-system of global knowledge production, being “international” means being fully Western or including the West to a great extent, while it is not at all necessary to include non-Western regions of the world. Western journals lacking diverse content and diverse editorial boards are indexed as international journals and are highly-ranked in prestigious databases as Scopus and Web of Science. Meanwhile, in order to be indexed at all (and with a markedly lower ranking), peripheral journals must include a significant amount of both Western content and editorial board members. In other words: Western journals are rated as international even if they are regional, but the same does not hold true for other regional journals outside the Western world. This is, by definition, a double standard that favors Western content and Western gatekeeping in the field of “international” knowledge production, one which tilts the playing field even more in favor of the central agents of the system, further reinforcing their power positions at the expense of peripheral scholars, journals and institutions.

References Bandyopadhyay, J. (2017). “Development” and “Modernity” in the Global South. Why a Science and Technology Studies Perspective is Important. Economic and Political Weekly, 52(34), 34–37. Bonitz, M., Bruckner, E., & Scharnhorst, A. (1999). The Matthew Index— Concentration Patterns and Matthew Core Journals. Scientometrics, 44(3), 361–378.

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Bush, R. (2007). Poverty and Neoliberalism. Persistence and Reproduction in the Global South. London: Pluto Press. Canavero, F., Franceschini, F., Maisano, D., & Mastrogiacomo, G. (2014). Impact of Journals and Academic Reputations of Authors: A Structured Bibliometric Survey of the IEEE Publication Galaxy. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 57(1), 17–40. Demeter, M. (2018a). Changing Center and Stagnant Periphery in Communication and Media Studies: National Diversity of Major International Journals in the Field of Communication from 2013 to 2017. International Journal of Communication, 12(2018), 2893–2921. Demeter, M. (2018b). The Global South’s Participation in the International Community of Communication Scholars: From an Eastern European Point of View. Publishing Research Quarterly, 34(8), 238–255. Erfanmanesh, M., Tahira, M., & Abrizah, A. (2017). The Publication Success of 102 Nations in Scopus and the Performance of Their Scopus-Indexed Journals. Publishing Research Quarterly, 33(4), 421–432. Goyanes, M. (2017). Desafío a la investigación estándar en comunicación: Crítica y alternativas [Challenging Standard Research Methods in Communication: Critiques and Alternatives]. Barcelona: Editorial UOC. Goyanes, M. (2019). Editorial Boards in Communication Sciences Journals: Plurality or Standardization? International Communication Gazette, 82(4), 342–364. Goyanes, M., & Demeter, M. (2020). How the Geographic Diversity of Editorial Boards Affects What Is Published in JCR-Ranked Communication Journals. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly. https://doi. org/10.1177/1077699020904169. Lauf, E. (2005). National Diversity of Major International Journals in the Field of Communication. Journal of Communication, 55(1), 139–151. Lauk, E. (2015). A View from the Inside: The Dawning of De-westernization of CEE Media and Communication Research? Media Communication, 3(4), 1–4. Metz, I., Harzing, A.  W., & Zyphur, M.  J. (2016). Of Journal Editors and Editorial Boards: Who are the Trailblazers in Increasing Editorial Board Gender Equality? British Journal of Management, 27(4), 712–726. Myrdal, G. (1977). Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations. London: Pelican Books. Perusko, Z. (2015). Past and Present of Communication and Media Studies in CEE. Presented at CEECOM 2015, the Annual Meeting of the ECREA-­ CEE Network, Zagreb.

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Rigg, J. (2007). An Everyday Geography of the Global South. New York: Routledge. Siebert, F. S., Peterson, T., & Schramm, W. (1963). Four Theories of the Press. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Stetka, V. (2015). Stepping Out of the Shadow: Internationalizing Communication Research in CEE. Presented at CEECOM 2015, the Annual Meeting of the ECREA-CEE Network, Zagreb. Thomas-Slayter, B. (2003). Southern Exposure: International Development and the Global South in the Twenty-first Century. Bloomfield: Kumarian Press.

7 Global Academia and Reeducation

In the previous chapters, the analysis of the world-system of knowledge has been reduced to subsystems such as the publication field, higher education and research institutions, journal and university ranking organizations, editorial boards and international scientific associations. In this section, I will attempt to systematically show how these subsystems are related to each other and how their relationships reinforce the disqualification of the periphery by both centripetal and centrifugal forces and the cumulative presence of the Matthew effect. Empirical data provide a basis for observing two types of systemic dynamics in global knowledge production and academic capital accumulation: one centripetal and one centrifugal force. By centripetal force, I mean the fact that in order to gain international recognition and a central position, agile researchers from the periphery are willing to undertake central education or even reeducation, where reeducation means that they are willing to leave behind their existing degrees received from peripheral universities and repeat their education at the center. This due to the fact that global elite academia does not recognize knowledge acquired on the periphery as valuable and legitimate, and systematically excludes scholars without central (ideally American or British) © The Author(s) 2020 M. Demeter, Academic Knowledge Production and the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52701-3_7

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qualifications. Centripetal dynamics result in extensive brain drain and reeducation in the global system of knowledge production, where researchers in peripheral regions have to undergo major transformation and centralization if they are to establish or increase their visibility and reputation as scholars. The other type of dynamic, related to centripetal force, is called centrifugal, and its name implies that peripheral scholars who refuse to undergo central reeducation are excluded from elite academic institutes. Moreover, as we have seen before, they will likely lose other systemic credentials like editorial board membership and publication possibilities at elite journals. Because of these two dynamics, the global knowledge exchange is far from being balanced or even bilateral. In fact, knowledge production and knowledge dissemination follow a clear one-way trajectory on the global level, from the center to the periphery, while the opposite direction is extremely rare. In other words, while central knowledge is recognized and, in most cases, overestimated at the periphery, peripheral knowledge is absolutely insignificant and unrecognized at the center. In the terms of our model explained in Chap. 2, it can be stated that the operation of the world-system of knowledge production is defined by the center, but, as with any system based on exploitation, it would not work nearly as effectively without the steady subordination and self-­ stigmatization of the periphery. This applies to both the horizontal (geopolitical) and vertical (class division) dimensions of the model. In the case of the geopolitical dimension, the center has succeeded in presenting its own academic values as the sole valid, general and international values. These Western values are imposed upon peripheral scholars, as if it were self-evident that the values of the center are of a higher order and that only scholarly products and institutions based on Western values can be seen as valuable transnational academic capital. At the same time, there are two ways in which the periphery contributes to maintaining and consolidating this system, thus peripheral actors are not mere victims of academic exploitation, but are sometimes active agents in the process as well. First, in the context of the “center on the periphery” phenomenon, the center is frequently represented at an institutional level through central higher education institutions at the periphery or through the international distribution of central journals. Second, the very common

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inferiority complex of peripheral scholars (which is, at least partially, the consequence of the central devaluation of these regions) results in self-­ stigmatization habits. As a consequence of self-stigmatization, peripheral agents tend to underrate their own scholarly performance, academic culture and traditions. At the same time, they appreciate and overestimate the academic standards and the academic culture of the center, even if it results in a very low rating of peripheral scholarly output (according to Western standards). According to dependency theories, this self-­ stigmatization is one of the greatest obstacles to development: it is impossible to comply with centrally defined norms, given that the definition of excellence is always the privilege of the dominant center and never that of the periphery. Of course, at the level of individuals, developing the required central academic habitus and a camouflage identity can lead to the desired result of integration into the center, but after re-education, peripheral scholars can be hardly considered as central representatives of their peripheral academic culture, but rather as assimilated central scholars that originate from the periphery. What the world-system of knowledge production does not allow is the combination of regional authenticity and global visibility, even for scholars working in the field of decentralization studies or decolonial studies. Researchers from the periphery who want to gain any international influence have to speak at central fora and publish in central journals, even if, on the basis of their field of research and activism (in most cases, decolonialization and decentralization scholars are also activists, based on the practice of critical social science) this would be contraindicated. And since, as we have seen, it is almost impossible to achieve international visibility with purely peripheral academic capital, the situation is that even among scholars who criticize the global academic hegemony of the North, those who have gained serious international visibility have almost always undergone central education or reeducation and are working at central universities. Thus, one could question whether they are able to authentically represent the regional/ peripheral academic culture and, as a consequence, the decentralization ambitions of their peripheral fellows. For example, one the most famous scholars of decolonization theory, Sousa-Santos, did not get his PhD at Ibidan University, but at Yale, and Walter Mignolo’s alma mater was not an Argentinean state university, but one of the leading French elite grandes

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écoles, the École des Hautes Études. Suresh Canagarajah, originally a Sri Lankan researcher, could only publish his epoch-making book on the intellectual racism of academia after graduating from the University of Texas at Austin and moving to America. Amartya Sen received his “second BA” in economics from Trinity College at Cambridge, despite already having a BA in economics from the Presidency College, Kolkata. Central reeducation means the University of Chicago for Arjun Appaddurai, Princeton and Harvard for Edward Said, Cornell University for Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and the University of Oxford for Homi K. Bhabha. The central elite Western reeducation thus appears to be an essential prerequisite for anyone to speak on the periphery, on behalf of and for the sake of the periphery, in the international scientific field. However, there are many decolonial scholars that work in the South, although they don’t publish in English so often, such as Segato in Argentina/Brazil (Segato 2012) and Quijano in Peru (Quijano 2000).

 elationships Between Subsystems R of the Scientific Field In what follows, I will briefly outline the deeper interconnections between the scientific subsystems analyzed so far in this book. In my view, the fundamentals of relationships should be approached from a world system theoretical perspective. In this respect, we can say that global knowledge production and thus the transnational academy—against its false self-­ determination as a meritocratic field—is, similarly to other social subfields, based on the economic-political world-system. As a consequence, global knowledge production patterns faithfully reflect the global world-­ systemic structure, including all its relations of dependencies (Chase-­ Dunn 1999). This characteristic of the economic and political world-system is not only evident in the more abstract frameworks of world-system theory, but also in some well-known phenomena of societal reality. The fact that, to put it simply, there is significant money in science and knowledge production, is not only true of the innovative and industry-­related sectors, such as the IT sector or the pharmaceutical

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industry. The publishing industry is one of the fastest-growing industries, worth billions of dollars, and every discipline takes its share in the publication market. For example, the Plan S initiative, which has been sharply criticized in the previous chapters, highlights how the operation of the international publishing industry, in its current form, results in central publishing houses accumulating tremendous economic capital. In order to maintain this accumulation of capital, the academic field provides a considerable amount of free work. On one hand, scholars publish their articles in leading periodicals for free, or, in some cases, even have to pay for the review process and/or publication. Academic journals almost never pay any kind of honorarium to the authors or reviewers whose labor develops the products. On the other hand, either individual scholars or their institutions have to pay enormous sums in the form of subscriptions to access the published papers. Thus, we are talking about a workflow in which the product is created as a result of hundreds of working hours, but the wages of these working hours are paid not to the workers, but to the capitalists—in our case, the publishers. Whether we calculate with the average open access costs, usually ranging from $1000 to $5000, or the $2000 per article suggested by Plan S, we see that there is significant unpaid work and, as a result, significant profit on the capitalist side. The other similarly illustrative example concerns not publishers, but universities. Our main concern here is not those international universities from the middle of the ranking lists that draw the most significant portion of their income from relatively high tuition fees paid by foreign students, mostly from the emerging regions. These newly established central universities clearly follow a business protocol that is quite similar to those of the other market players of the world-system. Which is more interesting is the functioning of older, elite universities. In his Opus Magnus, Thomas Piketty dedicates a separate subchapter to the return of capital in the case of elite universities that is much higher than one would expect from institutions that usually bank on the idea of pure science (Piketty 2017). In the United States alone, there are about 800 universities that manage their own foundations, some of which have tens of billions of dollars in capital: Harvard has $30 billion, Yale has $20 billion, Princeton and Stanford each have $15 billion (Piketty 2017, p. 567). All

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in all, these 800 universities hold over $400 billion in foundation capital. What is more remarkable than the magnitude of this amount is its profit margin, which shows an extremely high rate of return: it has averaged 8.2% per annum over the last three decades, rising above 10% in some years. In addition, the richer the university, the higher the rate of return: above 10% for Harvard, Yale and Princeton, averaging 8.8.% for universities with more than $1 billion in foundation capital, and about 6% for higher education institutions with less than $100 million in foundation capital. It is important to note that these returns are net profits, i.e. the amounts remaining after the deduction of operating costs. Especially for elite universities, this yield is extremely high, even assuming that the universities pay substantial sums to their portfolio management agencies. In fact, this amount is never higher than 1% of the foundation’s capital, for example, only 0.2% in the case of Harvard. It is thus clear that investing in a university foundation can generate a significant return, and the richer the university is, the higher the yield, meaning that maintaining the status of elite universities is, first and foremost, an economic issue. It is no coincidence that, like the leading positions in university rankings, the income rankings of elite university foundations have not changed significantly over the last 30–40 years (Piketty 2017, p. 571). The above two examples, the very high profit margins of publishers and elite university foundations, perfectly illustrate the reliance of transnational knowledge production on a capitalist world system essentially governed by economic and political dynamics. In the following section, I show the dynamics of the processes between different subsystems of global knowledge production. My aim in identifying and describing the nature of these relations is to provide a coherent overview of the dependencies within the world-system that include the exclusion and exploitation of the periphery by the center, despite the fact that both these processes are contrary to all possible self-definitions of science.

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Elite Journals, Editors and Authors Through the intermediary of their journals, publishers enter into a long-­ lasting privity with editors-in-chief, and both of them with authors seeking to publish the result of their studies in prestigious periodicals. Of course publishers, who usually also the owners of the journals, are interested in raising the prestige of their journals in order to increase their subscription fees. For owners and publishers, a successful editor is one who employs strategies that increase, or at least do not decrease, the prestige of the journal. This is reflected in the journal first appearing on the lists of various evaluation platforms as Scopus or Web of Science, and then inching upwards on the rankings, ideally becoming a Q1-ranked elite periodical. The selling price of journals is directly proportional to their position on the most selective ranking lists, so when a new journal is added to the Scopus list, and it moves up from the fourth quartile to the third, second and finally the first quartile (Q1), its market value increases dramatically. Of course, big publishers have no interest in selling a well-functioning journal, because—as we have seen earlier—scientific publishing is an extremely profitable business. It is much more common that big publishing houses try to buy journals published by smaller, peripheral or independent publishers, or by scientific associations, as soon as these journals start climbing upwards on Scopus or Web of Science rankings. Among the most prestigious Q1 journals in social sciences, we can rarely find periodicals that are not owned by some major publishing house like Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Sage or Springer. In other academic fields like computer science or engineering, there are international associations that are financially robust enough to publish their own journals, but this is unusual in the social sciences. In fact, it is much more common that even the prestigious journals of international scientific organizations in the social sciences are published by large publishing houses. Because of the above mentioned characteristic of the publishing industry, there is lot of pressure on editors to live up to the publishers’ expectations and to attract authors that will presumably receive a lot of citations, since databases like Scopus and Web of Science index academic journals

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based on their number of citations. As we have seen in previous chapters, the papers of already established central authors are likely to generate the most citations, so it is the vested interest of journal editors to favor central authors over peripheral authors with no international reputation whose articles, according to the Matthew effect, will presumably get less citations than central articles, even if the papers in question are otherwise excellent (Ashtaneh and Masoumi 2017). Moreover, the fact the impact factor and Scopus’s SJR measure citations concerning total publications explains in part why editors are conservative (otherwise, they can publish as many articles as possible, even if articles only draw a few citations each). On the other hand, the authors themselves strive to publish their results in the most prestigious journals, which means that there is tremendous competition for the publication spaces of elite journals. In this competition, editors, backed by publishers, seek to get as many elite central authors as possible, while authors are also working under tremendous pressure to publish. Accordingly, publishing activities take place in a highly complex social environment in which different agents (publishers, editors, peer reviewers, universities, research funders) all enter into processes with different interests, but ultimately these interests all promote greater centralization of the system (Schott 1998). Publishers and editors are interested in publishing a large number of elite central authors, who will thus make their journals move up on the rankings, enabling them to attract more central elite authors, and so on. Increasing publisher expectations and stronger central pressure make it virtually impossible for authors from the periphery to access top-ranked spots, as publishers, editors and central researchers all have a strong interest against decentralization (Saurin 2016). As a result of the “publish or perish” paradigm, the volume of annual publication output has increased dramatically, as well as the number of journals. However, this does not mean that the visibility of the periphery increases proportionately: publishing is subject to exactly the same process as mass education. Just as the dramatic increase of capacity in mass education has had no effect on the number of admission spots in elite universities, the dramatic growth seen in the number of less prestigious, newer or non-indexed journals does not mean that there is more space in elite journals. The academic publication field is thus divided into two

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parts: on the one hand, there are highly selective, centrally owned elite journals with a limited publication space, and on the other hand, a sort of academic mass production has emerged both in the center and in the peripheries. The latter includes both predatory journals and low-prestige journals, periodicals that share a common feature: papers published there generate little or no capital (Tóth 2012).

Universities, Journals and Global Rankings Universities, academic journals and their rankings appear at first glance to represent the various agents of academic knowledge production, but in reality there are many interactions and interdependencies between them that determine their performance, including their world-systemic operation. We can start with universities, whose most important focus has recently become academic research, surpassing even education. This is clearly evident from the fact that the most important criteria for university rankings is research excellence, measured in publication output in leading journals, a factor which affects ratings far more than teaching excellence. Universities are therefore dependent on elite journals, as it is essential that the faculty of elite universities be published in these top periodicals. Of course, there are many ways to cultivate the trust of journals, but the most useful is by gaining membership in editorial boards. As we have seen, editorial boards influence the dynamics of global knowledge production in many ways. First, they promote the journal in a variety of ways, whether in their own department, during their teaching activities, or at international conferences. Second, editorial board members often review articles submitted to a given journal or contribute to the selection of reviewers and thus directly act as gatekeepers, since they have a say on which articles will be published and which will be rejected. Finally, leading scholars are just as strategic in selecting the journals from which they accept invitations to serve on the editorial board as the journals themselves are in choosing whom to invite for these positions (Willett 2013). From the perspective of journals, the composition of the editorial board is key, since this is the information that prospective authors intending to publish in the journal especially take into consideration. The

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composition of the editorial board reveals a great deal of information about the prestige, geopolitical orientation and world-systemic position of the journal. It is thus no coincidence that the highest-rated journals with tremendous capacity to accumulate academic capital tend to have editorial boards packed with members from elite universities, while there are barely any members from geopolitically peripheral universities or lower-rated central universities (Goyanes 2020). It is not uncommon for a typical elite journal’s editorial board to be exclusively made up of members from top American universities, and if there is some kind of internationalization, it is typically limited to editorial board members from elite universities in other central countries (Lauf 2005). On the one hand, we can see that publication in elite international journals is of crucial importance for university rankings. On the other hand universities have—at least indirectly—a decisive influence on journal rankings as well. The more highly ranked a potential author’s university is, the more likely the article is to be cited in the future. Consequently, if a journal publishes a sufficient number of papers from authors from elite universities, this will likely have a positive impact on the journal’s rankings. All this can be justified by double-blind experiments: an article attributed to a professor from an elite American university is considered by both reviewers and readers to be much more argumentative, persuasive and relevant than the same article if it is attributed to an unknown author from the periphery (Pan et al. 2012). Another level of interconnectedness is represented by the relationship between editorial boards and authors. The editorial board membership of a scholar from a given institute is guaranteed to increase the ability for her colleagues from the same institute to publish in the journal where she is a board member. This can be done in a completely informal way, for example by first sending the article you want to publish to the editorial board member for review, or by discussing the topic, methods or style with her. All these communication benefits are reserved to scholars having a personal acquaintance with the editorial board member, most typically colleagues from the same department. For example, the gatekeeper function of George Gerbner (an internationally leading communication scholar of Hungarian origin) is well known. Gerbner was the editor-in-­ chief of the Journal of Communication, which was already the most

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prestigious journal in communication studies at Gerbner’s time (Ruddock 2018). Although the Journal of Communication has been published since 1952, it has only published three Hungarian articles: all three during the time of Gerbner’s editorship. No Hungarian papers were ever published in this flagship journal of the International Communication Association in the decades before Gerbner, nor in the decades after his editorship. One possible explanation for this is that the journal never had an editor or editorial board member with Hungarian connections apart from George Gerbner. As a matter of fact, the Journal of Communication has never had an editorial board member from the whole Eastern European region.

Scientometrics, Citations and Publication Habits One of the main measurements in scientometrics used to rate individual scholars is independent citations to their works. Of course there are several kinds of scientometrics, and we obtain fundamental differences in rankings when we change the metrics. For example, selection committees could prefer Google Scholar Metrics, Scopus or Web of Science. One of the main benefits of Google Scholar is that it automatically generates scientometric data on authors. Of course, Scholar is primarily focused on international data, but it usually also finds citations from smaller regional locations. A further advantage of Google Scholar is that it cannot be directly hacked, that is, the authors cannot manually record citations to themselves, because they are always generated by the system. Google Scholar is problematic however since it ignores the source of the citations, thus a citation from a paper in Nature is weighted the same as an unpublished and uncited pdf uploaded to ResearchGate by the author. Google Scholar Metrics, therefore, provides only limited information about the quality of the citations received by the analyzed author, but still gives a valuable overview of scholars’ international impact. Scopus, similarly to Google Scholar Metrics, has the advantage of not allowing authors to record their own citation data. Moreover, it only

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records citations that refer to a Scopus-indexed journal article of the author, and those where the citation itself also comes from a Scopus-­ indexed journal or book chapter. This is both a benefit and a disadvantage of Scopus: it rules out citations that appear in places without the appropriate quality standards, but usually excludes citations in monographs as well as otherwise valuable links such as citations in high-value regional periodicals. As Scopus only counts citations from Scopus-indexed sites, it creates a significant bias against the periphery, since local and peripheral authors generally publish and cite in peripheral journals, which renders their publications and citations invisible to Scopus. Accordingly, there are many authors who are highly respected at their regional level but who have no presence on Scopus at all. The Web of Science is quite similar to Elsevier’s Scopus, but it is even more selective since it indexes even less journals. In the social sciences, Scopus indexes four times as many journals as the Web of Science. This extremely elitist platform, just like Scopus, counts only citations from a Web of Science indexed journal that refer to an article published in a Web of Science indexed journal. The central bias in Web of Science is extremely high, since it almost exclusively indexes central journals, and generally includes only a very limited number of publications in the social sciences and humanities, making its use in these disciplines very limited. The main characteristic of the above scientometrics, but especially of the exclusive science metrics of Scopus and Web of Science, is their tendency to create citation universes. This means that these systems operate in a universe-like systemic fashion and, as mentioned above, they only see the publishing and citation events that are within this inner universe. Accordingly, international scholars who have become habituated to the measurements in these systems also seek to conform to this universe-like nature. This happens in both a broader and a narrower sense. At the broader level, researchers who wish to appear in indexed central sites tend to strategically cite articles published in these sites, and systematically exclude references to local, peripheral, or simply non-indexed articles. Again, this approach corresponds to the systemic nature of global knowledge production, as references are not self-serving, not only legitimizing the author before their critics and editors, but are also numerically added to the number of references of the cited journals, thereby increasing their

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prestige. This brings us to the narrower meaning of citation universes, that is, to recognize that the top journals of a given discipline contain a high degree of network-like cross-references to each other. This enables the author to, on the one hand, legitimize himself/herself vis-à-vis the editor and reviewers of the targeted journal and, on the other hand, make an unspoken offer to the effect that successful publication will mean that the article will bring the journal as many citations as those that it contains already referring to the same journal (not to mention future citations). Accordingly, a network that is structurally similar to the network of elite university networks is created, in which papers published in the elite journals of the inner circle contain disproportionate numbers of references to similarly-situated elite journals, all of which is of course in the spirit of reciprocity (Bunz 2005).

Center/Periphery Positions: Summary Matrices Below I summarize, with some textual explanations, the main features of the center/periphery relationships in the subsystems of global knowledge production, and thus try to systematize the inequalities discussed in detail in the previous chapters. In Table 7.1 below, I specify the main features of central and peripheral positions in the world-system of global knowledge production. As most parts of Table 7.1 have been discussed in detail in previous chapters, I will briefly address only those two features that have not been discussed so far. One is in connection with research proposals, which, if they are announced for the competitive international academic community and not for special or regional communities or exchange programs, are overwhelmingly awarded to applicants from central countries. For example, in the case of research grants awarded by the European Research Council (ERC), the center/periphery bias is so strong that even Nature dedicated an opinion article on this issue (Abbott and Schiermeier 2014). Calculations show that, between 2007 and 2016, ERC grants (the most prestigious European research grants) were disbursed as follows: 6899 grants went to Western European institutions and 125 to Eastern Europe. In other words, the share of the central part of Europe was 98% in the

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Table 7.1  Typical central and peripheral features in global knowledge production Center

Periphery

Significantly overrepresented publication output Significantly overrepresented in journal editorial boards Significantly overrepresented in selection committees, especially selection committees that oversee international science funding actions Significantly overrepresented in international academic associations, especially in power positions Owns the vast majority of international publishing houses

Significantly underrepresented or even invisible publication output Significantly underrepresented or even totally absent in journal editorial boards Significantly underrepresented or even totally absent in selection committees, especially selection committees that oversee international science funding actions Significantly underrepresented or even totally absent in international academic associations, especially in power positions Does not have international publishing houses, its activity is limited to national or regional publishing A limited number of international journals, most have a local focus; typically, the most successful international journals of the periphery are eventually bought by a central publisher Either follows centrally determined theories or kept out of international science Either follows centrally determined methodologies or kept out of international science Either follows centrally determined language, academic rhetoric and style or kept out of international science Tries to connect its local associations to central associations without having power positions in them Tries to apply for international research funds

Owns the vast majority of international elite journals

Determines internationally accepted theoretical frameworks

Determines internationally accepted methodologies and academic standards Determines international language, academic rhetoric and style Establishes, controls and operates leading international academic associations Establishes, controls and operates leading international research funds and frameworks Receives a disproportionally large Receives an extremely limited amount of amount of international research international research funding funding

(continued)

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Table 7.1 (continued) Center

Periphery

Induces significant brain drain and central reeducation in the world-system The accumulation of transnational academic capital is fast and significant

Significant academic migration to the center; subjects itself to central reeducation Accumulates transnational academic capital to a very limited extent or not at all

Source: Demeter (2019)

last decade. This marked disproportionality shows that the peripheral regions of the EU are virtually excluded from the most prestigious European grants, and, as a consequence, have virtually no access to funding that is in many respects the sole condition for high quality scholarship. Another topic that has not been discussed in sufficient detail is the epistemic hegemony of the center, which is primarily due to the fact that, in theory-driven research areas, the center provides both theoretical frameworks and accepted methods while outsourcing to the periphery subordinate academic activities such as data collection or the uncritical application of Western methodologies (Dabashi 2015). In an earlier study in which we investigated how the authorship of theoretical articles in communication science evolved between 1997 and 2017, we found that, even in 2017, about 90% of theoretical articles were written by authors working in central countries. This is a significant improvement however, as the center’s share was over 99% in 1997. At the same time, quantitative research and methodological innovations in the area have become significantly more valuable, and the periphery is reported to be much less involved in these kinds of scholarship than the center. Global trends suggest that peripheral performance remains poor in areas offering the possibility of high academic capital accumulation, while in less valuable fields, typically in qualitative research, the periphery’s share has slightly increased in the last two decades. This world-systemic dynamic is consistent with the process we see in the broader global marketplace, where the center seeks to outsource to the periphery work processes that are considered less valuable, while keeping innovative industries close at hand. The following table illustrates the types of positions that, based on

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the features described above, have emerged in the world system of global knowledge production, and I will also give one or more typical examples of each position. The categorization scheme in Table 7.2 is based on horizontal (geopolitical) stratification, and the table is followed by some comments on the vertical (class-based) stratification. The table above shows that we can distinguish six different positions in the world-system of knowledge production, starting from the supercentral position of the United States to the colonized semi-peripheries. However, this matrix is incomplete, since, on the one hand, it hides important differences between countries in the same category, and, on the other hand, it does not include peripheral countries with virtually no international visibility. However, it follows from the world-systemic operation of global knowledge production that countries and regions that do not add either output or input values to the world system cannot be considered as part of it (Wallerstein 1983; Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997). Thus, Table 7.2 cannot represent the legions of smaller countries that are not part of the world-system in terms of global knowledge production. A more serious limitation of the world-systemic description of global knowledge production is that certain categories include countries with significantly different positions. As this applies especially to the category of the colonized semi-periphery, I will briefly outline which other, region-­ specific aspects should be introduced in order to understand the differences between countries in this category. For example, we can see that Hungary, a small Eastern European country, has been placed in the same category as the developed Asian countries despite the huge differences between them. Singapore, as contrasted to Hungary, has elite, internationally leading universities, and the international academic visibility of Singapore is incomparably higher than that of Hungary. However, Hungary serves as a semi-peripheral mediator between the periphery and the center in its own region, just as the developed Asian countries do in Asia. The Central European University in Hungary is a typical example of a knowledge colony: a great part of its professors are from the West, and most of its faculty have been educated in elite Western universities; the CEU clearly represents Western knowledge. Besides this epistemic mediation, the CEU also serves as a practical mediator, since a great number of its students go to the US or other Western countries for

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Table 7.2  World-systemic positions in global knowledge production Horizontal stratification

Supercenter

Examples

US

Significant international center UK, Australia

Share in the accumulation of educational capital Share in academic and social capital Knowledge import Knowledge export Accepting central education Accepting peripheral education Position in centrifugal effect Position in centripetal effect Horizontal stratification

Very high

High

Germany, France, Japan Average

Very high

High

Average

Very low Very high Low (excluding American) Zero

Average Average/high Average

Low Low Low

Zero

Zero

Agent

Agent

Neutral

Agent

Agent

Neutral

Colonized center

Colonized semi-periphery

Examples

Canada

Share in the accumulation of educational capital Share in academic and social capital Knowledge import Knowledge export Accepting central education Accepting peripheral education Position in centrifugal effect Position in centripetal effect

Low

Singapore, Korea, Chile, Hungary Very low

Relatively significant international semi-periphery China, Russia

Very low

Very low

Very low

High Very low High

Very high Very high Very high

Average Very low Average

Zero

Very low/local

Average

Neutral

Patient

Agent

Neutral

Patient

Agent

Source: Demeter (2019)

Local nationalist center

Very low

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doctoral training, compared to other Hungarian or Eastern European universities, where this education trajectory is less frequent. Hungary is also a semi-periphery in the European region in terms of research funding: although Eastern Europe received only 2% of the ERC grants over the last decade, almost half of them were attributed to Hungarian research institutes. At the same time, besides similarities, there are significant differences between the semi-peripheral mediation of Hungary and the developed Asian countries. While the knowledge-colonized and globalized universities in developed Asian countries are implementing the state standard, the operation of Central European University in Hungary is rather an exception to the normal mode of state-owned institutions of higher education. This brief analysis brings us to the topic of vertical (class-based) stratification, complementing the horizontal (geopolitical) stratification represented in 7.2. A review of vertical stratification allows us to map two important world-systemic patterns: the center within the periphery and the periphery within the center phenomena. For example, in the case of the supercenter, its supercentral features apply only to elite universities. Among the more than 6000 American institutions of higher education, most of them are devoid of supercentral properties. In other words, the US exerts its supercentral features through its elite institutions, including elite universities, top journals and leading academic associations, while the periphery within the American academic field—including the community colleges filled with students from ethnic minorities and students with a lower class background—suffers from the very same difficulties as its peers in geopolitically peripheral regions. The situation is similar in the UK, where—besides the top universities—there are many lower prestige higher education institutions that do not partake of the central academic accumulation of capital. As a counterpart to such periphery within the center positions, there are also central positions within the periphery. An example could be the afore-mentioned Central European University in Hungary, different American universities in the periphery such as the American University in Bulgaria or in Cairo, or the elite universities in developed Asian countries that operate with central academic capital in the geopolitical periphery. In this respect, China is only partially a knowledge colony, and Russia not at all, since Chinese universities only

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partially import Western academic capital, and Russian universities almost never import Western-educated professors, especially not to the extent of, say, the Central European University or elite universities in developed Asia.

 ood Practices and Developments for a More G Just and Balanced Global Knowledge Production In this final subchapter of the book, I will attempt to present some strategic suggestions that, when applied together, can improve the dependent nature of peripheral regions in global knowledge production and create a fairer, more pluralistic epistemic universe for the benefit of the entire academic community. We have already seen the contradictory nature of these suggestions in previous chapters, thus I will refer only two fairly typical problems here. The first problem refers to the merely theoretical nature of de-Westernization initiatives that mostly come from the West. The problem with this is that most scholars taking the de-Westernization position are agents working in the center and enjoying the benefits of this situation, so they usually make little effort in practice to change the existing hegemonies, meaning that decentralization remains at an ideological, rhetorical level. Another type of Western suggestion is so immature that it is almost absurd. One of the most typical manifestations of this type of suggestions is a paper that has been recently published by some Dutch research institutes and research funding agencies. This fundamentally benevolent initiative calls for the diversification of science metrics in order to ensure the better recognition of different types of talent and, in principle, for the recognition of diversity in global academia (VSNU, NFU, KNAW, NWO, and ZonMw 2019). These are all very important goals, but unfortunately, the eight-page document does not give any specific details on how to evaluate scientific performance, if not in the usual way. For example, the popular idea that quality criteria should be used instead of quantitative indicators (number of articles, H-index, journal impact factors) is reiterated in the document, but neither this initiative

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nor other similar writings provide information on how such a so-called qualitative evaluation would be implemented. In the absence of concrete suggestions, however, the “qualitative rather than quantitative indicators” formula seems to be a mere slogan and does not appear to be an appropriate alternative to current science-based procedures. As far as I can see, the other problematic area is the decolonization discourse, as almost all decolonization theorists and most activists who can create their international visibility have undergone central reeducation and are likely to transfer to a job at an elite central university. This creates a “periphery at the center” phenomenon which, in my opinion, makes the authenticity of the decolonization program rather questionable. The mobility paths of most decolonization scholars reinforce existing inequalities in the world-system of knowledge production that bind the internationally visible representation of the periphery to central education, central affiliation and central position. With this, internationally recognized decolonization scholars, against their will, reinforce the dependency of the periphery to the center. To overcome this problem, early dependency theories have already suggested partial or complete detachment from the center (Love 1980). According to Prebisch, the only chance for dependent regions to become centers is to be able to break off from their current centers. The possibilities for doing so have been extensively studied by researchers of dependency theory, particularly in the fields of economics and political sciences (Ferraro 2008). As we have seen earlier in this book, the Spanish-speaking hub can show a good practice for this breakaway. However, we cannot avoid the question of why it would be important to have a flatter, less hierarchical, distributed and dependency-free world-­ system of knowledge production at all, and why it would be better than the present system. Empirical results show that in the current world-­ system of knowledge production, the Western center dominates theories, methods and transnational academic capital, and also determines which types of academic capital can be recognized internationally. Researchers in peripheral regions, as individuals, can do nothing to counter this process, and in fact, when analyzing career paths, we have found that the more successful peripheral researchers are, the more similar they become to their central counterparts. This means that they accumulate central

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academic capital, mostly in the form of central education, develop central academic habits and, eventually, settle in a central country. We can see that this centripetal dynamic of the world system does not favor decentralization; indeed, the centralization of talented and mobile peripheral researchers leads to the exact opposite of what is usually understood by decentralization. Centralization works not only at the individual but also the institutional level. A university on the periphery can succeed internationally only if it is westernized, teaches Western curricula and employs Western professors. A journal established at the periphery can only succeed if it invites Western professors on the editorial board to attract more Western authors, and consequently publishes mainly Western articles, and then, in a few years, sells itself to a large and prominent Western publisher. These processes are as antithetical to decentralization efforts as the re-­ education of peripheral scholars and central brain drain are to de-­ Westernization endeavors. However, the current hegemonic structure and mode of operation of the world-system of knowledge production is, in my opinion, not only detrimental to the peripheral agents and institutions, but also to the global community, as it prevents the free flow of fresh, novel ideas and, in the long run, results in intellectual stagnation and homogenization. The present mode of operation excludes peripheral ideas and inspirations from the international academic discourse, both horizontally and vertically. Authentic voices from the periphery do not reach the center, and consequently remain invisible to the international academic community. Likewise, potential scholars from lower social strata do not reach positions from whence they would be able to make their voices heard internationally, since they are not admitted to the elite universities—an elementary precondition to becoming an international scholar. This horizontal and vertical inequality leads to a world-system of global knowledge production where we almost exclusively hear the voice of a central elite, while everyone else is expected to either humbly follow suit and imitate central scholarship, or listen to central preaching in respectful silence (Demeter 2018). Even if scholars from peripheral regions get to the center, they have to pay a high price: they often have to give up their authenticity, and assimilate into Western academic culture. Nowadays, it is almost impossible to imagine a peripheral researcher

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being internationally recognized without a degree from an elite central university, but such reeducation can be rightly understood as intellectual colonization (Sousa-Santos 2007, 2011, 2018). Reeducation as an ultimate necessity maintains the intellectually racist conjecture whereby academic capital accumulated at the periphery is worthless, and should be substituted, overwritten or replaced by Western education, and that the periphery can only enter the system of knowledge production as a potential commodity: either as a source of data or as a source of potential subjects for further Western reeducation. There are many possible practices to overcome these inequalities, ranging from very radical, quota-based solutions to one that uses built-in filters to try to avoid or at least minimalize geopolitical or class-based exclusions. Quota-based practices would mean that those agents of the system that call themselves international (universities, journals, scientific societies, editorial boards) would have to organize themselves in a manner that actually reflects geopolitical diversity. However, quota-based practices are perhaps too radical, and even the concept of mandatory quota has raised much vocal criticism, mainly originating of course from central agents in power positions (Ang et  al. 2020). However, in my opinion, developing a transparent, global academic evaluation system that focuses solely on the product (and not on collected academic capital) may be acceptable to the global scientific community as a whole, including its central and peripheral agents. Such evaluation systems would not take into account the academic capital resulting from geopolitical and class differences, but would only base their assessment on the accumulation of capital that originates from work. In other words, a more balanced evaluation system would consider only productivity, and not elitist forms of academic capital such as elite university degrees or association memberships. If an elite education institution is better than its rivals, then students from this elite university should be more productive. Thus, scholars’ performance should be measured on the basis of their productivity alone. Moreover, contrary to current practice (Piketty 2017), the evaluation should be totally transparent. It means that we should clearly see the productivity of all the applicants for a competitively advertised academic position, and we should also see the metrics that selection committees use to make their decisions.

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Currently, no accurate information is given about criteria for evaluating either academic job applications or journal article submissions. In the case of published papers in a given journal, the databases contain no data on the articles submitted, only on published papers. This makes it virtually impossible to examine the conditions under which the decisions were made. If these evaluation systems were transparent and researchable, they would be much less able to enforce both the subjective elements and the exclusion mechanisms resulting from world-systemic dynamics. In a good evaluation system, in my view, the inherited (geopolitical and/or social based) part of central capital could play no role in the assessment of scholars. As we have already seen, in the selection process, the place of the diploma is often much more important than actual performance, which is contrary to science’s self-proclaimed ideal of being a meritocratic system. Data on different educational histories should be made anonymous in the selection process, just as gender, age, or sexual orientation, as these aspects have nothing to do with productivity. If elite institutions actually deliver better education, then this should be reflected in future research output, that is, in performance. In this case, however, it is completely unnecessary to indicate the qualification data, and especially to evaluate it, as it has to be implemented in the production stage. Similarly, a good practice would render optional or even prohibit authors from stating their affiliations when submitting an article to a journal. As seen above, this information about the author could profoundly impact editorial decisions, and even reviewers tend to assess papers from authors from elite institutions much more positively than articles from peripheral agents, irrespective of the merits of the manuscript. In fact, in the process of allegedly double-blind peer review, reviewers do not see the author’s affinity, but the editor does, and contrary to popular belief, it is not the reviewers, but the editor who has the final say on the acceptance of a manuscript. It is impossible to rationally argue that the affiliation of the author is required for the assessment of his or her article. It would be sufficient to specify the position and affiliation of the author after the evaluation and final decision on the article have been made. At this point, elite journals should not be suspected of favoring central elite authors in their decisions. Current practice in this regard is specifically working for editors that want to put into practice elitist

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discrimination, as it is mandatory for all high-profile journals to provide information on the affiliation of the authors, including both the country and the name of the university. What is more, in the case of some elite journals, they also want to obtain information on the university from which the authors have obtained their PhDs. It is obvious that this information could not serve anything but the elitist bias towards scholars from the elite universities, since there is no reason for knowing the education paths of potential authors when assessing their submitted papers. In addition to the above-mentioned necessary changes in the global academic evaluation schema, which should be based on transparency and should be against inherited knowledge capital, it is, of course, equally important that peripheral scientists themselves fight for their own identities. We need more and better regional conferences, and we should abandon the pathetic practice of inviting only central keynote speakers to plenary sessions while enrolling our regional peers in parallel sessions, and abandon the myth that these practices ensure the value of an international conference. This assumption is based on marketing, and not on academic considerations. International conferences should be international in terms of keynote speakers as well, irrespectively of the location of the conference. Peripheral regions would also need to establish and manage regional but well-functioning international journals based on the hispanophone pattern discussed earlier, and should strive to get these journals into prestigious databases of greater international publicity, such as Scopus or the Web of Science. However, the material limitations (for university-based non-profit journals and publishers) and the neocolonial requirements to be indexed, such as the use of English as a desirable request in the Web of Science could be a burden for peripheral regions. Consequently, central institutions as the Web of Science should also consider to revise their requirements. Raising the global visibility of the Global South is only possible if we abandon the detrimental practice of self-stigmatization, if we start to read and cite the works of peripheral scholar peers, of course only when they are of high quality. This would cause a disadvantage in the short term in relation to the current world-system of knowledge production, but in the long run, it allows the creation of unique citation universes, which give

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each peripheral region some visibility and thus a better position. Finally, and most importantly: researchers in the peripheral regions should retain, raise and express their cultural identity to the highest level possible. They should retain their authentic voice, even if they manage to get into power positions at the center. In these ways, they could help the emancipatory movements of their peripheral peers from a power position. Well-­ intentioned Western scholars, former peripheral academics currently working at the center and the legions of peripheral scholars could all help each other to build a more inclusive, more diverse, more just and more effective global knowledge production system that is free from the global knowledge hegemonies that are alien to the concept of a meritocratic and autonomous international academic field.

References Abbott, A., & Schiermeier, Q. (2014). After the Berlin Wall: Central Europe up Close. Nature, 515(7525). Retrieved from https://www.nature.com/news/ after-the-berlin-wall-central-europe-up-close-1.16272#/europe Ang, P.  H., Knobloch-Westerwick, S., Aguadedd, I., Munoz-Uribe, J., Wasserman, H., & Athique, A. (2020). Intellectual Balkanization or Globalization: The Future of Communication Research Publishing. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 97(1)., advance online publication. Ashtaneh, B., & Masoumi, S. (2017). From Paper to Practice: Indexing Systems and Ethical Standards. Science and Engineering Ethics, 24, 647–654. Bunz, U. (2005). Publish or Perish: A Limited Author Analysis of ICA and NCA Journals. Journal of Communication, 55(4), 703–720. Chase-Dunn, C. (1999). Globalization: A World-Systems Perspective. Journal of World-Systems Research, 5(2), 198–215. Chase-Dunn, C., & Hall, T.  D. (1997). Rise and Demise: Comparing World-­ Systems. Boulder: Westview Press. Dabashi, H. (2015). Can Non-Europeans Think? London: Zed Books. Demeter, M. (2018). Open Access Movements: Emancipation or Hypocrisy? KOME: An International Journal of Pure Communication Inquiry, 7(1), 126–127.

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Demeter, M. (2019). The World-Systemic Dynamics of Knowledge Production: The Distribution of Transnational Academic Capital in the Social Sciences. Journal of World-Systems Research, 25(1), 111–144. Ferraro, V. (2008). Dependency Theory: An Introduction. In G. Secondi (Ed.), The Development Economics Reader (pp. 58–64). London: Routledge. Goyanes, M. (2020). Against Dullness: On What It Means to Be Interesting in Communication Research. Information, Communication & Society, 23(2), 198–215. Lauf, E. (2005). National Diversity of Major International Journals in the Field of Communication. Journal of Communication, 55(1), 129–151. Love, J. L. (1980). Raul Prebisch and the Origins of the Doctrine of Unequal Exchange. Latin American Research Review, 15(3), 45–72. Pan, R. K., Kaski, K., & Fortunato, S. (2012). World Citation and Collaboration Networks: Uncovering the Role of Geography in Science. Scientific Reports, 2(902), 1–7. Piketty, T. (2017). Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Quijano, A. (2000). Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina [Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America]. In E. Lander (Ed.), La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas latinoamericanas [The Coloniality of Knowledge: Eurocentrism and Social Sciences. Latin American Perspectives] (pp. 201–246). Buenos Aires: CLACSO. Ruddock, A. (2018). Backstage in the History of Media Theory: The George Gerbner Archive and the History of Critical Media Studies. KOME: An International Journal of Pure Communication Inquiry, 6(2), 81–91. Saurin, T.  S. (2016). Ethics in Publishing: Complexity Science and Human Factors Offer Insights to Develop a Just Culture. Science and Engineering Ethics, 22(6), 1849–1854. Schott, T. (1998). Ties Between Center and Periphery in the Scientific World-­ System: Accumulation of Rewards, Dominance and Self-Reliance in the Center. Journal of World-Systems Research, 4(2), 112–144. Segato, R. (2012). Brechas descoloniales para una universidad nuestroamericana [Decolonial Gaps for an Our-American University]. Revista Casa de las Américas, 266, 43–60. Sousa-Santos, B. (2007). Cognitive Justice in a Global World: Prudent Knowledges for a Decent Life. Lanham: Lexington. Sousa-Santos, B. (2011). Epistemologies of the South. Justice Against Epistemicide. London: Routledge.

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Sousa-Santos, B. (2018). The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South. London: Duke University Press. Tóth, J. (2012). The Dangers of Academic Bubble Economy from a Young Researcher’s Perspective. Acta Sociologica: Pécsi szociológiai szemle, 5(1), 61–67. VSNU, NFU, KNAW, NWO, & ZonMw. (2019). Room for Everyone’s Talent: Towards a New Balance in the Recognition and Rewards of Academics. Retrieved from https://www.scienceguide.nl/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/283.002Erkennen-en-Waarderen-Position-Paper_EN_web.pdf Wallerstein, I. (1983). Labor in the World Social Structure. London: Sage. Willett, P. (2013). The Characteristics of Journal Editorial Boards in Library and Information Science. International Journal of Knowledge Content Development and Technology, 3(1), 5–17.

8 Technical Appendix

As this book was intended for a broader audience than just specialists, I tried to spare readers technical paragraphs in the main text that are indispensable in the methodological chapters of academic journal articles. At the same time, from a scholarly point of view, it is extremely important to know the methods we used to get the results. In this technical appendix, I will briefly explain the methods used to generate our datasets. However, I would like to also refer to the fact that all my publications cited throughout the book were published in rigorously peer-reviewed journals, thus they include methodological sections in which readers can find sufficient details regarding data collection, coding, calculations and interpretative protocols.

Measuring Scientific Output In measuring scientific output, we took into account a number of scientometric indicators, of which the most important indices were the following. First, according to international standards, scientific output was always measured in a given database such as Scopus or Web of Science. © The Author(s) 2020 M. Demeter, Academic Knowledge Production and the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52701-3_8

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The only exception is the comparative analysis which involves the comparison of publication patterns in different databases. In social sciences, we typically used the SSCI list of the Web of Science or the Scopus list. Scopus indexes about three to four times as many journals as the SSCI list, depending on the discipline, and it is almost always true that the Scopus list contains most journals that are indexed in SSCI, but the reverse is obviously not true. The research results presented in this book were obtained by either using Scopus (Demeter 2019a), a quartile of Scopus (Demeter 2017) and in that case, typically the most prestigious Q1 quartile, or by using the SSCI list of Web of Science (Demeter 2019b). In the social sciences, Scopus gives a more detailed picture since it is more inclusive, while measurements based on SSCI tend to rather show in-center distributions only. Accordingly, SSCI-based calculations are prepared primarily for the US academic market. Nevertheless, in terms of the main patterns of center/periphery relations, there are no significant differences between results based on data from different databases. After selecting the database, we define a time interval in which the measurement is performed and specify the types of publications to consider. All of the analyses presented in this book were based solely on peer-­ reviewed journal articles. There are methods that are both more inclusive and more exclusive selection methods. The selection method is more inclusive when commentaries, editorial prefaces, or book reviews are also considered, and more exclusive when only original research articles published in regular issues are considered. Commentaries, editorial prefaces, and book reviews are generally excluded from the analysis on the basis that they are non-referred, too short, and unsuitable for academic capital accumulation. Articles published in special issues may also distort the analysis. Consider, for example, that an elite journal dedicates a special issue to China. In this case, there might be a great deal more Chinese authors published in the special issue than in normal issues of the same journal. However, information on what kind of thematic issues a particular journal publishes also provides useful information on geopolitical power relations. Thus, in my own research, I usually consider full research articles published in special issues while excluding non-referred writings published in either normal or special issues.

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Another important factor in measuring scientific output is the order of authors. In the international practice, generally, the first author’s position is the strongest, although there are cases when the paper lists authors in a simple alphabetical order. In the cases of some national and international research funding applications, the proportions of authorship must also be indicated, so the data to be included may be, for example, 60:40 or 70:30 (in favor of the first author). The hierarchical nature of the author order is emphasized by the fact that, in the case of a co-authored article where one author contributes from the center and the other from the periphery, the central author is almost always in the first position (Demeter 2019b). Both Scopus and the Web of Science offer the possibility to query papers by the country of the authors. It is very important to note that when assigning an article to a country or region (see the category tables in the next section), we do this based on the affiliation of the first author. This might be a source of several misconceptions. With regard to the results of research on geopolitical inequalities, many critics think—typically as center-based researchers—that there is something wrong with the data because they have many colleagues from the peripheral regions. Therefore, it cannot be emphasized enough that, technically speaking, a researcher of a given country is someone who actually works in a research or higher education institution of that country. For example, in our metrics, we consider a researcher as Hungarian only if she works in a Hungarian institution at the time she submits the article. A researcher who was born in Hungary but works in an American university at the time she submits her article is an American researcher from the scientometric point of view. Consequently, when we are talking about racism in academia, we always mean it in an intellectual, epistemic and cultural sense, referring to the fact that the global system of knowledge production favors central agents who were educated at the center, work for a central institution, irrespective of their original country of origin. When we talk about world regions, we are talking about the role that a particular region plays in knowledge production, not focusing on the origin and ethnicity of the agents involved in each knowledge production process. Of course, many central higher education institutes have African, Asian, Latin American, Eastern European or Middle Eastern faculty members. Nevertheless, the vast majority of them, as we have seen, are centrally educated or

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reeducated, and their scientific output is published as staff members of central institutions. Their published papers will increase the knowledge production of those central institutions and, in a broader sense, of that central country or region, and not of their original country or region of origin. An originally Serbian scholar who works at an English university will increase the publication output of the UK with each of her publications, and in no way raises the academic visibility of Serbia.

Diversity Measures and Category Tables Measuring diversity in the research presented in this book has been done in several categories, and there are many ways to measure diversity itself. First, I introduce some methods of measuring diversity, and then I introduce the category tables which we used to measure diversity in different subsystems of global knowledge production such as publication output or editorial board membership. The simplest applied models work with simple proportions. For example, in the case of geographical diversity, we can measure what proportion of each world region is represented in the data sample. These are actually statistical measurements, but they are also suitable for detecting trends through longitudinal analysis. The fact that statistical diversity measurements are relatively simple to conduct does not mean that they cannot describe more complex systems, such as the behavior of matrices that represent different states at different time intervals for different disciplines. Almost all classical and most contemporary bibliometric and scientometric studies measure diversity statistically (Borgman 1989; Feeley 2008; Funkhouser 1996; Rogers 1999; Walter et al. 2018). Another method for analyzing diversity is when researchers measure diversity using computer-assisted analysis, usually on a very large sample. This method is known as topic modeling and is very different from deductive analysis. In the case of deductive analysis, the categories used to measure diversity are available from the start of the analysis, while in the case of topic modeling, the inductive method is used to construct categories based on certain correlations. The resolution of these categories (that is, how many categories the software is trying to create in total) can be modified by researchers, and the measured diversity may change in

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light of the number of categories (Günther and Domahidi 2017; Freelon 2013). In addition to simple statistical measurement and topic modeling techniques, there is another method that I have used in several studies, especially in cases where we may have a conjecture as to the degree of expected diversity (Demeter 2018, 2019b; Lauf 2005). In these cases, Simpson’s reciprocal diversity index calculations are used (Hill 1973), with values between 0 and 1, where values closer to 1 mean greater diversity (Goyanes and Demeter 2020). The calculation takes into account both the number of categories analyzed and the distribution of the number of items within each category. Diversity indices are higher when the values are closer to perfect or equal diversity. For example, the value of diversity is very low if we have eight categories and only the first two have elements, but it produces a high diversity value if there are roughly the same number of elements in each of the eight categories. The obvious advantage of the Simpson index is that the diversity of each type of code unit (say, geopolitical situation, applied theory, or geographic location of data collection) is easily comparable. Thus, we can say that, for example, a journal is more diverse in terms of editorial board membership than in terms of the geopolitical positions of its authors. A considerable disadvantage of this method, however, is that it does not give precise information about absolute or expected diversity, nor does it give a precise definition of what diversity is. To alleviate this problem, we are currently developing a mathematical model and research protocol that allows us to calibrate the diversity of various groups of articles (g-group) by mathematically defined properties such as perfect or expected diversity. Diversity is always measured for a category or categories, so below I disclose the name of each measured category and the code instruction used for each. Some categories such as paradigms and research approaches relate only to communication studies, while more universal categories such as first author affiliation or land of data collection apply to all social sciences. First Author Origin/Affiliation  Value 1 [US], Value 2 [UK], Value 3 [Western Europe], Value 4 [Canada], Value 5 [Developed Asia including Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong], Value 6

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[Australia], Value 7 [Middle East], Value 8 [Africa], Value 9 [Latin America], Value 10 [Eastern Europe], Value 11 [Developing Asia], Value 12 [Israel]. As outlined, we combine continent level, country level and geographical level to present the data in a coherent and concise manner, following previous studies (Demeter 2018; Lauf 2005). Type of Authorship Value 1 [solo], Value 2 [national], Value 3 [international]. Form of Cooperation Value 1 [intra-institutional], Value 2 [inter-­ institutional], Value 3 [none]. Land of Data Collection  Value 1 [US], Value 2 [UK], Value 3 [Western Europe], Value 4 [Canada], Value 5 [Developed Asia including Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong], Value 6 [Australia], Value 7 [Middle East], Value 8 [Africa], Value 9 [Latin America], Value 10 [Eastern Europe], Value 11 [Developing Asia], Value 12 [Israel], Value 13 [comparative]. Methodologies  Value 1 [experiment], Value 2 [survey], Value 3 [content analysis], Value 4 [observation], Value 5 [interview/ethnography], Value 6 [multi-methods], Value 7 [discourse/grounded theory]. Research Approach  Value 1 [quantitative], Value 2 [qualitative], Value 3 [mixed], Value 4 [theoretical]. Paradigms  Value 1 [positivistic], Value 2 [critical], Value 3 [cultural], Value 4 [rhetorical]. Content Area  Value 1 [mass communication], Value 2 [interpersonal], Value 3 [intrapersonal], Value 4 [group], Value 5 [organization], Value 6 [computer-mediated]. Analytical Focus  Value 1 [message], Value 2 [audience], Value 3 [source], Value 4 [policy], Value 5 [others].

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Theoretical Framework  Value 1 [interpersonal communication], Value 2 [race and media], Value 3 [parasocial interaction /uses & gratifications], Value 4 [selective exposure], Value 5 [multimedia information processing/knowledge gap], Value 6 [civic engagement/political participation/ deliberation/social capital], Value 7 [psychology of communication/cultivation theory/statistical methods], Value 8 [third-person effect/hostile media effect], Value 9 [agenda-setting/framing/priming]. Note that all values of a given variable must be mutually exclusive.

 etwork Analysis, Collaboration N and Education Networks Network analysis was used in the research described in this book in two areas. In the first case, we examined the trends of publication collaboration, in the second, we analyzed the individual career paths of researchers. The technical description of the two procedures is as follows. Analyzing scientific collaborative networks can be done at both an individual and a collective level. In the case of the individual level, each author assigned to an article in the sample is coded according to the category studied, which in our case is the geopolitical position of the author’s affiliation (see the code table above). Authors of different geopolitical locations are represented as the vertices of the network graph. The edges of the graph for co-authored articles are provided by assigned authors, and collaboration networks thus consist of a number of solitary vertices representing single authored papers, and a number of subgraphs with 2, 3, or more vertices representing co-authored articles. At this individual level, the relative importance of each world region can easily be seen by looking at the graph properties (each region is usually labeled with different colors). The most important data can be obtained from the visualization of the cooperation that represents many interesting features of the analyzed field. First, we can see the importance of cooperation in a given field of research, since data shows the proportion of multi-authored articles as contrasted with single-authored papers. Moreover, cooperation

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graphs labelled by world regions also represent power positions through the number of edges and vertices of a given region, and they also show the most typical relations between different geopolitical positions. The other type of analysis treats the categories of each geopolitical position aggregated. Thus, the degree of the individual vertices (usually represented with scaling on size) show the science output of different world regions. For example, if we find that the United States is represented by 800 papers in a given sample while Britain is represented by only 200 articles, the vertex representing the science output of the United States will be four times greater than that of Britain. In this aggregated model, the weight of the edges belonging to each aggregated vertex (represented by the thickness of the edge in the visualization) is determined by the total number of co-authored articles. For example, when there are four coauthored papers in the sample by American and British scholars, but only one article written in a German-French collaboration, then the US-UK edge will be four times thicker than the German-French edge. We also used both individual and aggregate graphs to analyze career paths. At the individual level, the career trajectories of the analyzed scholars are represented through a directed edge between four vertices. The first vertex represents the geopolitical position of the university from which the analyzed scholars have their BAs, the second refers to the place of their MA, the third to their PhD locations, while the fourth vertex is related to the geopolitical position of their current affiliation. From these four data, albeit in a highly simplified way, a career path is formed that can be analyzed in terms of world-systemic centripetal and centrifugal forces, as we have seen in previous chapters. Each four-vertice graph contains three directed edges which represent the career trajectories of scholars in a temporal arrangement that matches their real-life career paths. At the aggregate level, each position (BA, MA, PhD and current affiliation) for each scholars is coded aggregately. As a result, the aggregated career trajectory graph shows, for example, how many scholars have an MA from China, how many scholars have a PhD from the US, or how many scholars have a career trajectory that leads from the periphery to the center. The resulting graph clearly shows the relative power position, centripetal or centrifugal power of each geopolitical location. Both the analysis of publication collaboration networks and career path analysis required

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manual or manually refined data collection. Subsequently, the data was analyzed and visualized with Gephi, a widely used network analysis and visualization software.

References Borgman, C.  L. (1989). Bibliometrics and Scholarly Communication. Communication Research, 16(5), 583–599. Demeter, M. (2017). The Core-Periphery Problem in Communication Research: A Network Analysis of Leading Publication. Publishing Research Quarterly, 33(4), 402–421. Demeter, M. (2018). Changing Center and Stagnant Periphery in Communication and Media Studies: National Diversity of Major International Journals in the Field of Communication from 2013 to 2017. International Journal of Communication, 12, 2893–2921. Demeter, M. (2019a). Power Relations in Global Knowledge Production. A Cultural/Critical Approach. The Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 15(1), 1–17. Demeter, M. (2019b). The Winner Takes It All: International Inequality in Communication and Media Studies Today. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 96(1), 37–59. Feeley, T. H. (2008). A Bibliometric Analysis of Communication Journals from 2002 to 2005. Human Communication Research, 34(3), 505–520. Freelon, D. (2013). Co-citation Map of 9 Comm Journals, 2003–2013. Retrieved from http://dfreelon.org/2013/09/05/co-citation-map-of-9-comm-journals2003-2013/ Funkhouser, E.  T. (1996). The Evaluative Use of Citation Analysis for Communication Journals. Human Communication Research, 22(4), 563–574. Goyanes, M., & Demeter, M. (2020). How the Geographic Diversity of Editorial Boards Affects What is Published in JCR-Ranked Communication Journals. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly. Advance online publication. Günther, E., & Domahidi, E. (2017). What Communication Scholars Write About: An Analysis of 80 Years of Research in High-Impact Journals. International Journal of Communication, 11, 3051–3071. Hill, M. O. (1973). Diversity and Evenness: A Unifying Notation and its Consequences. Ecology, 54(2), 427–432.

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Lauf, E. (2005). National Diversity of Major International Journals in the Field of Communication. Journal of Communication, 55(1), 139–151. Rogers, E. M. (1999). Anatomy of the Two Subdisciplines of Communication Study. Human Communication Research, 25(4), 618–631. Walter, N., Cody, M. J., & Ball-Rokeach, S. J. (2018). The Ebb and Flow of Communication Research: Seven Decades of Publication Trends and Research Priorities. Journal of Communication, 68(2), 424–440.

Index

A

Academic capital, 14–19, 26–29, 35–38, 40, 54, 66, 69, 71, 77, 99–102, 106, 109–136, 141, 142, 157–159, 166, 171, 174–178, 186 Academic culture, vi, 14, 21, 51, 79, 135, 142, 159, 177 Academic institutions, 30, 34, 102–106, 109 Academic journals, 149, 161, 163, 165, 185 Academic migration, 126–131 Admission scandal, 66 Africa, 9, 18, 50, 51, 89, 91, 96, 114, 119, 128, 134–136, 144–146, 149, 153 Asia, 9, 11, 50, 51, 89, 91, 95, 97, 105, 106, 114, 119, 128,

134–136, 144–146, 153, 172, 175 Australia, 9, 53, 87, 98, 104, 115, 145 B

Bourdieu, Pierre, 4, 14, 15, 17, 26, 27, 29, 30, 32, 35–38, 40, 42, 49, 54, 63–65, 77, 79, 125 Brain drain, 19, 119, 126–131, 133, 134, 158, 177 BRICS countries, 19, 133–136 C

Camouflage identities, 75–81, 119, 159 Canada, 9, 53, 87, 115, 145

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Demeter, Academic Knowledge Production and the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52701-3

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192 Index

Capital accumulation, 14, 20, 38, 43, 44, 66, 106, 114, 136, 157, 171, 186 Career paths, 19, 32, 36, 53, 73, 121–123, 125, 127, 128, 130, 131, 176, 191–193 Center, vii, 11, 14–16, 18–21, 28, 33, 37, 40, 41, 50, 51, 69, 70, 73, 75–80, 87–89, 91, 94, 96, 99, 100, 105, 106, 111, 112, 115, 116, 119, 133, 134, 136, 142, 146, 149, 157–159, 162, 165, 169–177, 181, 186, 187, 193 Central European University, 73, 172, 174, 175 Chase-Dunn, Christopher, 37, 38, 99, 100, 160, 172 China, 8, 11, 18, 34, 47, 51, 95, 97, 98, 101, 102, 105, 106, 115, 124, 134–136, 144–146, 174, 186, 193 Citations, 7, 10, 11, 28, 30, 50, 101, 110–113, 125, 142, 163, 164, 167–169 Citation universes, 18, 33, 46, 134, 168, 169, 180 Co-authorship, 28, 112, 115, 122, 128, 130, 134, 135 Collaboration, 8, 10, 11, 19, 28, 112–115, 119, 134, 135, 191–193 Credentials, 15, 122, 158 D

De-Americanization, 53 Decentralization, 77, 80, 109, 117, 159, 164, 175, 177

Decolonization, 15, 16, 146, 159, 176 Departments, 26, 28, 65, 124, 132–133, 165, 166 De-Westernization, 20, 50–54, 109, 146, 175, 177 Discrimination, 6, 31, 76, 78, 132, 133, 180 Diversity, 17, 39, 51, 76, 89, 91, 105, 109–113, 117, 118, 142–146, 149, 151, 153, 175, 178, 188–189 index, 189 E

Eastern Europe, 9, 17, 18, 25, 50, 51, 73, 89, 91, 94, 95, 97, 106, 114, 119, 128, 134–136, 145–153, 169, 174 Editorial boards, 17, 32, 35, 43, 46, 73, 111, 117, 136, 141–153, 157, 158, 165–167, 177, 178, 188, 189 Editors, 4, 7, 20, 21, 43–47, 51, 74, 81, 110, 112, 116, 142, 163–165, 167–169, 179 Education, 3, 4, 8, 11, 12, 19, 27, 28, 32, 33, 37, 40, 49, 53, 64–69, 71–73, 75, 77, 78, 80, 94, 102–104, 106, 119, 120, 123–128, 130, 131, 133–136, 141, 142, 157–159, 162, 164, 165, 174, 176–180, 187, 191–193 Elite degree, 28, 64, 67, 133 Elite institutions, 16, 19, 28, 30, 41, 68, 123, 124, 132, 133, 174, 179

 Index 

Elite schools, 64, 66 Elitism, 4, 5, 17, 45, 65, 66, 69, 72 Elitist bias, 132–133, 180 Emancipatory movements, 76, 80, 81, 181 English language, 27, 75, 76 Epistemic values, 76, 81 Equality, 13, 72–75 European Research Council (ERC), 169, 174 Exploitation, 4, 9, 13, 14, 20, 158, 162 F

The field of struggle, 49–54 Field theory, 14, 28, 29, 35, 37, 99 G

Gatekeeping, 141, 142, 153 Geographical diversity, 111, 143, 188 Globalization, 7, 21, 35, 51, 89, 99, 109 Global North, 4, 6–9, 17, 19, 20, 26–28, 30–33, 41, 46, 47, 49–51, 53, 54, 78, 87, 99, 104–106, 119, 120, 122–128, 131, 134–136, 145, 153 Global South, 3, 4, 6–9, 17–19, 21, 25–28, 30, 32–34, 41, 46–51, 53, 54, 67, 79, 80, 87–106, 117, 119–124, 126–131, 134–136, 145, 150, 180 Google Scholar Metrics, 88, 167

193

H

Habitus, 15, 29, 49, 53, 79, 131, 159 Hegemonies, 13–17, 19, 25, 30, 40, 41, 64, 71, 72, 76, 77, 88, 91, 96, 99, 101, 103, 105, 106, 110, 112, 136, 159, 171, 175, 181 Hungary, vi, 4, 65, 73, 74, 101, 115, 149, 172, 174, 187 I

Indexing databases, 88, 100 Inequality, vii, 3–5, 8, 12–14, 16, 17, 21, 33, 37–44, 47, 49–51, 54, 63–81, 88, 102, 111, 123, 133, 141–153, 169, 176–178, 187 Institutional racism, 77, 112 Internalization, 36, 75, 133 International associations, 17, 149, 163 Israel, 9, 11, 12, 53, 75, 87, 95, 97, 98, 115, 119, 135 K

Knowledge production, vii, viii, 7–9, 11–18, 20, 21, 36, 38–40, 63–81, 87–89, 91, 96–103, 106, 109, 111, 114, 115, 117–119, 136, 141, 144, 146, 153, 157–160, 162, 165, 168–173, 175–181, 187, 188

194 Index

Matthew Effect, 20, 40, 49, 50, 114, 142, 157, 164 Meritocracy, 13, 14, 64, 123 Methodologies, 14, 20, 21, 33, 48, 71, 76, 77, 79, 110, 171 Middle East, 9, 12, 51, 89, 91, 96, 114, 119, 128, 134–136, 144–146, 153

112, 116, 118, 124, 136, 146–153, 157–160, 162, 164, 166, 168–178, 186, 187, 193 Power relations, 3, 8, 29, 30, 39, 42, 47, 63, 68, 74, 77, 97, 103, 186 Production, viii, 8, 15, 26, 30, 38–40, 63–81, 87, 89, 94, 98, 103, 106, 119, 125–127, 165, 175–181 Productivity, 7, 16, 26, 28, 29, 66, 68, 97, 98, 125, 126, 132, 133, 178, 179 Publication models, 69 Publish or perish, 116, 164 Publishers, 17, 19, 20, 30, 35, 71, 78, 102, 161–164, 177, 180

N

R

L

Latin-America, 8, 9, 50, 51, 89, 91, 95, 97, 99–101, 105, 106, 114, 119, 128, 135, 136, 144–146, 153 Latin hub, 9–11, 18, 134 Lower class, 6, 64, 65, 67, 174 M

Networks, 18–20, 27, 38, 39, 64, 65, 68, 69, 91, 110, 115, 119, 124, 127, 128, 130, 132, 133, 135, 136, 169, 191–193 Norms, 31, 38, 48–49, 53, 54, 148, 159 O

Open access, 70, 161 P

Peer review, vii, 44–46, 48, 179 Periphery, vi, vii, 8, 11, 13–16, 18–21, 28, 30, 33, 34, 37, 38, 40, 41, 50, 69, 71, 73–80, 87–89, 94, 98, 99, 104, 111,

Re-education, 19, 67, 73, 81, 159, 177 Reviewers, 7, 21, 31, 32, 35, 43–46, 48, 74, 141, 161, 164–166, 169, 179 Russia, 34, 98, 105, 124, 134, 174 S

Science communication, 69–71, 134 Science policy, 34, 134 Scientometrics, 9–12, 39, 167–169, 185, 187, 188 Scimago, 11, 12, 94, 100 Scopus, 10, 18, 27, 34, 88, 100, 101, 112, 114, 125, 149, 153, 163, 164, 167, 168, 180, 185–187

 Index 

Selection committees, 21, 26, 32, 33, 35, 43, 64, 74, 124–126, 132, 167, 178 Self-stigmatization, 14, 25, 75, 79, 81, 158, 159, 180 Semi-periphery, 99, 100, 172, 174 Spanish-language, 100, 116 Standards, vi, 5, 6, 16, 20, 39, 70, 75–80, 110, 122, 126, 144, 153, 159, 168, 174, 185 State strategies, 34 Stratification horizontal, 172, 174 vertical, 40, 172, 174 Subordinated habitus, 79 Symbolic capital, 27–29, 40, 42, 49, 64, 125 T

Thematic clusters, 33, 34 Transnational academic capital, 36, 37, 158, 176 Transnational human capital, 15, 29, 35 U

United Kingdom (UK), 3, 9, 11, 19, 36, 47, 53, 101, 104, 105, 112, 114, 115, 117–119, 124, 145, 148, 174, 188 United States (US), 9, 11, 19, 36, 39, 46, 47, 51, 53, 73, 79, 87–89, 98, 99, 101, 102, 105, 112–119, 124, 125, 128, 134, 135, 146, 153, 161, 172, 174, 186, 192, 193

195

Universities, vii, 4, 17, 19, 20, 29, 30, 34, 35, 44, 53, 63–71, 73, 77, 78, 102–106, 117, 119, 122, 124, 125, 127, 128, 132, 133, 142, 157, 159, 161, 162, 164–167, 172, 174, 175, 177, 178, 180 University degrees, 29, 64, 65, 178 University rankings, 34, 102–106, 157, 162, 165, 166 Upper-class, 16, 33, 37, 68, 78, 123, 126, 133 V

Visibility, vii, 18, 19, 51, 98, 99, 103, 104, 111, 119, 120, 125, 146, 158, 159, 164, 172, 176, 180, 181, 188 W

Wallerstein, Immanuel, 14, 29, 38, 100, 172 Web of Science, 18, 27, 34, 39, 88, 100, 101, 115, 125, 143, 148, 149, 153, 163, 167, 168, 180, 185–187 Western Europe, 9, 11, 19, 87, 89–91, 97, 105, 112, 114, 118, 119, 128, 134, 144, 146, 147, 149, 153 Western hegemony, 41, 71, 88, 106, 112 World-systems analysis, 79, 99