دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی تحقیقات در زمینه فست فود در عصر از رواج افتادگی برنامه ریزی نشده - وایلی 2018

Karl Marx once complained how those intellectual skunks, as he liked to call academics, only studied for the sole ‘purpose of finding new dead ends in every corner of the world’. The real point of any intellectual endeavour, for Marx, is not to interpret the world in various ways, but to change it. For today’s ‘academic skunks’, it proves hard enough getting their various interpretations of the world read, let alone actually changing anything. But this tragic truth is also farcical. Academics don’t mind being ignored so long as their interpretations about their dead-end corners of the world get published in some respectable (dead-end) journal. As a professional academic myself, I am no different. And I am no different because the professionally regulated market for scholastic knowledge, where I operate, expects research which is seen but not read. The professional conventions of academic life, and the institutional arrangements that support academic research, promote constant productivity which necessitates and requires merciless standardisation. As a cultural dope of the contemporary university, I like many of my peers follow these conventional arrangements without question. The results: vast amounts of commodified but disposable knowledge. You could say that what we are producing is fast food research.

Concluding Thoughts: Deprogramming the Fast Food Donkey…

To practically reject fast food research in favour of sustainable scholarship, by taking on board these priorities, requires a form of deprogramming. By this, I mean a brand of deprogramming that indoctrinated fanatics are required to go through before re-joining mainstream society. For the apologetic fast-food academic, a period of deprogramming is necessary before they can become sustainable scholars. This is because during graduate school through to early career appointments our fast food academic has been indoctrinated in the practice of specialisation. I remember, not long after I was appointed to my first lectureship, many of my conversations with senior academics revolved around one overwhelming question: what is your field of academic specialty? In such moments, I wanted to quote Max Weber’s terse reply when asked to describe his own specialism: ‘I don't have a field, because I'm not a donkey’.

Why this fixation with specialisation? Well, academic specialisation really does keep fast food careers ticking over. Academic promotion and career progress rely on being able to publish in bulk, and regularly over time – these are deemed the performance indicators of an academic’s intellectual contribution. And this consistent production of fast food research without disciplinary specialisation would be like mass production without an assembly line – impossible.