Where are you,Culture & Psychology ? Making of an interdisciplinary field

Sustained heterogeneity of the field

Culture & Psychology grew very rapidly in late 1990s to establish its central role – and solid subscription basis – in the field of cultural psychologies. The use of the plural form here is not occasional. Over years, I have insisted in the use of the plural when referring to the varied perspectives that gather together in Culture & Psychology. There is no unity – beyond the focus on ill-defined notion of culture – between different perspectives under the label. And I consider such heterogeneity healthy for the development of the field. Different theoretical perspectives meet at different junctions of their efforts to make sense of the human psyche in all of its varieties. But none of them – including my own version (which I call cultural psychology of semiotic dynamics – here I use cultural psychology in singular) – is let to dominate the discourses in Culture & Psychology. The journal needs to provide a multisided constructive forum for public discussion of all various versions of the theoretical efforts. Hence the ‘&’ in the title – which I have insisted upon ever since, even though in late 1990s there were suggestions to get rid of it and revert to ‘Cultural Psychology’. I refused – and continue to do so – on the plurality of the arena where culture and psychologies meet (see Gülerçe, 2015 in her effort to reveal the ‘mystery of the &’).

Democracy starts not from policy declarations but from concrete editorial actions. It also has its borders – since the beginnings we do not appreciate the submission of purely empirical investigations and always direct their authors towards the perennial question – in what ways is your work contributing to theoretical advancement in the field? It is often not an easy question to answer – the field of psychology at large is not ‘empirical science’ (as is often declared), but a theories-phobic exercise of evidence-based social argumentation. In contrast – a science, and cultural psychologies if they have something to offer to knowledge need to be that – needs to transcend local or even global social–political controversies precisely to create knowledge base for solving relevant social and psychological problems. An ‘empirical science’ slogan – used in social discourses – masks the appropriation of science by various social and economic power-holding institutions. Behind the story of science progressing through paradigm shifts and transitions between normal and revolutionary phases of science (Kuhn, 1962) is actually the dynamic opposition between various sociodigms and even metadigms (Yurevich, 2009). Psychology is a socially embedded science – yet it needs to be reflexive of its own history, present social functions and basic issues of creativity (Glăveanu, 2014) and recursivity (Beckstead, 2015). The majority of human beings are poor – yet creative (Bastos & Rabinovich, 2009). They strive towards happiness and affluence, while the social processes in which they become involved are both mundane and extraordinary (Wagoner, Jensen, & Oldmeadow, 2012). Cultural psychologies are necessarily in need of being interdisciplinary.

The second major feature in Culture & Psychology that makes it stand out among other psychology journals is its demand to the submitting authors to prove that their methods they used – qualitative or quantitative – are appropriate to the phenomena that they study. This is particularly important in the use of quantification in data derivation – authors who submit to Culture & Psychology have had to prove theoretically that quantification is a scientifically appropriate operation in case of phenomena that come (loosely) under the label ‘culture’. As a result of such inquiry is dethroning of the statistical data handling techniques from their socially set status as via regia of science. Statistical methods are merely only one of many possible ways of asking and answering questions – in the latter can be set in terms of phenomena-appropriate quantifications. Psychology may be better off by becoming self-reflexive in the meaning of its efforts at ‘measurement’ of psychological qualities (Michell, 2005, Toomela & Valsiner, 2010) and may even benefit from adopting alternative number systems than that of real numbers (Rudolph, 2006, 2013). There is much to gain from linking cultural psychologies with contemporary qualitative mathematics. Psychology has lost the capacity to think through abstractions. Or – maybe – it has never mastered it. It is still under the spell of Immanuel Kant who considered psychology incapable of being a science because it cannot become mathematical. Statistics – for Kant, had he known that curious invention at his time – would not have counted.

Secrets of community: The importance of staying independent

Culture & Psychology is a reviewers-centred journal. We appreciate the enormous work our reviewers put into their suggestions to help the authors improve their manuscripts prior to publication. This role of reviewers – helping peers rather than ‘expert evaluators’ – creates a micro-community in which the usual ‘blind reviewing’ rarely has a place. The normal state of communication around reviewing is open on all sides. I build that up on my own ‘moral imperative’ – no matter how critical I might be of one or another aspect of a manuscript, it is my duty to say – and substantiate – my claims to the author, without hiding behind the wall of institutionalized anonymity. I think that the ‘double blind review’ – so much emphasized in many places as ‘gold standard’ of reviewing and granting quality – is detrimental to preserving scholarly discussions in the field. Neither is high rejection rate of a journal an indicator of its supposed quality. I can view a high (around 90%) rejection rate as an anomaly on the border of supply and demand.

I am pleased with our reasonable rejection rate – fluctuating around 30–40% – which allows us to work productively with authors in improving their submitted texts. Maintaining such rejection rate is possible through the first quick evaluation system of all incoming manuscripts that is done in collaboration with our associate editors. By stopping obviously mis-fitting manuscripts from further consideration saves time and energy for all – the authors, the reviewers and the journal in full. We try to redirect non-fitting manuscripts to other journals among which the newly launched SAGE Open figures prominently. Our role is to help the promising authors cultivate their ideas so that these become better than before. On numerous occasions, our authors have been deeply grateful to the reviewers who have worked with them – rather than evaluating their texts – in the context of the peer review process.

Rapid success of Culture & Psychology in late 1990s brought with it various efforts to appropriate it for different social projects. Scholarly societies without their own journals attempted (at least twice) ‘takeover bids’ of Culture & Psychology that were successfully blocked. I remained adamant about the need for the journal to maintain its independent and open status. Any linkage of it with any one scientific social power group – a society with its own policies, elections, rivalries and all that comes with institutionalization – would have been the opposite to what one desires for a forum of ideas. For the first 20 years, we have maintained that freedom of opportunities for innovative thought.

The continuous life of a journal: How can ideas endure?

For a journal to survive in an environment where accumulation of small pieces of information into large ‘data bases’ is becoming the norm is a hard fight. A journal that lives is not a depository of published papers, but an arena for promoting public discussions for new ideas to emerge. In this vein, Glăveanu and Wagoner (2015) have set up for the present issue – by inviting contributors to continue on themes that were discussed in the past, to feed forward into the future – Culture & Psychology has a chance to survive as such an arena. The impact of a journal is in the continuity of constructive dialogues.

Real impact – And not the ‘impact factor’

A scholarly journal is an interface between knowledge makers and knowledge evaluators. The latter dominate evaluation boards of universities and granting agencies. They do not create new knowledge – but can most influentially decide upon the fate of new emerging ideas.

Universities in the 21st century have changed, and so have the rules of academic evaluations. As Fathali Moghaddam has succinctly stated

A telling sign indicating the university’s demise as an intellectual center is that advancement in the university is determined by advancement in professional associations, and not the other way around. It is from the professional association that modern academics derive their status and prestige. The university now looks to the professional association to determine the pedigree of an academic. In making its judgment, the university asks, Is this individual a president or in some other way an official of a professional association? Has this person received any awards from a professional association? How is this individual evaluated by other professional specialists? A division of responsibilities is evolving, with the university responsible for advancement in rank and salary, and the professional association responsible for advancement in knowledge. But since the latter dominates the former, the university is becoming an instrument of the association. (Moghaddam, 1997, pp. 27–28)

I learned about the impact of the ‘impact factor’ by coincidence. After some years into editing of Culture & Psychology, our office got a phone call from a library in another country asking us to tell them what our ‘impact factor’ was. We just did not know, and had to tell the requester of our dismissive ignorance. The librarian on the other end of the phone line was obviously surprised about our very unprofessional stance. I doubt that their library ever subscribed to such incompetently run journal.

Some years later, we received a manuscript that stood poor chance in getting published in Culture & Psychology, but fitted very well to another (internet) journal start-up. I suggested to the author that the manuscript could go in the other journal, and I could see how it could be published there easily (and quickly). The author refused – explaining that for her standing in his or her university our ‘impact factor’ at Culture & Psychology was more important than getting the article to be read by the people for whom it mattered. The administrative takeover described by Ali Moghaddam in the quote above showed its ugly head in this encounter.

The use of the ‘impact factor’ as an evaluation basis has been criticized substantively over the last decade. There is hardly any need to add to this critique – it is obvious that its evaluative uses are unwarranted in academic evaluations of persons. I want to point to another feature of that ill-fated index – it guides the given science towards historical myopia. Using the citations to the two previous years as the basis of the index renders all historical scholarship – which in cultural psychologies may go back up to 200 years – moot. The focus on the last two years in such citation indices represents a focus on scientific enterprise that socially cuts its own intellectual roots.

What have we learned in 20 years?

We have learned that our horizons in psychology can – and need to be – extended. The avalanche of accumulation of little investigations – all by themselves ‘contributing to the literature’ in some or another field – is not going to transform our knowledge. It is ‘normal science’ in Kuhnian terms – but psychology cannot afford to stay ‘normal’. It needs to transcend beyond the normal accumulative stance so that it becomes as creative in its understanding of the human psyche as artists, fiction writers and even politicians (sometimes) have been. The ruptures created by the Napoleonic devastation of the social textures of Europe more than two centuries ago are still being repaired through the slow and tumultuous processes of integration through the governance systems of the European Union. Similarly, the emergence of post-Napoleonic science in the form of psychology (Valsiner, 2012) progresses slowly over decades – despite its self-reflexivity of always being ‘in crisis’. Cultural psychologies are an effort to leave the ‘crises’ talk behind – but have yet to succeed in their constructive efforts.

We have also learned over the two decades that time has come to give voice in various societal contexts to new generation of psychologists who could explicitly identify themselves as cultural psychologists. The pioneering effort in Aalborg University to establish the World’s first masters programme in cultural psychology has in 2015 led to its own harvest of innovative projects (see Christensen & Wagoner, 2015, Eckerdahl, 2015). Combined with the newly established PhD programme at Aalborg University, together with the Niels Bohr Lectures series (Wagoner, Chaudhary, & Hviid, 2014, 2015), cultural psychologies are establishing their institutional basis in the Danish academic context, taking on a Worldwide leadership role.

What next?

We look forward, not back. Cultural psychologies have much to offer for psychology at large. First of all they lead the way of dealing with wholistic, meaningful phenomena that require radical reorienting of the methodological realm. The parallel publication framework to Culture & Psychology – the book series Advances in Cultural Psychology (published by Information Age Publishers) that I have edited since 2006 – has provided a number of key contributions to the field. Salvatore (2015) has introduced a new theoretical perspective that opens a number of new alleys for various branches of cultural psychologies. Zittoun’s (2006) path-breaking work Transitions has given a guideline for a productive research program on human life course research. A number of other monographs were published in the same series (Gillespie, 2006 in self theory, Linell, 2009 on dialogicality, Tanggaard, 2014 on creativity, Marsico, Komatsu, & Iannaccone, 2013 on the centrality of border phenomena, Carretero, 2011 on patriotism). The separate series of Annals of Cultural Psychology the first volume of which is about to appear – is meant to highlight different topical areas on yearly basis, starting from cultural look at motherhood (Cabell, Cornejo, Marsico, & Valsiner, 2015) followed by the focus on affective encoding of the environment (Cornejo, Marsico, & Valsiner, in press). There are both ruptures (Joerchel & Benetka, 2015) and continuities woven together in human life courses (Marsico, 2015). The study of the human life course is the central line around which most efforts of cultural psychologies find their domains of investigation (Zittoun et al., 2013).

Cultural psychologies begin to have an impact on the rest of psychology – suggesting new models for analysis of the complexity of higher psychological functions. An important immediate future event is the publication of the ‘Yokohama Manifesto’ (Valsiner, Marsico, Chaudhary, Sato, & Dazzani, 2015) with its upcoming corresponding symposium at the 31st International Congress of Psychology in Yokohama (24–29 July 2016): Cultural Psychology: A new science of the human nature. What is at stake is the focus on the complexity of the human psyche – starting from its most advanced forms of art, religion and scientific inquiry, focusing on human values (Branco & Valsiner, 2012), temporal nature of human living (Simão, Guimarães, & Valsiner, 2015) and – last but not least – on the perennial human predicament of linking construction and destruction in relating with one’s environment. The prevailing reduction of all human complexity to the study of ‘behavior’ that has dominated psychology over the 20th century needs to be reversed to focus upon the highest forms of living. Cultural psychologies will stay to attempt to make sense of the highest inventions of human culture. And in that quest Culture & Psychology continues to play a key role.