#32. Elite Dominance and Inequality in Academia - Assoc. Prof. Mehmet Orhan

Dr. Mehmet Orhan, Associate Professor of Management and Organizational Behavior at EM Normandie Business School joined us to talk about authorship inequality, elite dominance, and the ethical and problematic issues of doing science and academic careers. It covers issues such as unequal opportunities and bias in journal publications and how this inequality of research output can influence societies. Dr. Orhan also talks about how the academic system is setup against young researchers through what he describes as "academic rackets." 

Mehmet Orhan link

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction and background
• 5:18 Understanding Research Publishing and Elite Dominance
• 13:57 Impact of Publishing in Elite Journals
• 22:07 Increasing pressure to publish
• 25:29 Replicability and Scrutiny in research
• 36:58 Impacts of inequality on early career researchers
• 46:37 Solutions and Recommendations
• 50:14 Investigative Journalism and Academic Rackets
• 1:02:31 Wrap up

Transcript

0:06

All right. Welcome, everybody, to the Smooth Brain Society. Today, we have on associate professor Mehmet Orhan. He is associate professor in management and organizational behavior at Normandy Business School. He just mentioned that he's started a new job somewhere else, so we will get him to talk about that as well. But before that, he was also the head of International Management Program at Paris School of Business. He's also worked at Charles University at the Czech Republic, Tilburg University in Netherlands, and W Rye University in Belgium. He has come on today to talk about his work on authorship inequality, elite dominance, and the ethical and problematic issues of doing science and academic careers. This would be very interesting because usually when you think of elite dominance, you think of something in terms of business and oligarchy and things. So I like the idea of talking about it in terms of science and academia. And as always, as the way the show goes for people who are new here, the way we do it is me and a co-host who basically have no idea of our researchers' work. We'll try, we'll sit and kind of not just pretend, but we have no idea about their work. So their job is to try to explain it to us. Our co-host today is Emma Christensen. She's a friend of mine from about eight years now, right Emma? Yeah, ages, but I'll let her introduce herself and the work she does. And then we can get on to the podcast. Thank you, Sahir. Yes, my name is Emma. I work mainly in the nonprofit field. I have experience from street children trafficking now with the rights of people with disabilities. And my interests are marginalized peoples, power, violence and abuse, exploitation. all in that field. So I'm really excited to talk to you today, my mentor. Yeah, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. So probably my accent can turn off many of your listeners. So there is kind of a warning that I would like to give precisely for that reason, they should stay. They should stick around because we're going to talk about the problems in academia under representation, over representation and issues alike and the related ethical problems. So I can also welcome the listeners. My name is Mehmet Orhan. As Zahir mentioned, I am currently in Paris attached to the Normandy Business School in France. But in a couple of weeks, I will be starting my new position at Brooklyn at Niagara Business School in the Netherlands. So basically that's it. I think we're gonna discuss the remaining issues. Awesome. So we start where we start with everyone. Could you give us a bit of background into why you got into this kind of research a little bit about your journey and what interested you in this kind of field? Sure, with pleasure, of course. So I can talk about my past research projects, which were related to virtual work, remote work and issues alike, like the technology use in the organizational setting. But during the COVID, I also realized that this issue has become more pertinent, more relevant. And at the same time, I realized more and more researchers have started talking about these issues. Although they had no previous maybe idea or knowledge about the literature or expertise in the field, they started becoming an expert in the field, virtual teams, remote work and things like. But then I also realized that these authors were quite senior and elite scholars that they heavily recited themselves and circulated their ideas which were not necessarily related to the pandemic conditions, because during the pandemic we had a lot of different, you know, idiosyncratic challenges that caused many issues. Because like if you think remote work as a flexibility that is provided to mostly knowledge workers and corporate executives in the past. But now with COVID everyone had to start with working remotely, but then we also realized that inequalities have been more problematic. technological infrastructure has become a major issue. And many things alike, like your family conditions, your settings, your living environment, all these things have impacted the experiences. But on the other hand, we have started reading the papers from these elite scholars that, as I said, they replicated themselves. And I was interested to what extent editors allowing space to these senior authors and to what extent senior authors have privileged access to the journal space. So basically I was interested to unpack the authorship inequality in the field. I mean, usually I can talk mostly for management and organizational research that includes organizational behavior, human resource management, and similar topics, but the idea I picked was during the COVID time. Nice. So that's super interesting. Can we talk about, so when you're talking about elite researchers and self-publishing, what do you mean for someone who does not know about these things? So for most people, don't even have access to a lot of journal articles because they're behind payables, let alone know how the process works. So if you could give someone a background into that, that'd be nice. Sure, of course. This is actually a very broad topic and it's a very difficult question, Sahir. So I'll try to unpack it, of course. But maybe I can talk a little bit about how the science is conducted. So everyone may know who are following your channel, your podcasts. But, you know, in order to build your academic career, you have to be publishing. So publications are the currency of ours within our system. And of course, where your publishes are quite in... important determinant about your career. So it's expected that your work is appearing in high-impact journals. And these high-impact journals, they signal or they convey the messages that they are fair, they're open, they're accessible to all kinds of researchers. But at the same time, we see the same names, the same authors to be publishing in their journals more and more. So then the question becomes, you know, as again, to what extent there The publication review process is kind of fair and there are aligned processes in order to avoid the identities. Still, editors have enormous power in the system. So once a researcher submits a paper, a manuscript, the editor has a full site about the article, the sender affiliations and everything. So recently we know a research by a noble winning laureate, Vernon, who his research assistant, and they realize that their names, of course, make a difference. So even though you publish, you try to publish the same manuscript, your name, your affiliations would eventually play a role in the editor's mind. So although we believe that the system is perfectly fair and to what to that extent open to diverse researchers, the reality is far from that. Once an editor sees your affiliation, your name, of course, makes up an idea about the quality of a paper, the process and everything. So I am saying this with this confidence because I have some numerical or empirical evidence to talk about. Basically, I mean, of course, yeah, one more thing that I would like to mention. Once a manuscript is submitted to a journal, editors, associate editors, the team, the editorial team rejects up to 95% of submissions, of which 80% can be desk reject. like once an editor sees a paper, has an idea about whether to go with the review process or not. So these desk rejections, again, I wanted to understand if, again, some researchers had the privilege to access or any kind of proof that we can start investigating these issues. I don't know if I managed to address your concern. No, you definitely did. That gives a good idea of kind of how the process works and where potential biases could be. You mentioned you had numerical data to support this. Before coming on, you spoke about, you told me about a couple of papers that you're planning on publishing and so on about this. Question one, do you think? The fact that you're publishing papers showing about the biases in this field themselves have problems being published. And then I can ask the second serious question. Yes and no again. So I'm not doing all these things by myself, by the way. I collaborate with my closest academic friends, Matthijs Baal from the University of Lincoln from the UK and Yvonne van Rosenberg from Radboud University in Nijmegen. So. we are collectively trying to address these issues. And as you said, yes, it is a problem. So we are trying to build a kind of a critical lens and try to publish it in the field of organizational research that is, we believe that is problematic. So there is already kind of a paradoxical situation. And also, I was going to say that, just one second, I was going to say one thing about that. Oh yeah, so the thing is we are also trying to show the evidence from the positivistic perspective. Although we are trying to build a critical lens or critical stance about these issues, the way how we do it is kind of positivistic. So we have the numerical evidence. We have the support from a data that editors shouldn't be saying that we are kind of biased in our own views as well. So again, we are trying to be as objective as possible, but at the same time, as critical as possible. too. So this is the idea. But as you said, sometimes the ideas are not quite well received by the editors because we are pointing out the system, you know, systematic and problematic issues. But again, our aim is to how to indicate that things could be improved. So our essential goal is to generate hope for the newcomers for the new generations of researchers. and at the same time to indicate that things could have been done or could be done better. I think your position is very interesting because you're within the structure itself that you're criticizing. So the call is coming from inside the house and as you said, it's not being well received all the time. But do you think you in some ways still have to play the game that you're talking about when you're in that structure? Or how do you navigate that? All right. Yes and no. The right answer is yes and no. Thanks for this question. Yes. I believe that we shouldn't be publishing all these things in the journal space. So it's okay to share this. I mean, the idea of publication is to communicate first of all. So we would like to communicate our ideas and channels are numerous. So now I'm talking to you guys, but you know, we'll, we'll be having some listeners. And even when they hear about these things, we are kind of, you know, generating new ideas, we are communicating. So I would like to disseminate my research results the same way we can use the internet. We can use, you know, YouTube, we can use multiple channels, TikTok, whatever you name it. So. The idea is to communicate the findings. So we would like to disturb the machine to some extent. We would like to share these things with the community that has taken it. And I think this is quite important. But again, you know, if these things are not published or let's say that they are rejected in the review process for any reasons, we would like to collect all these papers and publish it as a book. This is the idea. So... Yes, we are. I mean, you may feel or you may think that we are playing the game and we are kind of getting the, you know, benefiting from playing the game from the other way around. But no, so we are trying to show things and we are trying to communicate things with the right audience and using the right channels. But again, the findings are there. And I mean, we would, I mean, I also have some problems with the existing system, right? We would like, we should be having kind of the open process about the reviews. So I would like to disseminate my findings. I would like to talk about what I found, what I think. And then whoever, whatever thinks, they can raise concerns, they can talk, we can discuss. And journal process is like kind of a one shot game. You publish and unless someone finds an error, it stays there. Maybe they are retracted if some errors are found. But otherwise, they are like snapshots, never a kind of an ongoing debate. So although science should be based on discussions, debates and disagreements as well. So in order to facilitate that, journal space may not be the right place at all. Very nice. So we've talked about playing the game, but you said you have numbers to back this up. Can we talk about your research that way? And kind of like, yeah, what you did, what was the data collection process? What were you actually looking at? And yeah, and then we can talk about what the results were after that. Sure. Thank you again. So can I also ask you guys your own field? So you guys are also researchers as well, right? So. What fields are you working at? Sure. So I'm unemployed, someone please employ me. But I'm by trade, I'm a behavioral neuroscientist. So I've worked mainly in genetic and molecular work, but animal behavior, mostly I've done some other work, but yeah, that's my field, neuroscience. So I'm not a researcher in the traditional sense. I have a master's degree in development studies, but most of the research I've done has sort of been by proxy, like through projects that the nonprofits of work that has done. So I've been able to look inside and like reading your... articles would be really interesting because it shows a very different side from just like contributing to a research or something like that. It seems like such a like fraternity like looking into it. It's like such a weird system really that's I'm assuming it's not producing the best research when it's structured that way. I just wanted to add one more thing, sorry. When you talk about best research, I heard a rumor, I do not know if this is true, but I heard that for the Nobel Prize, former Nobel Prize winners in the committee are the ones who nominate people for the next Nobel Prize. And in that regard, you see certain universities and certain institutes winning them far more than anyone else, because they have more representation and they already have that kind of... advantage per se, so sometimes the best research doesn't come out. Now, I do not know if this is 100% true, you might be able to confirm it, but because I've heard this from multiple sources, it kind of makes sense as well, right, where certain institutes get a lot more noble arts than others, although you find interesting research coming out from so many more places than actual winners. Yeah, actually. You know, you can cut this part afterwards, but I know a person from Sweden who works on this issue, like inequalities in Nobel prizes. And I tried to Google up his name, but I completely forgot. So but yeah, I don't know. Maybe I can just wrap it up. So of course, if you think about the Nobel winning laureates and the institutions that they're coming from. Yeah, of course, you can also find some inequalities in that. area as well. And maybe this is, I mean, of course, inequalities are not something wrong in essence, right? So yes, some institutions are better than others. Some institutions have more resources than the others. So eventually they have to be like, you know, we are competing on resources as well. And then you can expect some uneven distribution in terms of productivity. This is like, obviously essential. Or you can say that it's natural. But on the other hand, our own observational evidence indicated that, I mean, I can talk a bit vulgar, if you allow me. So I was just observing academic diarrhea in our field. So the same ideas were repeated so many times that bring no value to the system, except they are helping researchers to build careers. And so this is what we kind of found problematic. and in the very first 10. Then I was asking, I mean, the reason why I was asking the your research areas, I wanted you to name some top publications, top venues where you can submit your research that is considered as the, you know, Bible of your field. For me, it would be nature. Oh, it would be nature or the lancet or yeah, those would probably be the big too, but then there's so many others. Behavioral neuroscience would be one. Yeah. Okay. Related to that or following up. Yeah. Sorry. I'm sorry. Yeah, please. I think for me it would be like JSTOR, Sage, Tila and Francis. Those ones. Okay. If I remember correctly. These are publishers though. So I was just asking the journals, the journals, like as you said, Sahil, so how many articles you feel like? If you publish in these venues, how many articles can change your career? Do you have any idea? Honestly, for me, it would be one. One would change my career. So for so many, actually, you know, being able to publish one article can change your entire career trajectory. But then how would you feel if you see a person publishing around 60 papers in that same journal? Right? So, I mean, what is the value or added value of publishing that many papers? So what is the reason for hyper prolification or over publication or over productivity? So these were also some of the questions that we wanted to ask. So imagine that you were a young researcher and you would like to dedicate yourself to your field. And let's say that you are only considered as a successful. researcher as long as you publish your manuscript in one single journal. So in some fields there are a limited set of journals where you can publish and as long as you do it you can be considered as successful or not. So there's even like a publication on this by Aguinus and the others and indicating that there are some A-level journals and these A-level journals of course It's getting more and more complicated to publish all these articles because competition is getting higher. You know, globalization and many other dynamics affect these types of competitions. But on the other hand, you also see more and more people, researchers, elite researchers, dominating the space, which were more, I think, alarming. So what we do in our research, we took a look at the data in the last 60 years. And what we did, we take a look at the top journals in all fields, around 42 different journals, and we try to understand how the most productive researchers dominated the space and how their domination has increased over time. So we also did comparative analysis between human resource management, management as a single field, and organizational behavior, organizational psychology. So all these fields, if you compare all these journals, we see that the number of most productive article count has been increasing over time as well. So there are increasing pressures to publish, of course, the competition is growing, but if you expect that the competition is growing, then you would expect slightly more kind of improvement in the inequalities. But no. So some elite researchers have been more... influential over time. So I was also wondering what is the purpose of or benefit of publishing 700 paper if you already have 699. So right we are also questioning the system at the same time. It sounds to me that this is an issue of money. I'm imagining that if you have a movie manuscript and you can attach Meryl Streep to that movie, you'll be like the chance of you getting funding for that movie will be a lot higher. And since the academic field is so competitive, getting funding for your research will be a lot easier if you have a really established author in your roster. Right. Is that correct? Is that fair assessment? Sure, but there are a number of issues Emma. So I can maybe also address these ones. So first of all, if you are already a productive researcher, you can, you know, we call about this Merton's law. So, sorry, Matthew's law. So the more success brings of course, the more fame and then the more resources and so on. So if you're a well-known productive researcher, more students would like to work with you because you are becoming more renowned, your fame allows, you know, also affect maybe editors, not necessarily in a bad way, but your reputation starts talking. And then more students would like to work with you, as I said. So more resources attract more resources as a result. On the other hand, again, the issue here, although you are building up a career at the later stages of your career, not everything you publish is necessarily your own product. You are supervisors. But again, you can exploit your own students. So you can supervise more and more and more and more students. And then their productivity means your productivity as well. So there are also increasing pressures and concerns around these areas too. So they are not independent from each other. And of course, if you are becoming more productive, of course, you get more funding, which is also quite natural. But at the same time, so why? would one person would like to publish this many papers. Because we're also reading about slow science, the new movement. And Uta Fricht from the University of College London, she was talking about how she's regretting of publishing this many articles in her career. So she has been published. If I'm not mistaken, she published over 400 articles. And then... she publishes a paper on slow science and she confesses that she is regretting. But again, If you feel like, I mean, this is also kind of a Hippocratic in a way, you know, kind of a problematic by definition so you can say that after only you publish this many papers so that people can take you seriously but if you're a young researcher and You realize that this game is kind of rigged or unfair or you know unattainable you may just quit, you don't want to do it. And as a result, we may lose so many people. We've discouraged so many people in the pipeline, in the process. Because again, these increasing pressures to publish creates kind of a wrong image in the field. Um, I might, I'll play to play devil's advocate for the suppose, say for the 600 publications or whatever. The argument could then be that each one of these is probably important for one in science. You can't necessarily you don't prove something is wrong, you kind of slowly disprove it over time by showing a large amount of evidence. a say, not the same, but slightly similar experiments, and each one's published to build up this entire thing to show a theory is right or a theory is wrong or a phenomena happens. So in that case, wouldn't you need to publish those many? Or are we talking more about just this one lab with this one person publishing these things again and again, and it not actually showing anything because it could only be working in that field, I'm sorry, in that particular lab with that student or whatever. Okay. That's a great question too, Saïr. So, but let's, let me be the devil's advocate here as well. So I'll try to, again, convert your question in a different way. So once you are known in the field, are you still dependent on the system? So once you are known, you can just disseminate your knowledge and you can share your findings with the you know, wider audience that you are referring to. So, but then this journal space is getting more competitive. And if you feel like your reputation, your, your work affects the outcome, because we know this story is like, you know, if your work is rejected, you can in the back door, you know, you can try to find back doors in the backstage. You can talk to the editors. You can even, uh, create some pressures on the editors and, you know, your colleagues, whatever. So. It's getting much harder for younger researchers to reject the submissions from the senior authors or elite scholars. So, but again, if you are an elite and already hyper prolific scholar, you're no longer dependent on the system. But so many people are. So again, we should also be questioning the system overall. So it's not about the elite publishing or elite reproducing themselves. So we should be questioning. to, I mean, why we're concerned with the impact factors or why we are like giving so much importance on these things rather than, I mean, if our concern is to disseminate knowledge, we have much better ways to do it. So this is like kind of the idea. How would you say that that's impacting the quality of the research that's out there? If Sahir is correct in saying that we have 400 studies on similar topics. we end up getting a pretty standardized set of research questions, right? But then Emma, there is kind of the artificial prestige element playing role. So we believe that pieces published in these top journals are superior than the others. So this is kind of a wrong idea. And of course, these things create incentives as well. But if you remove all these incentives, would be able to, I mean, would be willing to publish this many papers. So if our real concern is to communicate our research findings, I mean we can do it. We can just open up a new website and we can just share our ideas. Universities can do it. So each university can, you know, instead of paying for these incentives or subscriptions, they can build their own journals. And you know, I mean, I know that in reality these things are more difficult. I am, you know, not entirely naive to propose that this is like the best way. But again, these prestige element creates kind of an artificial system and kind of a wrong idea that these papers published in top journals are better than the others. So often we know the opposite is the case. So if our real concern is to disseminate our knowledge, our findings, if we would like to contribute to the science, no one stops us. And incentives again, distract in the wrong directions most of the time. I actually find this very similar to other sorts of ideas. So how sometimes academia is just, oh, not just, sorry, not academia, but schooling is kind of set up that if you've been to a certain school, you're automatically considered to be smarter and more prestigious than otherwise. I think a more very famous recent example is I think the foreign minister of Poland and the foreign minister of the UK. were both mates at the same club at Oxford, is it? Is David Cameron from Oxford? I might be wrong here, but they both literally were at the, were literally at mates in school and now they're the leading foreign ministers of their two respective countries. And it's funny how you being in a certain institute just kind of probably pushes you that further, although there might be, I don't know, like equally qualified people or equally as smart people in other institutes around the world who- probably never got that opportunity just based on name recognition. And the other thing coming back to journals, we used to do this thing back in the final year of honors. So honors is like fourth year undergrad or first year of master's, whichever university system you are in. And our supervisor and one of our lecturers used to be a teacher. bring out papers from The Lancet or Nature or any of these really high top publishing journals and he'd be like, read them and please critique them because, no, he'd just be like, read them and we'd come back and a lot of us would be like, oh, it's really good that, and then he'd rip it to shreds showing what's wrong with all of them. And kind of this idea that we think that this is good just because they're published there, it doesn't necessarily mean they're good, it's good research or it's. Yeah, you should be able to scrutinize these things and not just take them at face value on their name. Absolutely. And since you also mentioned about these colleges and universities, elite colleges. So I think the two researchers, if I'm not mistaken, from the from Harvard University and UPenn, Peter Blair and Ken Smetters, who talk about why elite colleges don't expand in supply. So they usually play on the card of selectivity and exclusivity rather than providing education with the resources they can maybe reach wider audiences. But again, the way how they operate is based on the prestige, based on the selectivity, exclusivity and so on. So again, the same way the journals are functioning. So they are proud to say that they are rejecting 95%, up to 95% of their submissions. But again, on the downside, If you realize that this may also be problematic, so it not necessarily indicates the rigor or the prestige. I mean, of course, it indicates maybe the prestige of a journal due to its selectivity. But again, not all the rejected articles are in inferior quality or so. Do you think that the inequality that is quite obvious here is a reflection of the broader inequalities in society? This is a good question. Yes, obviously. Yeah, as I said, there are many things interrelated to that extent. And yes, social capital, social inequalities, all these things play a role. And again, the colonization of, decolonization of business schools are becoming more and more important topic. We talk about the influence of the weird context, Western, educated, democratized, industrialized, and rich. democratic and industrials in rich countries. So if you look at the literature, yes, we have samples from these countries, researchers from these countries, journals from these countries. Of course, they dominate the space, the scholarly space, the intellectual space. But I mean, does it mean that they are providing the absolute truth? So we should also question these things. Maybe there are some other, in some other parts of the world, there are different realities, different absolute truths, they can compete with for some extent. It seems to me that if the people who are most likely to get published go into journals or the people who are just generally more privileged in society, like white men, you know, from Western countries, from all these universities, then that will then reflect in the research that they produce, right? Which makes sense to me. I remember hearing about how... research in medicine is generally quite sexist and quite racist and those things, which then bleeds into how medicine is provided. So it seems that the inequality that is quite evident in the fields that you talk about, it circles back into society with the information that it provides. It seems that it can have quite a great impact on the way that society functions generally. Is that correct? Yeah, sorry, let me be more specific in that sense. So we know that institutions are, I mean, there are institutional disparities, some institutions are better represented, overrepresented versus others. We know that the inequalities in terms of countries, discriminations in terms of gender, you know, all these things, we already have some set of evidence around these issues. But what our research has indicated, we also can talk about kind of a figure, kind of an image of a scholar that appears in top journals as the high, top productive scholar. For instance, like if you look at these 40 journals, we analyzed 42 journals. Yes, male dominant. Yes, they are all senior authors. Yes, they're all bald. They have gray hair. They are white. They wear glasses. They have green or blue eyes. So we can even talk about the inequalities in an individual level. Yes, society level we know, but again, so there are rarely, you can, you rarely find black scholar that is highly productive. You know, you rarely find immigrant or non-US author being highly productive. Again, there are exceptions, of course, to this rule, but you rarely see a female scholar being top publisher. So yes. And yeah. All these things are problematic, of course. Can we then, I really think we should go into the actual numbers of your research because we haven't actually spoken about them yet and we're 37 minutes in. Because we've gone through a lot of concepts and ideas and how it reflects in society, but it would be really cool to now have actual stats behind this. So could you go through a bit of your work and what you found? Sure. I just opened my stats. Of course, I don't want to bore the listeners with the numbers because they are quite detailed. you know, but I can talk about some numbers, of course. So. I was talking the... let me just try to be more specific and I know that this is also alarming for my career as well. Okay? So, but I'm going to do it. JAP, Journal of Applied Psychology. So in our field, in my field, it's the Bible. So one paper can change your life. And of course, we would like to understand how the top productive... researchers. How many articles, you know, the top 10 published on average. So we found the number of 38 or 39 on average. Like imagine that top 10 most productive researchers in the field publishing at JAP published on average 39 articles. So, and the top scholar, if I'm not mistaken, is about 55 during the period we covered. I'm still counting by the way, maybe. reached 60 or 65. So again, this indicates a huge inequality in some senses. And we also compared the organizational psychology research compared to human resource management and management. And when we look at the averages of our organizational psychology journals, we see that top 10 most productive of each journal published on average about 18 articles. journal. So this is like the average of the field. But if you look at HRM and management, it's much lower. So we would like to understand also the comparisons between and within the fields. So more than that, we also wanted to understand how researchers operating in fields function in different ways. So if you look at the numbers from the industry and has an average of 95 papers in their careers, almost 95 papers. But if you look at management and HRM, it's like 50 and 40, and these numbers are kind of indicative to indicate some sort of inequalities. So we say that yes, management and organizational research is problematic, but we found that organizational psychology is even worse in terms of these inequalities. And we would like to understand how many authors published more than 60 papers in their careers. So we also took a look at these numbers per field. In HRM we found no researchers publishing more than 60 papers. In management we only found one person. But in organizational psychology research we found around 23 researchers publishing more than 60 papers. So, but at the same time there are more numbers of researchers trying to publish in the field, but maybe they just leave. They realize that the field is more competitive that they can handle, so they just bail. They just leave the field. And again, this indicates kind of a... In order to build a sustainable career in the field, it indicates a problem. So we also took a look at the Gini coefficients in each field, and organizational psychology a Gini coefficient over 50%, which you can maybe compare with the economy of Angola, which is highly inequality society in terms of income distribution. So again, the other fields, HRM and management, they're maybe not much better, but again, all these inequalities have been rising over time, which is indicating another problematic issue. So I think I kind of summarized all these numbers in a nutshell. But I would like to, of course, discuss these things after things get published. So I would love to get some reactions on these numbers. You said that the field is getting more competitive. You also speak about the issues for early career researchers and how guidance is given to them and they're indoctrinated into a certain style of writing, a certain style of application and a certain style of... there were senior elite researchers to do certain things. How does that play into this? And does that mean you see a lot of students of these researchers also getting the higher productivity or do you compare to others? Thanks for that question as well, Sahed. So again, I was just mentioning, imagine that you are a young scholar trying to, you know, build a career in the field. And again, imagine that you... dedicate your entire career in the field and you would like to be considered within the hall of fame in the field. So again, if you look at the numbers, this is not an easy game. So there is no way that you can publish 60 papers in the top journal you're operating in within our field. So practically almost impossible, virtually impossible. So again, how this number can provide hope for future generations. Even if you don't eat and sleep and do nothing and only try to publish in your entire career, it's not feasible. So again, how can we consider that this can create hope for the future generations of scholars? We should also again question this. The editors who are working in these top journals, of course, they are trying to influence young researchers in a nice way, in a positive way. They are saying that, okay, we're in the publishing business. We would like to publish your work, send your best work to our journal. But the reality is again, you see that the reproduction of form is functioning. So same kinds of methodologies, epistemologies, ideas, they replicate because they are familiar. The style is quite obvious in some journals. They're even like pro forma templates that you have to be complying with. So. there is less and less liberty in academia. And again, we should be questioning all these things. Yeah, basically I can answer to this question this way. The way that you describe how stressful it is, you're not sleeping and you're not eating, that surely has an impact on the people within that structure, right? Can you talk about how that is visible in the field? Of course. So in all unequal society, there are some health-related problems as well. Since the income is distributed unevenly, there is also violence. There is also problematic things within the society. The same things apply in academic fields. Yes, if you have this pressure, you have burnout crisis. And if you see that the game is not easy, but you have to kind of prove that you made it, you made it your career, but then again, maybe you cheat. Maybe you try to find shortcuts. And maybe that's why we recently realized that so many researchers published cannot be replicated. And there are so many researchers that are fraudsters, that, you know, they just fabricate data. So again, these rising pressures are not functioning well. They only maybe function well for a certain percentage of individuals, but then the remaining researchers are suffering. So all burnout crisis, as I mentioned, all these pressures, all these incentives, all these rising concerns, all the dependency on tuition. for research, for funding. So all these things create, of course, unfair problematic practices. And yeah, I have to correct myself. Unintended outcomes, maybe that's the better word to describe it. Let me also check if we should cover some other things. Yeah, there are some specific numbers, but I have to keep them as not disclosed, because I have some statistics that I have to keep them. Because once I talk about them, they also refer to some certain individuals. And I want to make sure that it's not like, I want to disturb people anyways, but I don't want to harass them, or I don't want to reveal their identities. OK? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's completely fine. All right. Can I then ask, what do you think are the best ways to fix these inequalities? What kind of things do you suggest we do? And what are some of the short term things we can do? What are some of the more longer term things you'd like to see changed? Because I the more you talk about this, the more I realize this is just a reflection of society. So True, true. Maybe the unfortunate thing, I don't have the right answer to give to this one because it's a complex problem. So I can only indicate that there is a problem, but the solution is more complicated than the problem itself. So again, so many institutions are competing on resources and student tuition, like the tuition fees are a huge resource for universities. Of course, rankings play a huge role on this and publications also influence rankings. So there is kind of a game that are out there. So there is a ranking game. There is a ranking pressure. So rising pressures are creating problems. If I'm not mistaken, Adam Mastroianni suggested to kind of resist within this system. And yeah, what you can do. You just make these things more apparent. You have to be talking to your academic leaders, your managers. You, maybe, I mean, if you work on a certain topic, you have to be doing your research with, you know, your passion and don't let others to evaluate yourself with the numbers or with the quality of publications. Quality, I mean, the impact factor or the prestige of a journal you're publishing. So each work is valuable. And. As long as there are incentives, of course, people will be competing against these resources, again, rewards and similar things. But then the real value of research is research itself, the study itself, the findings themselves. So you have to be focusing on research and you have to be like negotiating with your department head. I know that it's not easy, but maybe your deans, maybe, you know. We have to be pushing them in a different direction that publications in top journals is not the only thing that should count. Right. There are other alternative channels that you can influence that you can make an impact. I don't know. Policymaking. I don't know. Again, presence in social media, writing a blog, all these things should count as intellectual property, as long as you're providing some value in the field. So. What I also feel that, I mean, there are increasing numbers of researchers working on these issues. So everyone has started complaining about the problematic areas, right? So these things are rather becoming more... I mean, people feel more ease to talk about these issues these days. So you could not imagine talking about discrimination or, I don't know, the inequalities maybe 20 years ago, 30 years ago. concerning these days. So again, things will change quite slowly, but surely they should change. Yes, no, I agree. I was just going through your papers, and I'm trying to think of any key things which you haven't covered, which you wanted to. So what? Maybe I should ask the question to you, what were certain things which you wanted to cover, which we haven't touched yet? And yeah, maybe I can also talk about the, the type of work we have been doing in the last couple of months, years, maybe Because like, yeah, the academic racket, so, you know, these networks, how they're influencing people's careers. So in the last few years, we kind of function as investigative journalists rather than researchers. So we try to understand hidden meanings as well. So the discourse analysis, these critical discourse analysis in order to understand the hidden meanings and hidden... messages that are conveyed to the younger researchers. Just like a few years ago, we entered to a Meet the Editor session in which we kind of played the role of early career researcher. And we tried to understand how unethical messages are conveyed so easily. And some of them were really shocking. I mean, I realized, I remember that... some of the editors, they recommended young researchers to co-author with big names, even though these big names provide no contribution. So, you know, all, I mean, it was kind of shocking, as I said, to hear these unethical practices to be accepted as norms in academia. Of course, there are kind of a, there are quick ways to make a career, maybe. Yes, you can have Of course, they can increase their productivity. It's kind of a win-win game. And then their name affects the quality or the perception of the quality of your papers. But if you start questioning the ethical considerations, then yeah, things are really pretty alarming at every level. So we try to understand these things with our recent research. paper that will be published in management learning, academic rackets paper, and how these rackets kind of protect their status quo over time by influencing young researchers. It's a pretty interesting research. I would encourage everyone to read that paper, how they emerge and how they sustain themselves. There's a personal level of when you ask, when you're writing a paper, you've heard it multiple times when I was at King's College. I heard it a few times when I was at Victoria University. I've heard it a few times being like, oh, we should try to get this person on the paper as well or this person on our grant because it will be more likely that it will succeed because they're big names. And yeah, the idea of it being self-fulfilling because if that works, then that's going to keep working and it encourages people to do. things like that, although I guess the big names you're trying to put in have added no real value. Well, probably resource value because you're getting it published in our journal, but they're not adding any actual value to the research itself. You're probably adding it to the exposure. But if you change the system and yeah. Except the signaling value, as you said, yeah, the signaling effect. So the rest, as you said, maybe no direct valuable contribution. to the paper. But it was again, I mean. How people can be comfortably share these things in a public setting is more alarming. Maybe, I can maybe suggest you to do these things in a private sessions. Look, Sahir, these are the ways maybe you try to, but again, this can be friendly conversation, right? So between, behind the doors, we can talk about these things. But if you are an editor, you have also a responsibility towards the scientific community. And... you should be protecting the principles, scientific principles. And you should be, of course, more careful with what kinds of messages you're sending, conveying to the potential authors. Yeah, I agree. Emma, from in your field, do you see similar things? Because I know you don't do research, but do you see kind of similar issues pop up in terms of disseminating of information or getting grants to do your work and things like that? Yeah, it's, I mean, it's starting to change, I think, but yeah, like, it's very similar, you get that like cookie cutter, like expectation of what they want. All these like application forms require very similar things. It's also a lot about the numbers game here. It's like, how many people can we impact? It's not really about the quality of the impacts. It's like, OK, there's a program that wants to get people in jobs. So they want to get as many people into jobs as possible. So instead of focusing on maybe the really hard cases that haven't been employed for ages, they'll focus on the easy ones, just so they can increase. The number that it will say in the reports will be higher. I also think in terms of funding is something that really requires intervention. They will ask, like the funders and the grantmakers will ask the tiny NGOs to create these really elaborate reports. And like, well, you impacted this many people in this way and like the long term effect and like making reports that really no one has the capacity to do if they want to do like proper actual work. I think it's sort of signifies similar sort of structural problems. I think like the whole system just needs to change, but you also think that it sort of moves with capitalism. It seems like the same issues I have with capitalism, of it being like about productivity and like people last is sort of some like indicating similar issues to what you're describing. So it's just about how like it's just about a numbers game. How many how many publications can you get out there? not really about the impact and the quality of the content. So yeah, I think it's, it's very, it's very indicative of my field as well. I had one more question about academic rackets. So when you're talking about, because racketeering is considered like a whole organizational, well you hear it in the sense of crime organizations and things like that, in this regard who are we talking about? We know journal editors encourage people to do this and this and that, so if, so what about, who is kind of involved in this? Do universities benefit from this in a way or who are the real benefactors from doing this? Does the editor really benefit from just putting the same researcher up versus putting a multitude of researchers up whose work quality is probably better than having 60 publications from the same person in one journal? Why wouldn't you have 60 good publications from different authors? in your journal, wouldn't that make it stronger? Sure. Now, there is also a problem here in this thing. When we talk about research integrity or transparency and openness, we believe that researchers should be transparent, open in their research processes. But on the other hand, we don't see these things in the editorial processes. We don't know what has been decided and behind the closed doors. So. Editors are also competing. So they're competing for citations. They're competing for readership. And they know that once they invite more famous authors, more productive authors, the citations they get will be increasing. They can signal more selectivity because of these citations because they can increase their impact factor these ways. And of course, that means that the publishers are also earning money out of this, right? So again, This game is not really independent from the system that we're having in our societies. Again, this capitalistic system works in the same way in academia. Yeah, there are obvious reasons, as I said, that affect the editorial decision. I mean, why would you publish a paper from a Nigerian scholar whose university has never heard that can almost, you know, confident to tell you that will receive no citation versus a big shot? So, of course, that impacts your citation numbers, citation numbers impact your impact factor, your rankings and so on. So of course there are legitimate reasons and understandable reasonable reasons why people editors are doing so. Nice. Okay, I noticed that we've been recording for an hour. So Emma, did you have any final questions? Or did you have any questions that you didn't get to? Did I depict really a dark picture here? Yes, you did. A little bit. So younger people, harder to find jobs, starting families later, can't really afford houses and also can't really publish in high-impact journals. No. So do you have, because you also said that you tried to put a positive spin on things. So maybe we can end on that. What are the kind of more positive takeaways from this, from your work? And yeah, maybe we can end on positive notes. Yeah, of course, I can also talk about the recent movement that we started with my colleagues, the Future of Work and Organizational Psychology, FORWAP movement. Forwap.eu is our website. So in our field, we would like to, again, promise some hope, try to connect with younger researchers to build a better future. So if we can resist against these things collectively, of course, we can get more results. And we believe that, I mean, I can also tell you that I am kind of reaching to a stage where I can feel more privileged. So I have more academic freedom. I can talk about these things without any fear, and maybe I can do another job as well, but as long as I tell the truth, so I don't really mind if I can get a job or not. So I'm at this level of my career. So. I mean, I was always questioning the field anyways, even in the past, even as a younger researcher, even as a PhD researcher. But now, I think together with my colleagues, as I mentioned, Matthias and Yvonne, so we are kind of committed to provide hope for the future generations. And we try to our best to get connected to do these things, to work on these problematic issues, to disturb the system, to disturb the actors who influence, who can influence the system. So on a positive note, yes, we believe that the future will be much brighter anyways. At the expense of our careers, by the way. Awesome. So if with that, should we move on to the more wrap up stuff? Awesome. All right. So the way it goes is I'll just have a few questions for you. Sure. Well, with Emma was we've been going back and forth of whether she should ask the questions or be quiet or answer them and I think it would be more fun if she answers them as well to be honest because this is her first time on here. So this is like seven or eight questions so you guys can take turns one after the other and answer them. Some are shorter others are longer. If that's okay with you as well? Sweet awesome. So I guess I guess as our Guest of Wonder Mammoths can answer first and then Emma can answer second. Alright, so first one, cats or dogs? Dogs. Emma? Alright, movies or TV shows? Uh, TV shows, maybe. Yeah. TV shows as well. All right. So for both of you, if your life were TV shows, what genre would they be? Emma, you go first. Oh, I have no idea. Like a drama, probably. Yeah, upsetting comedy. One of those dark comedies. Those are great. All right. What is your least favorite cuisine? I can go first on this one. I lived in the Czech Republic about 15 years almost and yeah, Czech Not good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The torture was so, you know, severe. Yeah, I'm so sorry, but I love the beer. I'm Danish, so I will say Danish cuisine. I feel like I can, this is my own country. All right, okay. What animal do you think you could beat in a fight? You know, I live in Paris and rats are our enemies. Probably, you know, I'm at the rat level. I'm weak. I can't, maybe like a fly. It's a losing game for me. It's fun. I've changed up a few questions for that reason. All right. And this is a common one. But. to ask for these things but I like it so I've kept it. What superpower would you like to have and why? to get published? Anywhere. Anywhere, yeah. I've thought about this a lot. There was a show called Teen Titans, if you remember that it was on during my, when I was a kid, and there was the green one which could transform into any animal, and I thought that was so smart, because you could fly, you could just transform yourself into a bird, and you could be very little or very big. I feel like that's the perfect superpower. The shape shifting in general is a good idea. I like that idea. All right. What is the dumbest thing someone has tricked you into believing or doing? The academia is fair. This is the general saying that you hear from all the editors, all the top researchers. Yeah. Oh, I'm going to take something similar and say that the charity and the nonprofit sector is Is it not? No, it's deeply corrupt. All right. What about this? Is there a saying which you've heard people say or believe which you think is complete bullshit? Mmm. We only publish the best work. Again, you know, I can just go around the same lines forever. I guess. To me, it's everything happens for a reason. I don't like that one. But doesn't it? It's terrible, isn't it? Yeah. It's a good way to keep, I guess it's kind of like the, it is what it is. Just to keep you... Exactly. It's just like, oh, this child gets born with HIV. Oh, everything happens for a reason. I was like, nah, it should happen. Terrible things happen without a reason and it's fine. All right, guys, the very last question. If you had to leave us with one piece of advice, so for all the people listening, what would that be? This is really tough to hear. Yeah, you guys might need to take a little bit of time. Yeah. Yeah, life is short will be really bullshit, right? I don't know. It's fine. We've got, we've got a variety of answers. This is why this is my favorite question. Oh yeah. People take it in many ways. Yeah, I don't have any. So I don't have any. This is like the sentence. You can, I don't have any. Fair enough. It's a cop out, but fair enough. I think to me it would be that to even the, to get everyone, every, every person to the same level, some certain people have to be okay with losing out on some of the privileges. I like that. I don't know how many people who are listening would feel that they're in a privileged position, slash willing to lose it. I don't know how it would go. But yeah, I guess it's a fact of life, right? If someone needs to gain something, then someone is probably going to do something as well. But yeah, awesome. Thank you so much, guys. Thank you, everybody for listening. Remember, thanks so much. I look forward to seeing how well your research is taken up. by the wider world. Now, hopefully, we are also, what do you say, we also broadcast on Wellington Radio now. So you'll have a few more listeners than what we did previously, which is nice. And yeah, thanks so much for coming on. Thanks for inviting me. Emma, thank you as well. I look forward to having you on for other episodes as well. Thank you, Sahir. Thank you, Mehmet. Thanks, guys. Awesome. And everyone else, thanks for listening again. And Take care.