Note that this is a double issue of Prometheus. To be sure, it is fatter than usual, but then it includes what would have been separate September and December issues. This sleight of hand allows us to align publication time with real time. The former has been lagging behind the latter ever since our dispute with our publisher, Taylor & Francis, in 2014. The editors downed pens for a full year and refused to work on Prometheus until our publisher recanted its wicked ways and promised there would be no more censorship of content. We have gradually been making up the lost time, but it has been a slow haul. With this double issue, we will almost have caught up. It’s cheating, of course, but perhaps we will be forgiven.
In the first of four research papers, Robert MacNeil, from the University of Sydney, looks at the efforts of the Obama Administration in the United States to encourage the adoption of renewable energy technologies. They were not completely successful. The problem is the focus of this paper. It was that the Administration paid insufficient attention to the economic and political circumstances in which the federal government has been able to facilitate technological change in the past. The paper looks at the mistakes made and how greater awareness of precedent might have avoided at least some of these.
Kean Birch, from the University of Toronto, also looks at Green technology, this time in the transport infrastructure of Ontario. By definition, infrastructure has a long shelf life and therefore tends to lock in societies to old technologies. In the case of transport, this means fossil fuels. How, though, to integrate the requirements of climate change into current infrastructure? Failure to do so will face society with the problems of designing round unsustainable infrastructure. Birch looks at what he calls the ‘materialities’ of infrastructure systems and develops the concept of ‘socio-material systems’ to be applied to transport infrastructure.
The paper from Brian Rappert and Louise Bezuidenhout looks at data sharing. Normally, this is a subject examined in the context of the data-hungry institutions and individuals of the developed world. Abnormally, Rappert and Bezuidenhout confine their attention to the developing world. Here they find evidence to challenge commonly-accepted claims about the universal benefits of open data. From their fieldwork in some of the biochemistry laboratories of sub-Saharan Africa, they conclude that there are good reasons why individual scientists should keep their data close to their chests. In such laboratories, funding systems and research governance militate against openness. This situation is unlikely to change unless serious attention is paid to the daily challenges of undertaking research in low-resourced environments.
The fourth paper is not really a paper at all, at least not in the conventional sense. It is an introduction to a film, entitled 600 Mills and available on the Prometheus website at https://doi.org/10.1080/08109028.2017.1336011. Both the hard copy and the film have been created by Martin Wood, Smiljana Glisovic and Leo Berkeley, from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. The subject of both is the chronic decline in Melbourne’s textile and associated industries. Schumpetrian destruction is evident enough, but there is little evidence of anything creative. The conversion of one of the few remaining mills to the manufacture of beanie hats provides stark evidence of that and is in tune with the stony bleakness of the film. The authors argued that their academic argument could be presented far more effectively in film than on paper. The tears flowing down the cheeks of the operator reduced to making beanies provided strong support. They also argued that Prometheus might go beyond an interest in innovation to be innovative itself. These arguments were hard to counter and both paper and film went to referees, who took an unusual task in their stride. So, too, did Taylor & Francis, commendably supportive of an innovative venture. This seems to be the first time that a paper in an academic journal has been published as a film, and we await academic reaction with interest.
We also have several book reviews and a couple of book review essays. The latter tend to start life as normal book reviews whose authors, if they do not exactly find religion, acquire an unexpected fervour for the task in hand. Such enthusiasm is not to be discouraged. Peter Swann, though deeply disillusioned with academic publishing, has favoured Prometheus with his thoughts on the continuing tensions in Economics between an orthodox establishment and heterodox dissenters. Nigel Holden has extended his review into a discussion of a not dissimilar topic, public debate in Russia. Doubtless our new book review editor, Janne Korhonen from the School of Business at Aalto University in Helsinki, will be seeking enthusiasm wherever he can find it once his feet are under the book review editor’s table. Organising the reviewing of books is challenging these days: publishers and book authors increasingly see book reviews as advertising, a marketing exercise rather than an academic one; for academics, writing book reviews is a labour of love unrewarded in institutional assessments. Janne will doubtless rise to the challenges posed by this managerialist environment.
I end on a sad note: Martin Wardrop has died. He joined our band of editors little more than a year ago and had only just begun to appreciate what satisfaction editing can give. Martin was one of those scientists who believes that good science policy needs good social scientists as well as good scientists. He worked for the Australian Science and Technology Council for many years, but Canberra was always his last love and the Outback always his first. Martin would spend weeks in spots so remote that only a helicopter could deliver and retrieve him. Exploiting this love of wilderness, he was to found a business selling Aborigine paintings on the internet and linking buyers all over the world with the painters themselves. No fastness was so remote that Martin was not aware of what was being painted there, sometimes before the paint was dry. Seconded from Canberra to the Department of Trade and Industry in London, he found himself renting a flat in Shepherd Market. This was at the height of Jeffrey Archer’s trial for lying in court about bribing a Shepherd Market prostitute. Martin was delighted to quip that he learnt more about the British political system in his Shepherd Market evenings than ever he learnt in his days at his office in Victoria Street. His merry mischief will be sorely missed.
General Editor