Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Academic Publishers: Speech Acts, Coordination, and History

    From Inside Higher Ed: the editors and editorial board of a top-ranked linguistics journal, Lingua, are resigning en masse to protest their publisher’s exorbitant pricing.

    The editors and editorial board members quit, they say, after telling Elsevier of the frustrations of libraries reporting that they could not afford to subscribe to the journal and in some cases couldn’t even figure out what it would cost to subscribe. Prices quoted on the Elsevier website suggest that an academic library in the United States with a total student and faculty full-time equivalent number of around 10,000 would pay $2,211 for shared online access, and $1,966 for a print copy.

    This is big news, and it’s not the first time that Elsevier has come under criticism (see here). And the plan is a smart one: the editors are creating a new journal called Glossa in an effort to transfer the reputation and quality of Lingua to an open-access model.

    (One peculiar thing is that apparently there already is a linguistics journal called Glossa. I have no idea how that is related to this new Glossa journal.)

    Now, note the following statement in the Linguist List announcement, from Stefan Müller of the Free University of Berlin, which targets any linguists who might agree to step in as the new editors of Lingua.

    You may be flattered by the offer of Elsevier but think twice: the good reputation of the journal was built by researchers like us. This reputation is now transferred to the new journal.

    This statement is what linguists call a speech act. By stating that the reputation has moved to the new journal, Müller attempts to make it so. The perlocutionary intent is to convince other linguists to act in ways that are consistent with Glossa being the successor of Lingua—to submit their manuscripts there, to accord it respect and prestige, and so forth. There are some direct threats to any potential collabos too.

    Being on a newly established board of a journal that remains after the former board moved to Ling-OA will not look good on any CV. I would not hire anybody who did something like that and I would object in any search committee I am involved in.

    Obviously the act of creating a new journal itself will not change reputations, which is why persuasion is so important. The challenges, though, are many. The first is a coordination problem inherent in moving reputation from one journal to another. Let’s say that I would prefer to treat Glossa as the successor of Lingua. But if I am a self-interested scholar, should I submit my manuscripts to Glossa? Only if I am sure that other linguists will do the same, and that they will accord my publications there the same amount of respect that they have customarily accorded to Lingua.

    Is that possible? Some scholars will surely make this switch. But so long as rankings such as the infamous Australian Research Council’s ranking of ALL THE JOURNALS exist, in which Lingua is an A journal and the already-existing Glossa is a C journal, treating Lingua like Glossa will run directly against the professional and financial incentives of many linguists (in this example, the Australians, but surely others in citation-metric-obsessed national university systems too).

    We can conclude, then, that coordination problems will be substantial. But there is a second challenge here too. In the end, somebody is going to end up running Lingua, and the journal will therefore continue to publish, and it will continue to hold Lingua‘s backlist. Even if people stop submitting their best papers to Lingua, and stop reviewing for them, and transfer reputation to Glossa, it will still be the case that every time anyone cites an article published prior to 2015, it will go towards Lingua‘s impact factor and various other citation metrics. Again, so long as academics and administrators accord value to impact factor, we can expect history to make it difficult to strike at the heart of Elsevier’s business model.

    Overcoming the weight of history will be even harder than overcoming coordination dilemmas. If there are any linguists out there reading this, I do have an idea. The first issue of Glossa should be entirely comprised of articles that are citations of Lingua articles.

    Here is an example of what I have in mind. Take the recent article, “The prosodic expression of focus, contrast and givenness: A production study of Hungarian,” by Susanne Genzel, Shinichiro Ishihara, and Balázs Surányi. Glossa should invite Genzel, Ishihara, and Surányi to publish a one-line article of the following type.

    The prosodic expression of focus, contrast and givenness: A production study of Hungarian

    by Susanne Genzel, Shinichiro Ishihara, and Balázs Surányi

    This article is a citation of Genzel, Ishihara, and Surányi (2015).

    References
    Genzel, Susanne, Shinichiro Ishihara, and Balázs Surányi. (2015) “The prosodic expression of focus, contrast and givenness: A production study of Hungarian,” Lingua, Volume 165, Part B, 183-204.

    Now there is an article by Genzel et al. in Glossa. Authors interested in transferring reputation from Lingua to Glossa can cite the Glossa version. Lingua still exists, but if the editors of Glossa are successful at changing reputations, this is a way to strike at the citation metrics too.

    UPDATE

    Via twitter, David Mainwairing observes that Thomson-Reuters might not count these new suggestions as “citable items.” I think he’s got a good point, but the consequences aren’t necessarily that bad—except for in one specific (and unfortunately distributional) sense.

    The main goal is to remove the citations from Lingua. Even if Thomson-Reuters does not consider tiny Glossa articles as citable items, this mechanism does remove citations from Lingua. Glossa would only gain in the metrics through new full submissions—which, if reputation is transferred, will still happen, just more slowly than if Thomson-Reuters did recognize tiny Glossa articles as citable items.

    The problematic distributional consequences are for scholars whose work appears in old issues of Lingua. My proposed tiny Glossa articles mechanism will mean that their citation metrics will suffer so long as Thomson-Reuters does not recognize their new citations. The challenge for the ex-Lingua editors, and for linguists interested in protesting Elsevier through a new open-access, is to think through all of the consequences of moving to a new journal. In a world of citation metrics as administrative shortcuts for allocating funding and prestige, some distributional consequences are unavoidable.

  • Bela Negara and the Re-Militarization of Indonesia

    Indonesia has a long history of military involvement in politics. Indonesia fought a bloody war of independence against the Dutch after WWII, and after independence the army—one of the few institutions that could claim to be truly national—remained a key political force. And of course, the events of 1965-66 brought to power General Soeharto, who would rule Indonesia as president until 1998. Under Soeharto, the Indonesian armed forces (ABRI) developed an ideology of dwifungsi [= dual function], which held that the military was both a military and a sociopolitical force. This did not merely justify, it actually required active involvement of the Indonesian military in political and social life. During the New Order, the prominent journal Indonesia frequently published articles that simply summarized what was going on in the Indonesian military. That is how important developments in the military were understanding Indonesian politics. (For academic treatments, see Crouch and Sundhaussen, among others.)

    Democratization in 1999 set in motion substantial reforms to the Indonesian military which made significant progress towards converting the military to a civilian role. These included separating the military from the police force, removing reserved seats for the military from the People’s Representative Council, and other changes. It is very clear that Indonesia’s military never “got out of politics” or “went back to the barracks,” if for no other reason than the fact that significant portions of the military’s budget still do not come from the official state budget. Instead, funding is generated by the military itself. But Indonesia’s military reforms did make substantial progress on a number of fronts. The best work on the nuances of this period is by Mietzner.

    In recent years, however, progress has stalled, and it is evident that Indonesia’s military—either as a corporate body, or among important leaders—does continue to insist that its interests extend far beyond a traditional “Western” notion of defense. The new program Bela Negara, launched last week by Defense Minister Ryamizard Ryacudu, marks the most visible sign yet of the re-militarization of Indonesian politics and society.

    By re-militarization I do not mean that the Indonesian military is entering domains in which it had left; as observed above, in most domains, it never left in the first place. Rather, I mean two things. One, a visible reassertion of military prerogative in domains in which the military has been relatively inactive, or in which activities have remained out of the public eye. And two, a revival of a New Order-era language of defense against imagined threats, one that implicates all Indonesians in a common project of maintenance of the state and nation.

    What I find particularly meaningful is the effort to deny that a program called “Defend the State,” and proposed by the Department of Defense, amounts of militarization. This effort, to non-Indonesians, is simply bizarre. Here is a press release.

    jelas bahwa bela negara bukanlah wajib militer, bukan militerisme, bukan militerisasi dan bukan pula sebuah usaha pembelaan atau pertahanan negara secara fisik dalam menghadapi ancaman militer.

    Akan tetapi, sebuah upaya membangun karakter bangsa yang menyadari hak dan kewajibannya untuk berbuat yang terbaik bagi bangsa dan negara, guna menjamin kelangsungan hidup bangsa dan negara dalam menghadapi multidimensionalitas ancaman yang membahayakan kedaulatan negara, keutuhan wilayah dan keselamatan bangsa.

    it is clear that “defend the state” is not a military service requirement, nor militarism, not militarization, not even an exercise to defend the state physically against a military threat.

    Rather, it is a way to develop national character that recognizes the rights and responsibilities to do good for the nation and the state, to assure the continuity of the nation and the state in confronting the multidimensional threats that endanger state sovereignty, territorial integrity, and the well-being of the nation.

    There is something so very New Order about this insistence that using the military to inculcate military values does not amount to militarization. Look at the picture that accompanies the above press release.
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    One might be forgiven for thinking that this is just a touch militaristic.

    Still, Bela Negara draws on some common themes that aren’t just about the Indonesian military. One is a conception that pervades Indonesian political life about national character as an ideological project. One sees this in Prabowo Subianto’s campaign, in aspirations for a political culture that is adab [= civilized], and also in Jokowi’s “Mental Revolution.” Mass political culture in all of these different examples is something that must be cultivated (perhaps by politicians), and that is somehow currently deficient.

    A second theme is one of total people’s defense, or pertahanan rakyat semesta. A former Cornell master’s student, John Lee, wrote a compelling thesis on the origins of the institutional culture of the Indonesian armed forces, arguing that its norms, values, and self-understandings emerged under the PETA [Pembela Tanah Air, = defenders of the homeland] units established by the Japanese under the Second World War, but that the model for PETA was in fact the Imperial Japanese Army, in particular the experiences of the Kwantung Army in Manchuria. Here is how he described the Imperial Japanese Army’s relationship to Japanese society in the late 1800s:

    As Japanese society quickly became more educated, industrialized, and thus increasingly diverse and socially mobile, military leaders developed an obsessive fear of national disunity…

    Military leaders also exploited the natural tendency toward cohesion and cooperation in rural village life. The funding for the militarized local organizations came from the community, not the national government, reinforcing each village’s financial and psychological sense of investment in the military. Responsibilities for civic services such as fire departments were given to local military reserve units, so that the line between civil and military functions often disappeared.

    You can easily see the parallels with Indonesia under the New Order. Total people’s defense emerges in the 1950s as a central principle in Indonesian military doctrine, and today shows up as the term hankamrata (pertahanan keamanan rakyat semesta), which adds a concept of security or safety [= keamanan] but does not change the meaning.

    Re-militarization as described above is a qualitatively different thing than the persistence of odious paramilitaries like Pemuda Pancasila, the military protecting private mining activities, forbidding public discussion of the killings of 1965-66 at a writer’s workshop, or the invocation of vague ill-defined threats to explain restrictions on movement and speech. Re-militarization is a mobilizational project predicated on, first, legitimating the rejection of a boundary between military and national interests, and second, mass participation in an undefined threat to both state and nation. Both legitimation and participation elements of that project became contested in ways never before possible after 1999.

    And that is important. One thing that does distinguish contemporary Indonesia from the New Order period is the possibility of discussion and criticism. Critics of this new and still fuzzy Bela Negara program do exist and are vocal: see here and here. (On the other hand, Prabowo likes it.) So it is not right to say that re-militarization has happened, or is complete, or is inevitable; it is none of those things. I am sure that those analysts of military and politics in Indonesia can tell us a lot more about the deep politics of re-militarization, and the extent to which programs like Bela Negara are more of the same, something new, or simply huff and bluster.