Qualitative Inquiry in the Neoliberal Public Sphere: Contesting Accountability Metrics

Context ¹ : This text is dedicated to all of us who, at different moments in our academic education, have started a path of training from the periphery, having survived against all odds. Against all determination toward a future without specialized training for us. For all those who have distorted what was established, bent the guidelines of a hierarchical system, created for an elite to which we do not belong, and which today obliges us to make compromised academy, human and real.

I always dreamt of going back to my home town and work at the university in which I studied my undergraduate degree. When I finished my PhD in Psychology at the Universidad de Salamanca in Spain, I was able to make an appointment for a meeting with whom was the director of the School of Psychology in March 2008.

While he was reaching with his hand toward a journal of Applied Psychology, he asks me: Why did you do a qualitative thesis? That is not useful at all. Here, we need people who can publish in WOS (Web of Science) journals, and what you have done cannot be published in these types of journals. Look at this journal, it doesn’t have any qualitative research in it.

November 2008. After a series of meetings, there is a national competitive examination established for recruiting qualified staff, and I get the post as instructing professor. You have to publish and get funding from Fondecyt projects. Everything else will be fine but you have to do that. What you learnt in methodology is not useful for us. These were some of the sentences told by the acting dean at that moment.

September 2011. I come to Urbana-Champaign for a postdoctoral stay with professor Norman Denzin: I tell him that I have been using NVivo, and that I had written a PhD thesis about trauma and loss analyzing 60 interviews to ex-political prisoners and that I had created more than 1,700 analysis categories. I had also done cluster analysis.

Professor Denzin asked me: Where are you in the fieldwork?

Crash! Breakage of paradigms!

Professor Ronald Pelias in his workshop 2 years ago asked me: Why do you write what you write?

I was so anxious having to prove that qualitative inquiry was publishable in WOS journals. However, I felt the pressure of having to write articles about trauma and loss of the ex-political prisoners during the Chilean dictatorship between 1973 and 1990 without having found my voice yet.

I did that, and it was only then that I was able to keep myself in academia and that my work could be really considered as research.

In a School of Psychology where the research assumptions about the study of people is to treat them as if they were exact and neutral sciences, and the ideal seems to be more like the Anglo-colonial world day by day, becoming a copy of it. While the current trends in psychological sciences focus on studying attachment theory, well-being and empowerment, and some other topics which do not emerge precisely in Latin America and when the interest arises from a vision of the south as a distant, lost, indigenous, folk, old and a poor world, or to expand the sample of people regardless of their origin and particularities, to compare them in large cross-cultural studies where Latin American academics are often limited to applying tests without the right to comment on their relevance, where participation is limited to number, and while more countries are reached with the psychometric test, more credits are given to the author of the assessment instrument.

Meanwhile, Pinochet says, You must thank me, that we are a precursor country in Latin America on the application of the neoliberal model since the 70s (see Harvey, 2007); preaching the cult of science, generalizing competition at all levels, instituting the culture of assessment and placing merit as a model of social justice (Slachevsky, 2015, p. 1473).

K. Araujo and Martuccelli (2012): But is social justice an adherence to the philosophy of competition, based on the valorization of effort and personal work, and, mainly, on the reward of merit?

Slachevsky (2015): That is exactly it; education in Chile is established as an individual good under the aegis of widespread competition, the goal of science and culture of assessment.

Me: And what about the publications?

Elizalde (2015, p. 8) says in an upset tone, it is pure Mercantilization of knowledge. It should be that “Knowledge has value per se and not according to the journal that publishes it.”

The knowledge market is controlled by foreign publishers, impacting diverse spheres of academic life, from academic assessment mechanisms, which value this type of publications mostly, to the same hierarchical systems that favor hierarchical advances based on journals of this category preferably. With this, academics/researchers are forced to disseminate their findings, as a result of their research, to those publications indexed in WOS databases, as if knowledge had no value per se, but depending on the journal in which it is published (Elizalde, 2015).

As Elizalde (2015, p. 9) points out, the paradox of the system is that most WOS journals are not open access (OA), so that, in circumstances where research is publicly funded, in our case with the money of all Chileans, even the authors themselves are not allowed to freely access their own works if the institution in which they work has not paid a subscription to access this information, i.e. “pay per view,” which promotes the market of Scientific information . . . it is not possible that scientific information generated by science as a system is hostage to payments and that information emerged from long and laborious research processes, is imprisoned by “providers” who set high fees to access their databases; and consequently only the powerful institutions have the possibility of paying those high costs. Or even more so, having to pay in order to publish with prices ranging from US$1,000 and more.

Poch and Villanelo (2016): The National Commission of Science and Technology of the Chilean government spent $7 thousand million Chilean pesos (about US$11.000.000) for this purpose.

Me: In my reality of a public university in the north of Chile, a paper published in WOS equals between 10 and 16 points of academic acknowledgment which in turn equals to two to three subjects, the total amount of academic teaching hours per semester and a productivity incentive bonus.

A paper published in Scopus or Scielo database for Latin America equals between 8 and 14 points. A book gives you 15 points but it does not allow you to have less teaching hours, and it doesn’t have a money bonus either. A paper published in a prestigious journal which is not indexed, as in the case of International Review of Qualitative Research Journal, equals 1 point.

This has also generated polarizations between academics who defend the book and do not acknowledge the production of academic papers, and somehow also keep closed groups of academics who look at each other with discredit. In these communities, the trajectory in years, for those who are reluctant to publish and can subsist in the academy doing teaching, I mean the permanent academics with more than 45 years, is a factor that usually differentiates colleagues. On the contrary, as expected for a young academic researcher, at least the publication of two WOS papers per year and the constant award of national competitive projects are what are valued as a minimum for his or her subsistence in academia and it implies to be doing the work well:

Pinochet: In Chile, the Direct Fiscal Contribution (AFD) is the most important basal financing instrument that the State allocates to the universities of the Council of Rectors of Chilean Universities (CRUCH). It consists of an unrestricted subsidy, 95% allocated according to historical criteria, and the remaining 5% according to annual performance indicators related to student enrollment, the number of academics with a postgraduate degree and the number of projects and research publications of excellence. The current legislation, which regulates this assignment, is DFL No. 4 of 1981, Decree No. 128 and its amendments.

From these decrees stem the monetary incentive policies for publishing in WOS/Scielo. These incentives, which allow us to attend conferences, finance activities, and why not say it, increase individual income according to the individual incentive policies that the universities provide or negotiate with their academics:

Poch and Villanelo (2016): This promotes that all the new knowledge generated by the research is reduced to a bunch of hyper-specialized publications, which eventually have a value among the community of that specialty, but nowhere apart from the publishing market.

Me:How about the young researchers?

S. Araujo (2003): We have the enormous pressure of producing, that is publishing, which has also increased plagiarism and negotiations to create collaborative groups where the deal is that the more authors accept to be part of the group, the more papers the group will get, although not necessarily all the authors have participation of the papers that are published in their name.

Me:and are we required to be “successful” in the current system of higher education in Chile or are we the product of the system and its competitiveness?

In this academic context, it is not very important to ask ourselves why we do, what we do, and when we develop a research project. What will be its impact, or how can we contribute from the social sciences to the real problems we study in our communities and how, from our work, we can contribute to the education of citizens committed to the problems of their environment, as Giroux (2002) points out:

Giroux (2002): It is about promoting individualism, competition, and consumption. So where is the struggling for democracy as a political and educational task left? Fundamental to the rise of a vibrant democratic culture is the recognition that education must be treated as a public good—as a crucial site where students gain a public voice and come to grips with their own power as individual and social agents? Public and higher education cannot be viewed merely as sites for commercial investment or for affirming a notion of the private good based exclusively on the fulfillment of individual needs. Reducing higher education to the handmaiden of corporate culture works against the critical social imperative of educating citizens who can sustain and develop inclusive democratic public spheres.

Elizalde asks, What are, then, the main challenges the social sciences will have to face in our continent? What are the main questions we need to ask ourselves in order to contribute to the future of democracy, peace and sustainability in our societies? . . . Will the social sciences be able to emancipate themselves from their colonial origins and from the restraints imposed on them by capitalism? Should not these be the issues that concern us in the social sciences in Chile?

The same author adds that these questions may not be of interest to North American publishers in general, nor to Latin American researchers.

Final Thoughts

In a context where public or perish is our daily life reality, we have the possibility to dedicate the most of our time to do research. Doing research is profitable for a university today. You’re a tried and trusted watermelon (tested), says my director. Your publications and projects, bring credits to our University says the academic authorities. The topic is important but not the most important thing. Neither is the journal, as long as it is WOS. The ideas that construct a piece are important but more important is writing in a determined way or do as you think an American or Latin American mind would do if you want to send an article to a journal of a Latin American country, as long as it is in WOS. In Chile, the proportion of WOS journals is minimal in relation to this indexation in the local journals, these are indexes from here. So compromising publications to organize the work of a year is somewhat kamikaze if you do not have articles accepted and in the press, because in most cases, journals in Spanish, and even in English, receive such an avalanche of submissions that in their web sites they explain that it takes between 2 and 3 years to respond even to say that the paper does not adapt to the norms of the journals.

In the case of my country, and with the policies of incentive to research that the majority of the Chilean universities have, if a researcher publishes a paper in WOS index, the government gives the university this researcher works at, through the direct fiscal contribution. If the full-time professor publishes a paper in WOS per semester, he could deduct hours of teaching per semester from teaching throughout the semester. If that professor publishes two articles in WOS index, he is free from teaching throughout the year. At the same time, this professor receives bonus from “productivity” after his work is published. Some years ago, As for the workload and the recognition of this work in the commitment of academic professors, the discount of teaching hours, of a maximum of 16 direct hours per academic, it only applies to the academic who is the first author of the paper. The rest does not get a discount of hours. Fortunately these measures changed. Is this the purpose of universities? And how is the teaching received by the students of former students and teachers who are not involved in research?

In a system in which the ideal of success is to publish more than 10 WOS papers a year, there is no time for teaching, even less so for getting involved with the community.

Writing these words is contradictory to me. It is even more so to publish in WOS on suffering, pain, loss, vulnerability (the others and my own), on the trauma of the dictatorship in Chile, on the difficult realities of lives that migrate toward Chile through the main terrestrial entrance gate located in the city where I live, in the extreme north of Chile and from where I do my research. However, I had not had the voice I have—recognized in my university and politically in the instances that comprise the work I am doing in the schools of my city, before having been awarded a project by the National Science and Technology Fund of my country. So it’s true—we have to be productive and aware of the responsibility that falls on our shoulders when we investigate urgent social problems and use the metrics to relieve our voices about what is happening in academia. But we cannot forget the game in which we are taking part and how in the case of Chile, and as I concluded in the doctoral thesis that I worked on from the discourses of former political prisoners in Chile, the military regime continues to strongly influence our lives. Nonetheless, an anti-system stance turns us into alienated voiceless entities in a system that needs ethical debates about the uses of state funding in research and about research with a local focus that will rescue our cultures too battered by science. We have to do all the way, even to propose improvements for public policies to the government and disseminate the results of our projects in the community through different strategies, even if they do not pay us to do this. I am sure that with publications indexed in WOS and the award of projects in the funds I have mentioned, we will have the tools that, in these times, will allow us to actively participate in the change that we have to generate in our universities and to do University in a human, committed and ethically responsible way with the people who are educated there and those whom we study in our local communities.