World Social Science Report 2010: Knowledge Divides (review)

Reviewed by: World Social Science Report 2010: Knowledge Divides Arno Tausch (bio) International Social Science Council (ISSC). World Social Science Report 2010: Knowledge DividesParis: UNESCO Publishing, 2010. Pp. xi, 422. Paper: ISBN-13 978-92-3-104131-0, €28.00, US$75.40; PDF available at http://www.unesco.org/new/en/social-and-human-sciences/resources/reports/world-social-science-report/. The publication of this volume is timely. Constraints on state budgets around the globe in the wake of the world economic crisis that began in 2008 have increasingly compelled government ministries in charge of financing science to cut back on expenditures for research and to distribute their scarce funds according to 'objective performance criteria' and 'global university rankings,' 1which, in essence, all rely on the article and conference-paper databases that abstract and store scientific literature. 2At no time in the history of scholarly publishing in the social sciences have authors and also publishers faced such strong institutional [End Page 121]and social pressures to abandon more traditional market behaviour (like first publishing scientific results in books and not in journal articles, which was so typical of the classics of social sciences in the early twentieth century, from the works of Freud to those of Keynes and of Schumpeter 3) and to 'go for the journals' instead. The reviewed book is a systematic and critical evaluation of the evolving and deepening centre-periphery structures, which result from the headquarters of the dominant journals being nowadays concentrated in very few countries; as a result, authors seeking publication from the periphery and the semi-periphery of the world system de factohave very limited access to these journals. But the economic structures of the world system, which took shape after the Second World War, are changing dramatically: Countries such as Brazil, India, and China are rising in power and the dominance of the industrialized western democracies in the North Atlantic arena is waning. Thus, some cataclysmic changes in the production and publishing of global social sciences scholarly material are before us. The long-term effects of centre-periphery structures in the field of scholarly publishing—which began to take shape in the sciences long ago, and now have spread to the arts and humanities and the social sciences—will be felt everywhere. Like the triple-A rankings dispensed by the credit-rating agencies in global finance, 'impact factor' language and thinking started in the mid-1970s to dominate the discourse in the arts and humanities and the social sciences as well; deans and vice-deans nowadays circulate lists of journals that are indexed in the databases on which the global university-ranking systems usually rely, and dare you to publish somewhere other than in the journals covered by these indexes. No longer does the market success of an academic product determine an author's standing, like in the days of the groundbreaking books written by Freud and Popper, and Keynes and Schumpeter at the birth of global social sciences in the twentieth century. Instead, the impact factor of the journal where the article was first published is most important. Such structures of non-market behaviour are doomed to failure just like the global economic power of the rating agencies, and the challenges from the new centers of global power can already be seen in the global publishing industry. For example, there are ongoing efforts in Latin America—like the Mexican Latindex 4and the Brazilian SciELO 5 —to provide free access to high-quality peer-reviewed journals produced in the periphery and semi-periphery. [End Page 122] The present ISSC report, published by UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), is vital reading for anyone concerned by these structures: research administrators at international, national, and lower levels; administrators of academic institutions, company executives interested in financing research, scientists, journal editors, managers of book and journal publishing companies, and, last but not least, the tens of thousands of students of the social sciences, especially in the developing countries. Some individuals in the social sciences have been aware of these evolving structures for quite some time now. The increase in the proportion of Nobel Prize winners from...

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