Our magazine, or, why does no-one read us?

In this short piece, I want to reflect on the status, relevance and future of the academic journal. They emerged at a point when middle class European men were beginning to produce a cumulative body of knowledge using paper technologies, editorial boards and professional associations to legitimate their discoveries. Three hundred years later, the global university system, the financial interests of global knowledge corporations, and the occupational interests of university workers has supported a huge explosion of journals as markers of status, providers of data about who writes and who cites, and profitable ways of extracting value from university library budgets. This journal, though it has published much which is critical about such a system, is entirely parasitic on this set of financial and occupational interests. As Organization enters its fourth decade, might it be possible to be clearer concerning what services it provides and for who? If we think of it, as my mother-in-law once presciently suggested, as a magazine, can we be more explicit about what stories and features we are selling, and who our readers are? In other words, should we try to be more magazine?

Over a decade ago, I was trying to explain to my mother-in-law what an academic journal was because I was editing one at the time.This one in fact.She knew that I spent quite a bit of time working on it and when I tried to explain what it was, she said "oh, it's a magazine."I remember thinking that I can't have explained properly, because journals and magazines aren't the same things.Magazines are glossy, have pictures and adverts, and aim at a particular audience, selling advertising and subscriptions to pay the rent and the writers.Academic journals are different.More important, more prestigious, less reliant on "the market," and with fewer pictures and no adverts.For clever people.
At least that's what I remember thinking.In this short piece, I want to reflect on the status, relevance and future of the academic journal.They emerged at a point when middle class European men were beginning to produce a cumulative body of knowledge and used paper technologies, the status of editorial boards and professional associations to legitimate a new way of thinking about how to produce and document their discoveries.The idea of the serial publication, with volumes, issues and references, evidenced a practice which was relatively independent of the church and state.A bourgeois form of fearless enquiry, of collective independence, practiced by those with the time and status to engage in it.If we can set aside the positionality for a moment, there's something rather impressive about that.
Spinning forward 300 years, the global university system, the financial interests of global knowledge corporations, and the occupational interests of university workers has supported a huge explosion of journals as markers of status, providers of data about who writes and who cites, and profitable ways of extracting value from university library budgets.Organization, though it has published much which is critical about such a system, is entirely parasitic on this set of financial and occupational interests.It is also now almost entirely virtual, with the issue and volume numbers being an odd echo of a previous age.As the journal enters its fourth decade, might it be possible to be clearer concerning what services it provides and for who?If we think of it, as my mother-in-law presciently suggested, as a magazine, can we be more explicit about what stories and features we are selling, and who our readers are?In other words, should we try to be more magazine?

Magazines and markets
The spread of printing and literacy in the 17th century gave rise to a series of different forms of publication, each defined by who wrote and who read, how often it was published, as well as its physical characteristics and cost.The novel, the penny dreadful, broadside, pamphlet, chapbook, comic, newspaper, as well as the magazine and journal, were all variations on the theme of selling ink on paper.In the UK in 1731, The Gentlemen's Magazine began publishing, borrowing the etymology of a depot or storehouse, but this was many years after what are generally regarded as the first journals, Journal des Sçavans in France and the London based Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society which both began in 1665.To confuse matters, there was also the short lived Gentleman's Journal which ran from 1692 to 1694, but was really more like a magazine.
The titles of magazines clearly indicated their audience, such as the short-lived Ladies Mercury from 1693.In that sense, Philosophical Transactions wasn't that different, published by the entrepreneurial secretary of the Royal Society, Henry Oldenburg, and aimed at a very specialist set of readers.Its full title was Philosophical Transactions, Giving some Account of the present Undertakings, Studies, and Labours of the Ingenious in many considerable parts of the World and it was sold monthly at the price of one shilling.It was never much of a financial success for Oldenburg, but did begin to construct the idea of a form of collective agreement about the importance of the provenance of ideas, their authorship and date, as well as the beginnings of peer review which was intended to ensure that frauds and charlatans were excluded.It is this latter element which enabled the journal-paginated over a year rather than a single issue-to present itself as a trustworthy serial publication, because of the warrant provided by an editorial committee.Transactions borrowed the legitimacy of a social network of gentlemen in order to distinguish the reports of experiments, observations, or journeys published within its pages from fantastical claims made in other places, whether public houses or broadsheets (Csiszar, 2018;Fyfe et al., 2002).
In part, this was also a response to issues of censorship in a time when all publications were potentially seditious and anonymity was often the sensible response of authors.Oldenburg himself was imprisoned on suspicion of spying as a result of his extensive European network of correspondents.Neither was there any routine assumption about copyright at this time, with texts often reprinted multiple times with different attributions and plagiarism being an effective market strategy.Daniel Defoe, for example, did not sign his work, and there are still debates about what he actually wrote because so much of his work was reprinted with different attribution and in slightly different forms, often by entrepreneurial publishers who saw money to be made (Hamilton and Parker, 2016).Indeed, the very idea of a magazine partly relied on "borrowing" words from other places to produce a product that made a profit.It was, as the etymology suggests, a collection of texts and pictures brought together in the hope that an imagined set of consumers might pay for them.
If you go to a decent newsagent, even in our virtual times, you will still find a very large number of magazines.They are often broadly divided into women's and men's, with craft and relationships on one side, and boats and guns on the other.Segmentation goes further of course, with magazines for children and teenagers, for people interested in current affairs or history, caravans and heavy metal, science fiction and other people's houses.All of human life is there, including the top shelf.Or rather, everything that sells.Or rather, everything that a publisher thinks might sell.
So if we ask why there is no magazine for those interested in critical organization theory, another niche interest, the answer might be that there simply aren't enough people interested in it to make a profit.Unlike golf, wine, black women's hair, bike maintenance and tower cranes its simply too small a group of people to support a serial publication.There are broader business magazines-Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Fast Company-as well as anti-business magazines-Adbusters, Stir, Resurgence.There are even magazines about particular business functions, on personnel, accountancy, investment, logistics and so on, but nothing on critical theories of organization.No doubt the editors and readers of this journal would like to think they were doing something important and interesting, so why is it that Organization has a global readership of a few thousand?Why is it so unsuccessful?

Publishing as a signal
The reason Sage, and lots of other academic publishers, can afford these very specialist and small circulation journals is because their income primarily comes from higher education library budgets (Harvie et al., 2012).In that sense, they are not really operating in the same sort of market as a magazine publisher at all, but are effectively operating as paid publishers, extracting value without needing to engage in marketing and distribution.In the same way that a firm might be employed to produce an "in house" magazine for a company, the costs are covered, plus profits, and it doesn't really matter whether anyone actually reads the publication.Indeed, part of the function of a free company magazine is not really to be read, but just to be published.It is circulated as a signal about internal and external communication, a form of public relations or marketing which demonstrates something about values, culture and so on, as well as spreading good news about the product or service that the company is involved in.
So too might we say that many academic journals are published as a signal for universities and academics that an element of desired practice has been carried out, as well as a source of data that informs institutional rankings, appointments, promotions and so on.That is to say that, like the company magazine, many journals are not primarily concerned with cultivating readers.Indeed, it is often claimed that many journal articles are barely read at all (Prichard, 2013) but this doesn't mean that publishing in them has been unsuccessful.When an article such as this one is published the number of readers doesn't matter much, or even whether its ideas can be claimed to have any influence.It can function as a sign without any readers at all.Very rapidly the metadata will be scraped onto commercial websites such as Academia.edu,Google Scholar and ResearchGate, social media mentions will be counted and tabulated by geography and demography on Holtzbrinck Publishing Group's Altimetric, and any citations will also be counted and fed into the databases that produce the impact factor of the journal for Clarivate Analytics' SSCI or Elsevier's SCOPUS, or one of the many other content and data aggregation platforms such as Elsevier's SSRN.It even finds its way into referencing platforms, peer review metrics and automated university research management systems such as Elsevier's PURE.It will also, of course, be mortared into a CV, in turn submitted for annual reviews, job and grant applications.The article plays its function by being published, by finding its place within the network of intermediaries, institutions and academics that demonstrates that activity is taking place.It's a sort of simulation of a market in writers and readers, in which publication isn't a consequence of an editor's assessment of an audience's enthusiasm, but a consequence of the extent to which a submission is agreed to be sufficiently similar to other submissions, to "join a conversation," however muted and episodic.Once published, data about the publication is the signal that produces the information that matters (Parker, 2018).
The contemporary academic journal is certainly a medium of communication, but not only in the way that many people might imagine.If we set "content" aside, then publication in Organization (for example) communicates activity within an academic disciplinary network, showing who is active and who is not, and information about that activity is then collected, tabulated and monetized by all of the actors within the network-academics, research administrators and managers, state policy makers, editors, publishing executives, professional associations, social media entrepreneurs and so on.It can also be a different kind of signal, as it was at Leicester University in 2021 when publication in this journal was used as evidence to sack people from the Business School (Parker, 2021).Content, the words on the page or screen, only matters insofar as it needs to fit the journal-as-platform, in terms of length, structure, style, references, topic and so on.It doesn't matter that much what is actually written, but where it has been published, the company that it keeps.

Magasin
Now it seems to me that this simulation of readership is a problem, so 20 years later I want to reverse my response to my mother-in-law's suggestion and propose that Organization should try to be more magazine?If that means growing the readership by publishing articles which are of more interest to more people, why not?The first problem then is the business model, because the journal is owned by Sage publications, and as long as income arrives through university budgets, Sage doesn't need to worry too much about readers.When I became editor of the journal in 2008, I remember having a publishers lunch with the person responsible for journals at Sage and I, giddy on free wine and my new powers, made a series of suggestions about how we might increase circulation.Encourage better writing on less obscure topics.Have an attractive cover.Get people to write about topical issues using a news diary.Take advertising.Publish TV listings.Have more pictures, including centerfolds of famous organization theorists.It was probably the last one that got me a deservedly hard look, and what I remember as a cold reminder that it is (ultimately) Sage who decides what the journal is and should be (Parker, 2013).
The challenge of the idea of the "magazine" is one of readership, of being visible, interesting and attractive enough so that readers (and advertisers) want to spend money on it.This is the vulgarity of the market that I chafed at when my mother-in-law saw "our" journal like that, forcing editors like me into making decisions on the basis of popularity, not the noble scholarly values of the blind review system.The problem is that this is also a license for not being read, for imagining that it is sufficient to be talking to a vanishingly small number of people behind a paywall, the equivalent of whispering behind your hand to a few sidekicks.For some disciplines, this might not matter if there were very few people who could understand what was being discussed because of its technical nature-rocket science, brain surgery or string theory.However, for any discipline in the social sciences or humanities this is a less convincing argument, and for Organization it is a very unconvincing argument indeed.This is largely because of the word "critical" in the title.The problem is that being "critical" implies (at pain of contradiction) some sort of commitment to action, to working toward a state of affairs in which the criticism has been addressed, and that in turn suggests that widening the audience is a political imperative that should be backed up by a strategy.Not to do so would be hypocritical, or at the very least politically naïve.It implies that merely preaching to the choir counts as evangelism or, to be less kind, whining and demanding that "someone do something" (without specifying the detail of either) to a small group of friends is sufficient to call what you are doing "politics."Without some sort of idea about how these ideas might find wider dissemination, and become sustained practices which address the injustices identified, it is easy to see why many people who are not involved in the sign system would regard publishing in this journal as no more than a gesture, a virtue signal.And as I have suggested, for the algorithms, whether the signals are virtuous or not is irrelevant, they all get counted just the same.
The problem of the academic journal is not new to this journal of course.In issue 19/6, over a decade ago, series of papers condemned the scalping practices of publishers, the Anglo domination of management journals, and the cynicism of "excellent" academics with lengthy CVs (Butler and Spoelstra, 2012;Harvie et al., 2012;Murphy and Zhu, 2012).Beverungen et al. (2012) even put forward a series of suggestions concerning the expansion of open access repositories; a model of publishing regulation which rewards the labor of authors, reviewers and editors; a renaissance of university presses; and a move away from global information corporations toward professional autonomy via academic associations and editorial boards.The general theme is, of course, ownership and control of knowledge, and of the institutions and technologies that harbor this knowledge.None of these papers said much about readers, or audiences, because they seemed to be largely assumed.
Twenty years later, there has been some progress on open access, and on university presses, but the idea of the academic journal itself remains largely unquestioned, a sacred myth of academic life.To be clear, journals do play a role in academic status and career hierarchies, as income for professional associations, as a source of statistics in a global university system which seeks to use information to compete, and as product for global information corporations.What they do not do is cultivate readers, meaning that even journals with "critical" in their title are not beacons for critique, drawing readers to their flame.Without the subsidy of the global university system, most would not survive.
Implicit in my remarks here is the suggestion that a great deal of academic publishing, and particularly the "critical" stuff, ends up as a form of quietism.In busying themselves writing for each other, academics convince themselves that they are doing something important, something that reflects their values and is hence contributing to social change.Of course they might well also be active themselves in political parties or social movements, but it is as if consideration of the communication and mobilization strategies that they might employ in those contexts stops at the gate of the university.No sensible social movement would print leaflets, but ensure that they were written in a way that readers couldn't understand, and then hide them somewhere inaccessible.A movement strategy that didn't consider how to persuade other people to attend the assembly or demonstration, or even tell them where and when it was taking place, would be unlikely to thrive.Indeed, perhaps the best way to bury an idea is to publish it in an academic journal, because no-one will find it there.
My mother-in-law was right, and I should have been proud that she thought Organization was a magazine.It implies that more people read it, that it is a shop window for the things that we care about, and that "our magazine" plays a role in persuading people to think about the things that "we" care about.The journal was founded 30 years ago, and since then levels of income and wealth inequality have become even more staggering, the climate and ecological crises are upon us, and woke capitalism and woke business schools are even more tin-eared in their response to criticism.Now, more than ever, critical ideas about work, organization and economy need to be in wide circulation, and not hidden away in academic journals.Particularly in "our" journal.