Acceleration, capitalist temporalities and collective challenges in academic publishing [Language Policy]

1 On acceleration: our entry point

In his thought-provoking text, Wolfgang Klein (1989) invites us to think about the emergence of the knowledge industry and the extent to which it makes it impossible for readers of scientific journals to keep up with overproduction, a logic that defines what others regard as part of “academic capitalism”. The consequences of this logic are well summarised by the editors of The International Journal of the Sociology of Language, in their rationale framing their invitation to contributors in this special issue:

Unequal material access to produced scholarly work (paywall for instance), production as the centripetal measurement criteria for (ac)countable knowledge, as well as limitations in the human capacity (in terms of time and cognitive resources) to read the exponential production produce a major discrepancy between knowledge production (writing) and knowledge reception (reading), relegating the latter to an impossible task, while allocating to the former a status of distinction and desirability. Duchêne et al. 2024

Published originally in 1989, Klein underscores the very processes that for the last 35 years have greatly shaped what today counts as doing scientific/academic work or being a scientist/academic. Among them, one stands out as a key economic property: acceleration. Building on long-standing ideas of modernity, rationality, progress and development – and the efforts of empire and nation building that they have enabled historically, the temporalisation of thought has indeed proved instrumental to ceaseless expansion and accumulation of knowledge at the service of the economic activities of those very social groups invested in state-regulated global capitalism. This is why contemporary forms of time consciousness where time is closely linked to a future-oriented calculating rationality needs to be seen as evolving together with the rise of capitalism. Aldouri and Jenkins (2018) touch on some of the consequences for the knowledge industry:

The acceleration of intellectual production re-temporalizes thought, reducing it to the temporal order of capitalism – that is, to the time of ceaseless expansion and accumulation by the valorization processes of capital. Knowledge production is, in other words, governed by the capitalist economy of time. Any other modes of temporalization – especially ones that are decisively slower – are enemies. The breakdown of the tenure system and corresponding intensification of competition is reflected in the radicalization of these tendencies of the knowledge industry.

(https://damagemag.com/2018/06/27/the-knowledge-industry/)

But if acceleration as an economic property that governs contemporary academic capitalism is part of a larger political economic system that affects people’s lives, beyond that of scientists, then it is worth considering how capitalist temporality works and is challenged in society more generally. We shall first attend to such inner workings and challenges before we reflect more specifically on the possible implications of these for academic publishing.

2 Capitalist temporality: (two) inner workings and collective challenges

For the purpose of this piece, we focus on two closely interrelated dimensions of capitalist temporality: abstract and standardized clock time; and the commodification of time (Adam 1998). We do so with a view to collectives’ attempts to undermine capitalist efforts to control time outside the scientific realm, in hopes that these instances can provide us journal editors with something to learn. This is inspired by Graeber (2004) who encourages to view “micro-utopian” forms of collective resistance as creative forms of self-organisation around us that we need to pay attention to if we are to anticipate alternative futures in the making.

The first dimension, abstract and standardized clock time, associates the concept of time with clocks and calendars, detaching it from people’s living experiences, processes and rhythms. It privileges a linear (Newtonian) approach whereby time is something that can be recorded by an observer from the distance in search of cause-and-effect relations, isolating parts from the complex whole and searching for universal certainty. Commodification of time, the second dimension, is related to the economic understanding of time as a natural resource to be exploited, attributed value and included in calculations of profit and loss, particularly when it is associated with productive labour. Thus, preoccupation to get first to the market with a new product and avoid having products waiting in storage has turned time monitoring and speed into key drivers of capitalist competition. This paradigm has also made acceleration of production, distribution and consumption a prerequisite for capital accumulation, contributing to fuel people’s alienation from their experience of the world outside this value-making machinery (Rosa 2015).

Since the advent of proto-industrial capitalism, though, numerous collective initiatives have aimed to undermine standardized clock time and the commodification of time. Stopping work through strikes is an obvious deceleration strategy, but there are more subtle, “prefigurative” (Cooper 2014) forms of self-organisation seeking to create alternatives within the shell of the capitalist system. Among these, timebanks and worker cooperatives are of significance for what they reveal about the possibilities and limitations of such collective attempts. A timebank can be described as a network of people where individuals exchange services based on the time that they contribute and use, rather than money (e. g. Fleischmann 2023). The system is not based on direct reciprocity: if one person walks someone else’s dog for 1 h, for instance, then this person earns 1 h of time which can be spent on getting another individual in the network to help with a different task. Yet, competing temporalities have often emerged in the daily lives of these initiatives, with the community time eventually clashing with the demands of the capitalist temporality outside the network (e. g. Cooper 2013).

Worker co-ops, on the other hand, are organizations run and owned equally by the members who work in the organization under the guidance of cooperative principles such as democratic member control, autonomy or independence (e. g. Holmström 1989). They can oppose forms of profit acceleration exclusively devised for the benefit of external owners while also retaining some control over speed in policy design and implementation. However, they frequently experience difficulties in departing from abstract and standardized clock time since wages for the members’ work are mostly calculated on an hourly basis, relying on the capitalist logic of valuing and monitoring productive labour. In devising deceleration strategies to accommodate physical and mental sustainability as resistance to exploitative work, they also tend to frame non-productive time as helping to improve the quality of the output, reinforcing a notion of time as economically valuable (Sørensen and Wiksell 2019).

3 And what about the publishing sector?

The above-discussed capitalist logics, collective initiatives and inherent contradictions may not be seen as of immediate relevance to academic publishing. But they can offer significant guidance based on their potential translatability. One clear connection that we draw with our own work as editors of Language Policy is how standardized clock time and the commodification of time operate in scientific journals. After all, what we editors do contributes greatly to a logic of acceleration of production, distribution and consumption enabled by the optimisation of a number of features in our day-to-day editorial duties, including the timing of publication processes (periodicity), the textual features of submissions (genre), the medium in which content is published (language), and peer-review work.

Optimisation of periodicity is carried out through the organisation of journal contents according to “volumes” and “issues”, the reference units for both selling purposes – i. e. for packing the goods that journals sell through conventional subscription channels – and speed modulation – i. e. for increasing production rate based on number of issues published yearly. Genre regulation is exercised through conventional expectations about “good” submissions that are naturalised against ideas of “clarity” and “comprehensibility” which are normally displayed as “guidelines for authors” on journal websites. As to the medium of publication, the majority of journals publish only in one or a few standard languages tied to national and global markets, in what it is seen as a necessary means to amplify the circulation of knowledge. Finally, optimisation of peer-review is enabled by online technological platforms – e. g. Editorial Manager – and the temporal streamlining mechanisms that they offer in allocation of review invitations, arrangement of turnarounds and editors’ decision-making.

We believe that these levels of optimisation may help identify a significant target for challenging action, although we remind ourselves that journals can hardly be the only target of concerted efforts to undermine acceleration as an economic property of academic capitalism. Indeed, they are just one piece of a rather complex infrastructure that involves universities, national research councils, non-governmental organisations and supranational institutions (e. g. The European Union), an infrastructure that greatly defines “good” or “bad” science, (in)appropriate ways of generating valuable knowledge, (il)legitimate forms of transforming societies and the very criteria that determine scientists’ recruitment and career promotion. Even so, these optimised features organise scientific editorial work, and thus provide focal points to potentially (re)imagining some alternative ways of doing academic publishing or, in Wolfgang Klein’s terms, of striking a better balance between writing (production) and reading (reception). However, doing so requires more than just good will and energy from the editors-in-chief in post, for this only privileges an atomised approach that prevents any meaningful redefinition of the very structures of editorial work which the knowledge industry seems to comfortably feed on. Instead, it necessitates of collective action.

Inspired by the initiatives anticipated further above and the problems they raised, we ponder rethinking such structures with reference to both the cooperative principles of democratic member control, autonomy and independence that have historically characterised the organisational logics of worker co-ops, and the timebanks’ aspiration to retain some control over time management. These we have tried out in our own editorial responsibilities by way of defining our Editorial Board, not so much as a recognition-awarding body that is there only to provide social distinction both to its members and to the publisher’s journal they are part of, but also as a group of colleagues appointed on a time-bounded rotatory basis who collectively make decisions on matters that affect the daily doings of the journal. This has been particularly the case for peer-review, in part due to the unpaid nature of this type of work that has recently raised wider questions within the scientific community about the commodification of academic labour and which makes editors more reticent to rely on non-members of the editorial board to review journal submissions. This is why joining Language Policy as editorial board member comes with a requirement to review up to five papers a year which, in turn, limits the number of papers that can go through the system annually.

But if concentrating revision within editorial boards may have help align this entity more tightly with an understanding of peer-review as based on values of collegiality and reciprocity (and not on economic value), its space for manoeuvre is still considerably narrow. As much as in the case of the timebanks and co-ops, any attempt to give editorial boards autonomy appears as severely limited by their embeddedness in the wider capitalist structures of global, for-profit publishing industry. In fact, competing temporalities quickly arise as soon as the community time within boards clashes with the demands of the publisher to fill up the journal’s periodicity of publication – i. e. the expected number of annually published volumes and issues. And the same is likely to happen with any attempt by such boards to make decisions on the other optimised features. Yet, more could perhaps be done if we all committed more seriously to work on the self-governance of these boards so that they can better serve the interests of scientists as they, simultaneously, work on other fronts to redefine more emancipatory notions of “good” science, valuable knowledge and the criteria that determine their recruitment and career promotion.

As we write this piece, multiple initiatives are beginning to emerge in the humanities and social sciences, in line with these collective concerns and lines of action. In applied linguistics, for example, a group of scholars has recently set up and run their own fully open-access publishing group, which they call Applied Linguistics Press (https://www.appliedlinguisticspress.org/home). For now, this is only a self-managed platform that publishes e-books, and in any case we need to remain sceptical about the hierarchies that a relocation of the publishing processes can bring with it (see Del Percio and Vigouroux 2024, for a review of the exclusionary dynamics of Learned Societies when they controlled publishing, well before the present corporate model). But could self-governance and autonomy from corporate publishing be something worth reflecting more on, at this historical juncture?

Miguel Pérez-Milans and Kate Menken are the Co-Editors of Language Policy.