This is the very last issue of Prometheus to be published by Taylor & Francis. I am grateful to some of the staff at Taylor and Francis for the help they have afforded the journal over the years, Paul Naish and Louise Evans in particular. The inimitable Katy Chandler steered us through choppy waters for many a long year at a time when publishing with Taylor & Francis could still be enjoyable. To them all, my thanks.
There are four meaty papers in this final Taylor & Francis issue. The first of these, by Zoran Slavnic of Linköping University, is about data sharing among academic researchers in Sweden. While current rhetoric suggests that academic researchers, their employers and their funders are enthusiastic about the sharing of information, the reality suggests otherwise. Slavnic argues that it would be odd if the prevailing neoliberal academic environment really did encourage the sharing of research information. Universities often find that private sector partners want nothing of ready information exchange. The narrative of national research policy is also one of competition, and the Swedish evidence that Slavnic introduces indicates that competition is much more favoured than sharing. Even basic research has succumbed to the marketisation and privatisation that have already overtaken applied research. There has been little debate of these matters in the academic community and the exclusion of the qualitative research community has been total.
Thanos Fragkandreas of Birkbeck, University of London examines the paradox by which outstanding innovation efforts lead to either insignificant or undesirable outcomes. The European innovation paradox and the Swedish innovation paradox particularly attract his attention. From these he develops a typology of innovation paradoxes.
Gustavo Seijo of the Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, Los Polvorines in Buenos Aires looks at something very different – how to make an artificial satellite out of a nuclear reactor. Seijo analyses the emergence of new technology at INVAP, an Argentinean state-owned enterprise based in Patagonia. He examines the boundary-crossing capacity of new technology (shades of Joanne Greenland’s paper on homœopathy in our last issue). Seijo’s concern is not with simple technology transfer, but with how a technology can be detached from one context and inserted into another – turning a nuclear reactor into a satellite, in fact. He concludes that the conventional emphasis of R&D on the generation of new products and the improvement of production processes is misplaced. Instead, emphasis should lie with monitoring research-technology emergence and management.
More on boundaries, this time from Tim Ray of the Open University Business School in the UK. Ray challenges Erin Meyer’s focus on boundaries dividing nations, which leads to the observation that national culture determines how a nation’s people behave. Ray argues that this generalisation is just a bit simplistic and may result in invisible boundaries being ignored. He takes the case of Michael Woodford, an English executive who became president and CEO of Japan’s Olympus Corporation. On taking up his post in Japan, Woodford soon found that he was expected to join his Japanese colleagues in hiding the secrets of Olympus. He determined to expose financial fraud in the company – and found himself fleeing Japan in fear of his life. Here we have a stark case of invisible boundaries dividing insiders from outsiders. Invisible boundaries are obviously important, and not only in matters of ethics, but just how, asks Tim Ray, are they to be studied and their impact measured? Woodford’s MBA may not have prepared him for risking his life at Olympus.
And that is that. The end of the relationship with Taylor & Francis does not mean the end of Prometheus, though we have yet to find a new publisher. News that Taylor & Francis was divesting Prometheus came on 13 July 2018 without warning and with no allowance for a transition period. Given the lead times involved in running an academic journal, and particularly in transferring to a new publisher, this behaviour was unhelpful. It may, of course, prove to be for the best. Working with Taylor & Francis had become difficult. Academic publishing requires a trusting relationship between editor and publisher. Taylor & Francis could not trust Prometheus to be the standard publishing product – easy to manage and measure – that many academic journals have become. And for Prometheus, Taylor & Francis had become – through censorship, legal action and malign neglect – the major obstacle to producing an academic journal with something to say. When trust collapses, it is time to part.