Flinders, M. orcid.org/0000-0003-3585-9010 (2024) Impotence through relevance? Faustian bargains, beyond impact and the future of political science. Swiss Political Science Review. ISSN 1424-7755
Abstract
The relationship between academe and society is shifting. Academics are increasingly expected to work through forms of co-design and co-production with potential research-users to address state-selected societal challenges and produce evidence of “impact”. The risk, however, is that this shift incentivises a form of Faustian bargain whereby scholars trade-down their traditional criticality and independence as the price they pay for access to large funding streams and to be demonstrably “impactful”. The “impotence through relevance” thesis seeks to capture this paradoxical possibility: those scholars hailed as most relevant – the “high-impact” academic superheroes – may in fact be almost completely irrelevant; while the most relevant scholars in terms of truly transformative socio-political potential are dismissed and set aside as unproductive and therefore of little value. The “impotence through relevance” argument raises distinctive questions about co-option and control, democracy and decline. These are particularly significant for political science.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2024 The Author(s). Swiss Political Science Review published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Swiss Political Science Association. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | Co-option; Impact; Incentives; Relevance; State |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Politics and International Relations (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 27 Aug 2024 12:40 |
Last Modified: | 27 Aug 2024 12:40 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1111/spsr.12611 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:216513 |