Science as Culture

ISSN: 0950-5431 (Print) 1470-1189 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csac20

The Academic Productivist Regime: Affective

Dynamics in the Moral-Political Economy of
Publishing

Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer

To cite this article: Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer (2018): The Academic Productivist Regime:
Affective Dynamics in the Moral-Political Economy of Publishing, Science as Culture, DOI:
10.1080/09505431.2018.1455821

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2018.1455821

Published online: 18 Apr 2018.

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SCIENCE AS CULTURE, 2018
https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2018.1455821

The Academic Productivist Regime: Affective Dynamics in

the Moral-Political Economy of Publishing
Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer
Department of Gender Studies, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague, Prague,
Czech Republic

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
With proliferating neoliberal modes of science governance, Scientific publishing;
publishing has become more important. Recent studies affective economy; moral
point to researchers’ feeling of exhaustion and anxiety as economy; emotional labor;
responses to academic performance regimes. Yet how peer review; performance
assessment
affects underpin publishing in scientific cultures and
communities, and what this implies for STS scholarship has
remained underexplored. Drawing on insights from
ethnographic fieldwork and the cultural studies of affect,
this article traces the role of emotions, including hope,
contempt, and excitement for understanding the new
academic productivist regime at a Czech research
institution. While junior researchers’ orientations are
fostered through rendering publications objects of hope, a
moral-political economy intersects with geopolitical history
and values of research organization to shape the
publication practices of many senior scientists. An affective
labor of combat and equanimity is necessary for managing
these orientations that are corporeally energized by a
dynamic of thrill. This four-pronged approach makes
palpable how emotions render scientists’ bodies hopeful,
combative and excited while intersecting with ideals of
meritocratic research organization and assessment.
Frustration and failure are never entirely absent but serve
as an immanent driving force for a publishing culture that
thrives on adrenaline, combativeness, and hope. This makes
it difficult to leverage failures towards criticism of the
academic productivist regime—both for the scientists
differently affected within the institution and STS
researchers. Different engagements with this regime require
a more capacious accounting for the pleasure and thrill
generated by the uncertainty of publication outcome as
well as by unacknowledged practices of care.

Introduction
Academic publishing has multiple affordances: publications make scientific
knowledge public and potentially useful to other researchers and wider

CONTACT D. Lorenz-Meyer d.lorenz-meyer@fhs.cuni.cz Department of Gender Studies, Faculty of

Humanities, Charles University in Prague, Jose Martiho 31, 16252 Prague 6, Czech Republic
© 2018 Process Press
2 D. LORENZ-MEYER

society; and they are the primary means through which research is assessed and
academics can establish their reputation, advance their career, and obtain
funding (e.g. Latour and Woolgar, 1986). As neoliberal modes of governance
that prioritize rankings, benchmarking, and measuring research performance
have spread through academia, getting published, particularly in journals with
a high-impact factor, has become even more important (Shore, 2008; Linková
and Stöckelová, 2012). Critical observers have traced new publication strategies
through which researchers aim to increase output in response to efforts to
measure and optimize academic performance (e.g. Macdonald and Kam,
2007; Linková, 2014). They have also drawn attention to researchers’ feelings
of exhaustion, stress, anxiety, and guilt in relation to publishing imperatives
(e.g. Chandler et al., 2002; Gill, 2010), extending earlier observations of risk-
taking and ‘excitement’ in the laboratory (Latour and Woolgar, 1986, p. 229).
This suggests that scientists’ practices oriented toward publication outcome,
and their attendant emotions and affects, could be a useful lens through
which to examine the performance culture of entrepreneurial universities
(Clark, 1998).1 At the same time, recent studies risk conceiving emotions
merely as responses to performance regimes imposed from the outside. Little
attention has been paid to how different affects circulate, intersect with academic
values and technologies, and might underpin current publishing regimes.
This article seeks to bring the examination of publication-oriented practices
in science into conversation with the cultural studies of emotions and affects.
Taking the example of practices and feelings that are centered on publications
I examine how affects intersect with the moral orders and geopolitical histories
of the organization of research and assessment at a prominent Czech research
institution as it transformed into a more competitive research organization.
The article—and the framework I develop—address the following questions.
What emotions are necessary to draw novice researchers into a preoccupation
with publication outcomes? What is the role of moral values and academic geo-
politics for the investment of senior academics in publication performance and
metrics-based assessment? What modes of affective labor are required to sustain
the focus on publishing? How are the corporeal forces of affect generated in
relation to assessment procedures? Finally, what do these affective dynamics
and the marginal position of researchers affected differently imply for strength-
ening alternative publication practices—both for scientists and STS scholars?
Situated inquiry into how affects are co-produced and intertwine with circuits
of value production at the Czech institution is part of the recent effort to put the
energetic, physical, and sensual back into science studies in order to increase the
political relevance of their findings (Cohen and Galusky, 2010). The study of
affective dynamics is inspired by John Law’s (1994) work on the multiplicity
of ordering logics by which research organizations and subjectivities are recur-
sively performed. Law and Moser (2003, p. 5) suggest that different modes of
ordering (enterprise, administration, vocation, and vision) produce and are
 SCIENCE AS CULTURE 3

sustained by different ‘styles of desiring,’ such as the enterprise mode’s passion

for performance or the administration mode’s desire for institutional pro-
cedures. Extending these insights through the cultural study of affect, the
article offers a four-pronged approach to analyzing how the academic producti-
vist regime is generated and sustained through particular affective orientations.
The central argument is that rather than a single ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams,
1977) there are multiple partially connected affective dynamics that support and
sustain researchers’ publication practices and are interlaced with relations of
power.
This argument is organized as follows: I start by introducing the concepts of
the affective economy (Ahmed, 2004), the moral economy (Daston, 1995), and
emotional labor (Hochschild, 1983), which inform my analysis. I then introduce
the field site and methods. The four sections that follow successively present a
four-pronged approach to analyzing different affective dynamics and modes
of managing emotions that underpin prevalent publication practices. The first
two sections focus on how an affective orientation towards publication outcomes
is generated among junior and senior scientists, respectively.2 I offer the concept
of the economy of hope to show how, for novice researchers, publications tend to
be invested with distinct promises. These promises fuel the optimism of junior
researchers that spur everyday laboratory work while also instilling a means-
oriented ethos that directs lab work towards publishable output. I suggest the
concept of the moral-political economy of publishing to shed light on how an
orientation towards publication performance for many senior academics is
tied up with the academic values that are embedded in the geopolitical histories
and initiatives that seek to ‘Westerniz[e] Eastern-Bloc science’ (Schiermeier,
2008).
The next two subsections zoom in on distinct components within these
broader orientations. One of these components is the ‘affective labour of
combat and equanimity’, that illuminates the indispensable work of managing
and modulating emotions in publishing relations. The other is the ‘dynamics
of thrill,’ which brings to the fore the embodied intensity and forces of affect
that are generated in and through the technology of peer review. The conclusion
discusses what this four-pronged approach contributes to understanding the
appeal and tenacity of the academic productivist regime of publishing and its
implication for how STS scholars might contribute to initiatives of transforming
hegemonic publishing regimes.

Analytical Perspectives on Affects and Emotions in Science

A central insight of post-structuralist perspectives on emotions that inform the
analytical concepts that I discuss here is that emotions are tied up with relations
of power. This perspective is developed in Michel Foucault’s (1983) analysis of
the political technologies that shape and mark bodies through disciplinary
4 D. LORENZ-MEYER

routines. For Foucault, power is not primarily coercive but immanent and pro-
ductive: ‘it incites, it induces, it seduces’ (Foucault, 1983, p. 220). His later work
on governmentality links the ‘technologies of the self,’ (Foucault, 1988) which
operate on the body, with the technologies of (state) governance (Burchell
et al., 1991). In what Nikolas Rose (1999) aptly calls an ‘enterprising culture,’
neoliberal governmentality ‘autonomizes’ and ‘responsibilizes’ individuals to
assess the costs and benefits of their acts through programs and technologies
present at various social sites. Governmentality effects a congruence between
individuals and social bodies. Political rationality thereby inscribes itself in
everyday practices beyond the domain of formal politics.
In science, performance assessment is a political technology that capitalizes
on the desire of academic researchers for accountability and quality research.
Referring to the work of Rose, Shore (2008, p. 284) notes that neoliberal govern-
ance in science ‘seeks to act on and through the agency, interests, desires and
motivations of individuals, encouraging them to see themselves as active subjects
responsible for improving their own conduct.’ However, this proposition is also
understood in terms of subjects ‘internalizing the external norms of manage-
ment’ (2008, p. 284), an understanding that conceives power—and affect—as
induced from without, rather than being an immanent part of scientific cultures
and communities. Exploring affective dimensions through a focus on the tech-
nologies of self-care, such as ‘resilience training’ offered by universities (Gill and
Donaghue, 2016) to foster a flexible, confident and productive ‘enterprising self’
(Rose, 1999), fails to examine how affective processes play out in practice. This
approach arguably ignores the conceptualization of the corporeal agency of
affect and its situated entanglements put forth by studies on emotions and
affect. It is to these conceptions that I now turn.
Sara Ahmed’s work on ‘affective economies’ suggests that feelings such as
happiness or fear ‘do not reside in a given subject or object’ (Ahmed, 2004,
p. 119) but instead circulate in subject-object encounters across psychic and
social fields, accumulating affective value over time. Affects ‘do things,’ such
as aligning individuals with some communities and against others. Affective
economies examine how different emotions ‘stick’ to and move between
bodies. This movement is informed by past ‘histories of association’ (2004,
p. 127) that have already left an impression on a body but whose traces are
obfuscated. Fear, for example, rather than being contained in an object such
as ‘the terrorist,’ is intensified by the impossibility of containment. The figure
of the terrorist evokes other fearful figures that stick to the present; fear produces
differences and borders by establishing the objects that fearing subjects set them-
selves apart from. Happiness conversely directs subjects towards objects that
promise happiness, thereby creating a futurity that is hoped for (Ahmed, 2010).
The concept of moral economies helps shed light on the distinct histories of
association by foregrounding the close association between emotions and values.
The concept was introduced by E.P. Thompson (1971) to refute the economic
 SCIENCE AS CULTURE 5

reductionism behind the interpretation of food riots in the eighteenth century,

which, Thompson argued, were a response to the violation of a moral consensus
of what constituted legitimate economic practices. For Lorraine Daston, in
science the moral economy refers to the ‘web of affect saturated values’ (1995,
p. 4) that mobilizes and transforms the wider values of society and bind
science practitioners to historically specific rules of judgement and evidentiary
standards and procedures. The moral economy of seventeenth-century empiri-
cism encompassed trust and civility, which drew on the wider cultural models of
gentlemanly honor but constituted a distinct economy of affects and values
(Daston, 1995). In reference to the entrepreneurial university, Sayer (2008,
p. 147) highlighted potential tensions in the moral economy by noting that
moral sentiments not only structure and legitimize (quasi)economic activities
but can also be compromised by economic pressures. A focus on moral econom-
ies can thereby help to pinpoint the specific histories and tensions involved in
how emotions ‘stick’ to and valorize particular technologies of publishing and
bind researchers to distinct communities.
The concept of emotional labor (Hochschild, 1983) finally foregrounds the
work of reiteratively managing feelings in complex and potentially contradictory
organizational encounters. Managing feelings depends on distinct ‘feeling rules,’
that is, the social standards regarding what are deemed appropriate emotional
responses in specific situations. It is geared towards modulating bodily displays
that incite a certain state of mind in others. For Hochschild, feelings do not exist
before the acts of management: ‘in managing feeling, we contribute to the cre-
ation of it’ (1983, p. 18). In the modern service economy, the emotional labor
of suppressing or inducing particular feelings to create well-being in others
has become part of the service itself—often with substantial costs for service
workers. Hochschild’s iconic example is the emotional labor of flight attendants
trained by commercial airlines to create facial and bodily displays of ‘deep
emotions’ of geniality and hospitality during interactions with passengers.3
While these authors do not refer directly to neoliberal governance in science, the
analytical concepts of the affective economy, the moral economy and affective labor,
which have yet to be considered together, offer a more nuanced way of examining
how affects are constitutive in giving rise to and sustaining practices and relations in
academic publishing. Beyond an individualistic conception of emotion, these con-
cepts direct inquiry towards the agency of affects and how emotions are co-consti-
tuted and entangled with values, histories, technologies and settings. This means
that affective dynamics can only be examined as part of situated encounters—
and through concepts that are not comprehensive but partially related.

The Field Site and Methods

The following analysis draws on data generated in participant observation and
interviews conducted in three laboratories at a Czech research institution in
6 D. LORENZ-MEYER

the fields of physical and biosciences (henceforth ‘the Institute’). The initial
research was carried out between 2006 and 2008 as part of a project titled
‘Knowledge, Institutions and Gender: An East–West Comparative Study,’ exam-
ining the changing contexts and cultures of knowledge production in five Euro-
pean countries.4 At all the study sites publishing in prestigious journals was
considered to be of crucial importance (Felt and Stöckelová, 2009). The research
was conducted at a significant period in the Czech Republic when academic
institutions were being transformed into enterprising research organizations,
both locally, and nationally through the introduction of metrics-based research
assessment. The Institute chosen for the research was at the forefront of some of
these changes (Lorenz-Meyer, 2012). This timing suggests that there was no
single and temporally delimited ‘post-socialist transition’ (Bauer et al., 2014)
in science.5
The follow-up research that I draw on—a group discussion with research par-
ticipants in 2010 (organized with Marcela Linková) and a publishing workshop
in 2014—as well as the Institute’s continued showcasing of publications in pres-
tigious journals on its webpage, along with recent concerns about predatory pub-
lishing in (and outside) the Czech Republic (antipredator.vedazije.cz, 2017) all
suggest the continuing significance of a competitive (albeit not uncontested)
publishing culture and thus also of the affective processes that I delineate.
I chose to reexamine the affective dynamics of publishing because I was struck
by the ubiquitous presence of publications and the strong emotions that sur-
round them. The analysis that follows systematically examines the emotion-
laden ways in which publishing was performed and talked about by the scientists
who participated in this research and examines them through the analytical per-
spective outlined above. As I will show, the multiple affective links tied up with
academic publishing mean that the affective dynamics I describe also relate to
modes of research organization and collaboration.

The Economy of Hope

Publications as Promissory Objects

I begin by examining how affective orientations towards publishing are mani-

fested among doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers in the ‘enterprising
laboratories’ (Lorenz-Meyer, 2012) that emerged in the Institute’s transition
towards a more output-oriented research organization. A doctoral student
named Kateřina (pseudonym) told me that members of her lab were working
on different projects and explained that ‘a project is, in my words, one story
that you will publish’ (interview, 2008). Research there was understood in
terms of publishable outcomes: findings that were ‘good, new, and interesting’
(interview, 2008) and could be turned into a ‘story’ to be published in an inter-
national journal. At Kateřina’s lab, publishing seemed to lie on the horizon of
 SCIENCE AS CULTURE 7

everyday laboratory work, an anticipated—indeed often keenly awaited—

outcome around which research practices were organized (see also Müller and
Kenney, 2014). Writing was typically done collectively, with different research-
ers writing different empirical sections, and the lab leader drafting the introduc-
tion, discussion, and conclusion, which situated the research within its wider
field. Drafts of papers were circulated repeatedly among the co-authors.
Junior researchers conveyed little sense that writing these papers disrupted
their research.
For many of them publications held a ‘cluster of promises’ (Berlant, 2006)
highly invested with emotions. The first promise was that published research
findings are of use to many others. Jiři, a doctoral student who was about to
submit his thesis in the form of a collection of (co-authored) journal articles
he had already published, noted:
Jiři: I think it’s nonsense to write a thesis that’s 200 pages! Who are you writing it for?
Such work will read by about 6 or 10 people (laughs). But if you publish results they’ll
be read by hundreds or thousands of people.

Dagmar: That’s very optimistic! I think the average article is also read by very few
people.

Jiři: Yeah, but everyone could read it, people find it on databases. OK, let’s say dozens
of people. But that’s still more, it’s still available for people. (Interview, 2008)

Publishing generated intense optimism about the epistemic impact of research,

here intimated by the sheer number of researchers who will read a published
article. Electronic databases held the promise of spatially and temporally
(almost) infinite uptake. The flipside to this optimism was the contempt that
seeps through Jiři’s derisive laughter and exclamation that unpublished research
is ‘nonsense.’ Jiři’s hopeful and economic orientation towards publications sets
him apart from other, questionable scientists, exemplifying a connection
between affect and moral values that I will explore more fully in the following
section.
Hope also attached itself to publishing through the promise that quality publi-
cations will lead to a permanent job. Alain, a postdoctoral researcher, explained:
If you do easy work, [synthesizing] two or three molecules, you can publish fast, but
that’s a small publication. Here, for example, it took me 15 months to get my first pub-
lication, but it should be a very nice publication … and when I will go back to France it
will give me better chance to get a permanent position. For a permanent position they
take your CV into account, that means your publications. (Interview, 2007)

This promise entails the promises that good publications materialize in pro-
portion to how demanding a research problem is and the effort that goes into
it, and build a researcher’s CV. They cohere through the idea(l) of meritocracy,
the belief that academic advancement is based on individual achievement, hard
work, and merit. Meritocracy assumes that equal opportunities—and ability—
8 D. LORENZ-MEYER

are already in place and endorses a competitive and hierarchical research organ-
ization. Effort itself becomes a moral virtue (Littler, 2013). For Alain, it was not
just a vocational commitment to the processes of science that motivated him to
spend 15 months studying a set of reactions that will—hopefully—lead to his
first ‘big’ publication; nor was it the monetary bonus that his lab leader paid
to the first author of co-written journal articles in his team. His laboratory
work was sustained by the expectation that his publication could be converted
into longer-term employment. Vocational practices here are already shot
through with (enterprising) means-end calculations.
Read through the concept of affective economy, I would suggest that these
promises turn scientific publications into ‘happy objects’ (Ahmed, 2010). They
contain the promise of happiness ahead, as long as researchers publish
(enough) work in impact factor journals. Happiness does not reside in any par-
ticular publication but in the expectation of what will follow, whether that
means uptake, citations, or a job. Promises of happiness were not easily
rebutted—there is always a possibility that research will be read and useful and
a job secured eventually. When Alain failed to get a job earlier that year he was
told that he just did not have enough publications. The hopeful promises that
become attached to publications in this way then fuel a ‘productivist pacing of
capitalist normativity’ (Berlant, 2006, p. 26): a vocational culture of long
working hours, self-discipline, and deferred reward.
The possibility that the promises attached to publishing could remain unful-
filled made itself felt in Alain’s unfinished sentences and repeated self-admon-
ishment ‘I must not give up,’ which gave failure a disavowed presence:
I knew that this was—it would be hard. And yes, it is hard because—let’s say that you
don’t have a great personal life (laughs), but you have to choose. The science is the pri-
ority, so you have to make a choice and—So now it’s more difficult because I am older,
but I know I am near the end so I mustn’t give up, and now I find I fight a lot because I
know that I am near the end. I am quite sure that now, with my CV, with my experi-
ence with [lab leader], I can be of interest to someone. (Interview, 2007)

Although Alain does not express in words the possibility that he will not get a
permanent job, the sequence of broken sentences reveals his nervousness about
the possibility that his investment will not pay off. Hope must be managed care-
fully. Uncertainty cannot be contained within a register of calculation or sacrifice
because the greater the investment, the less conceivable a possible failure. Lauren
Berlant aptly speaks of ‘cruel optimism’ to name relations of attachment ‘to com-
promised conditions of possibility’ (Berlant 2006, p. 21): in the sciences, the
open secret that there are simply not enough permanent positions to accommo-
date all the (well published) scientists who are currently qualified for them
(Müller and Kenney, 2014).
Indeed, the refrain of optimism, meritocracy, and the happy outcomes of per-
sistence was constantly replayed. A workshop on publishing at the Institute
 SCIENCE AS CULTURE 9

organized by a renowned American journal editor tellingly ended on the note:

‘Don’t give up! If a paper is worth publishing you will always find a journal’
(field note, 2006). When I later asked laboratory leaders about how they tell
their students that there are not enough jobs, lab leader Vladimír answered
using the promissory register about returns on investment saying that ‘of
course we tell them it will be hard, but also very rewarding!’ (field note, 2010).

Affect Aliens
Yet not all junior researchers had a hopeful orientation towards publishing. The
close link between laboratory work and writing also meant that when exper-
imental work did not go well, neither did writing. Jackie, another postdoctoral
researcher was in a hopeless state as she tried to make sense of and write up
her experiments.
For each reaction Jackie has at least ten measurements from which she needs to choose
one for further interpretation. She consults her lab book, where she has recorded the
conditions of her experiment, and looks at her measurements. ‘I don’t know what is
interesting here.’ She starts by eliminating measurements that are ‘definitely not inter-
esting.’ J tells me this will be useless for [lab leader]. […] At one point she covers her
face with her hair, and falls silent. But she continues, leafing through her lab book, and
opening and closing data files. She finally includes one graph with no comment added.
(Field note, 2007)

Jackie’s inability to write makes her feel embarrassed in front of me, the keen
observer, physically expressed in the gesture of covering her face, falling silent,
and starting over. Failure and hopelessness are not to be exposed in the enter-
prising lab, lest it further embarrass the person who feels ashamed. On learning
that Jackie did not appear pleased to have another article published I had noted
that ‘strangely, Jackie does not seem academically inclined’ (field note, 2007),
remarks that indicated how much I expected academic drive and optimism to
be the ordinary ‘feeling rule’ (Hochschild, 1983) of a research scientist. Jackie
told me that she felt ‘alien’ in the lab and her indifference to publications did
not make her (in my eyes and in hers) a ‘real scientist.’
Analyzing the generation of affective orientations of junior researchers
towards academic publishing in terms of an economy of hope suggests that
researchers do not simply internalize governing standards of productivity.
Those who did not aspire to publish work eventually left for other jobs. But
their silent embarrassment accentuated the generative role of publications as
overdetermined objects of feeling that make and shape researchers’ activities
and identities. Hope became reiteratively attached to publications that promised
rewards in the future. It thereby encouraged optimism and a vocational persist-
ence to keep going in the present, and it bound junior researchers to persist in
conditions that conceal how uncertain the uptake of research and career
advancement promised by publishing actually are.
10 D. LORENZ-MEYER

I have already indicated that the economy of hope has a moral charge such as
the valuation of effort and persistence. I now turn to explore how this linkage
between feeling and moral values is tied to the modes of organizing research
espoused by many senior scientists.

The Moral-Political Economy of Publishing

The Contempt of Non-Performers

My exploration of the moral-political economy of publishing starts with the

observation that senior scientists often cast their publication practices in econ-
omic and moral registers. At the Institute economic calculations were prominent
in decisions of when a particular story was solid enough to be published, where it
could be realistically submitted to gain the greatest visibility and prestige, and
whom to include as co-author (Macdonald and Kam, 2007; Gillies, 2008). Evi-
dence of the extent to which epistemic merit was equated with market success
is that economic metaphors were used to describe publication performance—
like when Marek, a laboratory leader boasted of his lab’s ‘ability to sell its
science’ to many different journal audiences or told me that in a particular
field he and another scientist were ‘market leaders worldwide’ (field note,
2007). Importantly, undertaking such quasi-economic activities was deeply satu-
rated with affective and moral values (Daston, 1995). This was evident in the lack
of respect if not outright contempt for colleagues who did not publish much.
Renata, a senior scientist, put it like this:
There are people who do not publish a lot. They publish once a year. With a very good
paper that’s okay. But to spend one year, two years on a synthesis and out of it comes a
paper in [a local journal published at the Institute], this for me is terrible science! Also
this can be doing science that nobody else is doing, something terribly special. Where
you can take a long break and nobody even notices. But that’s for students in school,
not for real scientists. (Interview, 2008)

Viewed through the lens of enterprise’s passion for performance, the different
tempos and venues of scientific publishing embody not merely the value of
the research but also the worth of the scientist. As productiveness becomes a
moral virtue unproductive scientists were portrayed as inept and morally
flawed. Commenting on collaborative research that he had undertaken with
another group three years ago, Marek noted with chagrin that there still was
no publication from it. As more experiments were conducted, more findings
had been produced, which made writing them up increasingly difficult. Marek
was outraged that this delay would negatively impact the doctoral student
who conducted the research. When applying for a postdoctoral position he
only would have 3 publications when others had 10.6
The figure of the scientist ‘who hasn’t published anything for 20 years’ (group
discussion, 2010) especially haunted those scientists who were the most widely
 SCIENCE AS CULTURE 11

internationally published. Most frustratingly, such scientists often were skillfully

networked through ‘friendship ties,’ a notion that among the senior scientists
participating in the research conjured up associations of the state-socialist
period. For many lab leaders, the unproductive scientist was considered a
remnant of the state-socialist past where positions and access to resources
depended on scientists’ alliances with the regime. Twenty years after the
Velvet Revolution, the unproductive scientist was a living reminder of a histori-
cally outmoded way of organizing research that some had encountered as junior
researchers and still see at work today.7
There were private expressions of anger when these ‘unproductive’ scientists
obtained research funding. This outrage was often managed by meticulously
quantifying the inactivity of such scientists and appeal to the relevant insti-
tutional bodies with this information. For example, when his grant proposals
were repeatedly rejected by the national grant agency while scientists with
lesser publication records succeeded, Marek composed several rankings of
grant recipients in which the same group of grant recipients who had barely pub-
lished anything always ranked at the bottom. Marek took this documentation to
the grant agency, where he also hoped to be elected to the board. Other well-pub-
lished lab leaders successfully sought membership in national R&D bodies to
support the introduction of metrics-based research assessment. These policies
prioritized publications in journals edited in ‘the West,’ which was tacitly
equated with higher standards and ‘better science’ in all countries participating
in the larger study (Felt and Stöckelová, 2009).
I suggest the concept of the moral-political economy of publishing in order to
pinpoint this nexus between affect, moral values, geopolitical history, and policy
commitments. Moral outrage against those who did not publish much were
fueling scientists’ crafting and endorsing quantitative research assessment cri-
teria at the institutional and national level. As Linková and Stöckelová (2012)
note, rather than imposed from above, in the Czech Republic it was scientists
themselves, or some of them, who actively sought the introduction of metrics-
based assessment. In the moral-political economy of scientific publishing, the
passion for published outcomes in high-impact journals becomes tied to the
quest to create an administrative system where such publications are valued
and rewarded.
Characteristically these policy-oriented initiatives to re-install a meritocratic
practice have been thought of as a cure aimed at ‘de-politicizing science’
(Linková and Stöckelová, 2012, p. 3). Kolařová (2014) has observed that
modes for overcoming the failure and shame of the socialist past always pair
optimism with negative feelings. When we put up for discussion some of the
(unintended) consequences of the new assessment mechanisms on publication
strategies,8 lab leader Vladimír immediately interjected that there must be no
nostalgia for a mythical time ‘when people were doing good science and were
judged on merit and by their service. I still remember the good old days; that
12 D. LORENZ-MEYER

is certainly not what happened!’ (group discussion, 2010). In the attempt to bind
scientists to the procedures of performance assessment and overcome the legacy
of the state-socialist organization of research the moral-political economy of
publishing is intensely oriented towards the future—and the West.

Dishonest Publication Practices

At the same time, senior scientists were keenly aware that the very assessment
procedures they promoted produced devious publication practices that under-
mined the ideal of meritocracy they meant to institute. There were many
stories about referees reviewing submissions for prestigious journals who had
rejected articles for publication that contradicted their own research, or even
drew ‘inspiration’ from research that they rejected and subsequently repeated
and published it as their own (see also Gould, 2012). A discussion of academic
dishonesty formed a major part of the international workshop ‘How to get pub-
lished and how to avoid pitfalls’ (field note, 2014) and fraudulence has also
become an issue in the light of recently documented Czech cases of predatory
publishing.
At the beginning of my research, I had heard cautionary tales about research-
ers who were found to have falsified their published data. One such case had led
to the retraction of several articles published in high-impact journals by a U.S.-
based Czech scientist and a graduate student of his. This case was widely dis-
cussed in the blogosphere. Strong moral blame was assigned to the graduate
student and to her advisor for undermining trust and ‘putting the future of
U.S. chemistry, which is the envy of the world, in jeopardy’ (Mengnjoh,
2006). There were only a few voices that resituated this kind of academic mis-
conduct within the hyper-competitive academic publishing regime in the U.S.
But what about Columbia or chemistry at large? Did [the graduate student’s] course-
work include a required course in science ethics? […] If it was pressure from [lab
leader] that drove her to fake these results, what drove him to put undue pressure
on his students? Is he just naturally a slave driver? Or was it the ultra-competitive
funding situation in the U.S.? Why didn’t he look at her primary data? Did he? […]
This situation is what can result from the system that has been created. (William, 2006)

Among the enterprising scientists at the Institute, with their passionate attach-
ment to getting published in Western high-impact journals, there was no
broader discussion about ‘the system that has been created.’ Rather than weak-
ening the moral-political economy of publishing, locally, it included both the
quest for institutionalized assessment procedures and a commitment to voca-
tional standards of academic integrity: students were taught to work meticu-
lously, and lab leaders told me how they refused to split up findings to
increase publication output, co-authored work with colleagues abroad even if
score points were subtracted in the Institute’s research assessment, or pursued
 SCIENCE AS CULTURE 13

interdisciplinary work that was difficult ‘to sell’ to journals and reviewers
devoted to a single discipline (group discussion, 2014). Within the moral-politi-
cal economy of publishing, however, misconduct was portrayed as an individual
not a systemic failing, and publishing at any cost was resisted most explicitly by
those who were already widely published.
To sum up, while the affective orientation of many junior scientists towards
published outcomes was forged through an economy of hope, in the case of
many senior academics it was produced through the moral-political economy
of publishing that props up an enterprising publishing culture by instituting
and endorsing defined assessment procedures. Affective, moral and economic
considerations intersected with the post-socialist legacy and policy-driven
engagements. At the same time, scientists understood the quest to get rid of sha-
meful ‘non-performers’ in distinctly apolitical terms. Faced with the unintended
consequences of assessment procedures, they appealed to scientists’ vocation to
their work, and in so doing individualized publishing success or failure.

The Affective Labor of Combat and Equanimity

Combativeness in Publishing Relations

I have already noted that as part of the affective dynamics I identify above efforts
had to be made to carefully manage the feelings of hope and moral outrage—for
example, through the suppression of doubts or the documentation of non-per-
formance. Here, I take the example of scientists’ relations with co-authors and
journal editors to examine the modes of managing and modulating emotions
in more detail. While affective labor is commonly considered to be geared
towards generating satisfaction in others in the service of capitalist productivity
(Hochschild, 1983; Hardt and Negri, 2000), my encounters with enterprising lab
leaders suggest that affective labor in academic publishing can also take the form
of combativeness and menacing directed at modifying others’ behaviors and
judgments. When showing me how knowledge work and authorship were some-
times unyieldingly fought over, lab leader Marek described it as ‘bare-knuckle
fighting,’ literally suggesting a kind of combat in which the opponents take
their gloves off to inflict greater damage on the adversary.
M[arek] shows me what he initially sent to his French collaborator H[élène], not even
two pages: the graph [of a particular measurement] with some text that replaced a pre-
vious paragraph in the manuscript, ten new references [self-citations], and three
additional co-authors. H had sent the draft back, included the addition but cut all
additional references and only put M as co-author. M had replied in polite French
that she had two options: ‘either you include the graph, at least one reference and
all co-authors (a doctoral student, because he had taken the measurement, and the stu-
dent’s advisor, who had supervised the work) or you take out our graph and we include
it in a joint paper later on’. He thought the addition was quite central because it turned
a mere hypothesis into something more evidential. Then, visibly pleased, he shows me
14 D. LORENZ-MEYER

the final version sent by H: it includes the reference and all three new authors. (Field
note, 2007)

As a collaborative effort, publication-oriented practices here entail the lab

leader’s strategy to stand up for—and not ‘undersell’—the epistemic contri-
butions of his group. Forcefulness, risk-taking, and even threats were performed
as part of affective persuasion work that included paternalistic ‘trajectory care’
(Lorenz-Meyer, 2012, p. 255) in order to ensure junior researchers are acknowl-
edged as authors. As with the documenting of the ‘non-performance’ of others,
responses to feeling wronged did not take the form of open hostility but tended
to be translated into reasoned argument, calculation, and equanimity.
This affective labor of combat and equanimity was evident in numerous situ-
ations where senior scientists were privately enraged by suspected reviewer bias.
Again, the bias had to be carefully established, the likely identity of the referee
inferred from the nature of the comments, the supporting evidence assembled,
and then consideration given to whether to pursue the potentially time-consum-
ing process of contesting a review or trying to publish in another, usually lower-
ranked journal to avoid losing ‘scientific priority.’ Interactions with editors in
these cases were polite and decidedly matter-of-factly, and most certainly not
overtly emotional or vindictive. As the publishing director advised prospective
authors in a recent publishing workshop ‘it is very important not being
caught up in emotions’ (field note, 2014).

Humor and Gaming

While I have witnessed breakdowns in the management of emotions among
junior scientists, such as Jackie, I have not observed this among senior aca-
demics. Some of them nevertheless expressed a profound sense of frustration
that had to be endured rather than instantly transformed (see below). Those
who left the Institute often felt that their work had been insufficiently valued.
In this light, the frequent use of humor and particularly irony that Law and
Moser (2003) deem a sign of ‘tough emotions’ in the enterprising pursuit of
success can be seen as a strategy for refuting personally demeaning comments
from reviewers. Marek framed the first pages of his recently published articles
and hung them in the corridor together with selected comments from reviewers,
such as ‘This article should not be published in a chemistry and physics journal’
(field note, 2007). This too was a response emphasized in a workshop on how to
get published: explaining how to respond to ‘rejection letters without any helpful
comments’ that were ‘hostile towards the author,’ a senior journal editor
suggested, ‘Then you could send them a positive review of the next journal
you send it to—but out of humor!’ (field note, 2014).
In yet other situations senior scientists portrayed academic publishing as a
game (Macdonald and Kam, 2007; Gould, 2012). When a paper submitted to
 SCIENCE AS CULTURE 15

Science was rejected as ‘too chemical,’ Marek shrugged and explained that the
journal favors the life sciences: ‘It’s a lottery, what they accept and what they
don’t, so you always have to try again’ (field note, 2007). In other words,
while in some situations reviews were fiercely but matter-of-factly contested,
in others submissions were considered a gamble.
The ability to switch between different modes of managing emotions was part
of the affective labor of combat and equanimity that sustains a productivist pub-
lishing culture in science. As a seemingly natural aspect of publishing these ubi-
quitous acts of managing and modulating emotions were never discussed in the
lab. But I saw a postdoc who picked up not only the modes of argumentation but
also the emotional tone of the lab leader and adopted it when communicating
with journal editors. Although it could involve posturing and gaming, the affec-
tive labor of combat and equanimity was not disingenuous or mere stage-acting:
feelings, as Hochschild (1983) has argued, are constituted in and through their
management. Yet, there was an insistent corporeal energy of affect, and it is this
that I want to examine in the final section.

The Visceral Dynamics of Thrill

Publishing as an Adrenaline Sport

My analyses of scientists’ affective orientations and emotional labor in publi-

cation-oriented practices do not address the question of what corporeally ener-
gizes these affective dynamics. This final section zooms in on the visceral
dynamics that were generated in the moment the corresponding author received
a peer review of a submitted manuscript. Referee reports could generate power-
ful feelings of excitement and happiness. Consider the account of lab leader
Jiřina:
Yesterday, when I got the news that the paper I had been working on for half a year was
accepted, I said to my friend ‘You know, this is really worth it!’ Ten minutes after you
read the email that your paper is accepted. I was very excited! And then you think,
yeah, this is worth it! The ten percent of happiness that you have in your work is
worth all the frustration that you have from the experimental work. […] Then you
are really happy for a little while. But that gives you energy for the next nine
months of frustration. And since I’ve been through this several times I guess I know
that when I am really frustrated I tell myself ‘OK, let’s wait. Sooner or later you will
encounter something positive.’ (Interview, 2008)

For Jiřina that brief moment of happiness is intensely joyful, energizing, and
transformative. It affectively vindicates past research efforts and feelings of frus-
tration. Here, happiness is not deferred but is for a brief instant materialized.
Such feelings of thrill were also evident in moments of unanticipated discovery
in the lab that I observed when doctoral students were so excited that they
started dancing in the lab. Vostal (2015, p. 86) speaks of the accelerating-
16 D. LORENZ-MEYER

energizing ‘flashes of insight’ that contrast with the slow periods devoted to
taking measurements, making revisions or struggling with deadlocks. He
suggests that it might be ‘the tension between different rhythms, intervals, inten-
sities and frequencies’ that are experienced as pleasure and thrill and generate
the energizing motivational forces for academic work. These feelings have to
be savored and corporeally remembered to sustain experimental work and the
economy of hope. As I noted above, the less transient, and less remarked com-
panions of happiness are doubt and frustration.
The account of Renata, a senior scientist, further contextualizes the history of
association of these affects. Renata maintained that it was not only the accumu-
lated effort of research and writing that went into producing a research paper but
the uncertainty of the outcome of peer review that gave rise to affective suspense,
the resolution of which then produced intense affective highs and lows. These
were felt to biochemically change the body of the researcher.
One of things ‘driving’ you, so to speak, is adrenaline. Because you are finding new
things, you formulate them, you write a paper and you put lots of effort into it. And
then you send it to a journal for review and imagine how it will be received […]
And when the reviews come back saying that it’s a wonderful paper of the highest rel-
evance, and that you are a perfect author, then this releases endorphins, at least for me.
For me it’s great fun! But, on the other hand, when you think you have something
ground-breaking (laughs), and you receive two reviews where they write that this is
terribly stupid, that they don’t know why it should be studied at all—which has also
happened to me several times—then it is terribly depressing. Then, trying to fight it
—it is like an adrenaline sport, basically. I always enjoy it when I get really nice
reviews. I enjoy it, but the joy lasts for a shorter time (laughs); shorter and shorter.
Whereas the opposite feelings stay with you for a long time. (Interview, 2008)

Peer review procedures here generate what I call a visceral dynamic of thrill, ‘an
embodied intensity in which there are challenges […] that can only be met if the
adrenaline is running’ (Law and Moser, 2003, p. 10). Publishing becomes an
‘adrenaline sport’ where excitement comes from the (affectively experienced)
possibility of either success or failure, pleasure or depression. This sense of
thrill is an integral part of the enterprising ethos of pursuing success. Frustration
remains present as a memory and a possibility, but one must not succumb to it.
In the event that a manuscript is rejected, frustration has to be both endured and
translated into the painstaking affective labor of combat and equanimity, and/or
more vocational labor. What spurred Renata on to challenge editorial decisions
repeatedly, she maintained, was a concern for her numerous ‘co-authors, who
are all expecting that there will be a paper’ (interview), the successful publication
of which depended on the persistent efforts of the corresponding author. Caring
for collaborators then is not necessarily an obstacle to but can instead underpin a
productivist approach to publishing.
As an embodied visceral dynamic, this adrenaline force arises not as an after-
effect of a manuscript’s acceptance or rejection but as the driving force for doing
 SCIENCE AS CULTURE 17

research, or at least this is the case for some of the widely published scientists at
the Institute. These more ephemeral economies of pleasure and thrill are pro-
duced by and help sustain the affective and moral investment in the technologies
of assessment that are generated and sustained within the moral-political
economy of publishing. Renata emphatically rejected my inference that ‘the
peer review system doesn’t work’ in the economic register of calculation:
The more you publish the more you face it [failure of peer review]. But in general, if I
would take an average, I would say that it is fair. But sometimes, especially when you
do something new or when you enter a field where you aren’t established, then it’s
sometimes difficult. (Interview, 2008)

Renata refers to what has been identified as a major shortcoming of peer review,
namely that it works against new, less established research approaches and stifles
innovation (see, e.g. Macdonald and Kam, 2007; Gillies, 2008)—a failure sub-
sequently portrayed as rare. The important point here is that amidst the corpor-
eal experience of a visceral thrill in the peer-review process the possibility of
failure does not diminish but sustains support for this procedure.

Alternative Visions of Publishing

What does this mean for alternative visions of academic publishing? A radically
different but no less corporeally grounded vision of publishing was articulated by
one of the junior researchers. Lenka, a doctoral student and like Jackie an ‘affect
alien’ (Ahmed, 2010), did not get excited by the minutiae of day-to-day lab work
and was uncertain about the value of the knowledge generated and published by
her group.
Perhaps this is just not the right research for me. Because I feel you have a lot of routine
work and you just see little details. And these little details do not amaze me so much
[…] That the protein is melting at 43.5 degrees, that doesn’t excite me. […] There are a
million other people who study millions of other details, so if we’re all happy studying
those little details, then it’s fine. I think there is already so much knowledge in the
sciences and also among physicians that if we just stopped for half a year and tried
to put those things together, we could come up with a number of other answers to
our questions. I think we miss putting things together. (Interview, 2008)

It might be Lenka’s failure to be normatively excited and hopeful—her inability to

‘experience the conventionally prescribed emotions’ (Jaggar, 1989, p. 160) which
Jaggar deems necessary for developing a critical perspective on the world—that
triggered another vision for the production of useful knowledge. Lenka was con-
cerned with the relentless productivism in science that often merely ‘adds an epi-
cycle’ to a well-established discussion (Gillies, 2008, p. 38). She suggested
something more radical: a slowing down or even a temporal moratorium on pub-
lishing that would allow scientists to connect diverse existing knowledges and
‘come up with other answers.’ This idea for a moratorium is similar to the
18 D. LORENZ-MEYER

publishing quotas envisioned by Gilbert (2009) in the social sciences. Gilbert has
argued that a personal quota of 10,000 words per year would allow researchers to
read more widely and only publish their best work. It might also make ‘better
social scientists because our perspective would have been informed by a wider
range of ways of thinking’ (Gilbert 2009, p. 266).
But as with other radical proposals, such as replacing peer review by an open
access system of peer comments (e.g. Gillies, 2008), this proposal chiefly relies on
researchers’ intrinsic motivation and vocational dedication to the processes of
science. It does not account for the energizing pleasure that comes from the
thrill generated by the peer-review system, not despite but because of the uncer-
tainty of its outcome. As much as the moral-political economy of publishing this
thrill can also energize the economy of hope. It is a corporeal intensity that is
never entirely modulated or managed. While generating motivation and drive,
frustration and doubts about peer assessment and the usefulness of the pub-
lished results were rarely expressed at the Institute—they do not get rerouted
into wider professional discussions.

Conclusion
This article has suggested that a focus on emotions and affect can be a fruitful lens
for STS scholars through which to examine the appeal and tenacity of a prolifer-
ating academic productivist regime. I have shown how building on selected con-
cepts from the cultural studies of affect (Hochschild, 1983; Daston, 1995; Ahmed,
2004) goes beyond distinguishing different ‘styles of desiring’ (Law and Moser,
2003) or considering negative emotions like stress and anxiety as the hidden per-
sonal costs of competitive publishing regimes (Gill, 2010): these concepts prompt
us to account for a wider range of emotions and analyze their constitutive entan-
glements in proffering an academic productivist regime. In conjunction with eth-
nographic fieldwork at a Czech research institution, I have offered a four-pronged
situated approach for examining what affective orientations are required in aca-
demic publishing, how they intersect with moral values, academic geopolitics and
technologies of assessment, and how a focus on published output is affectively
generated, managed and sustained.
I first concentrate on two modes whereby affective orientations to publi-
cations are generated. Hopefulness is a crucial affect through which many
novice researchers are drawn into a preoccupation with publication outcomes.
In what I call the economy of hope publications turn into happy objects that
promise rewards in the future while spurring productivity in the present. The
moral-political economy of publishing draws attention to how affects such as
hope and optimism as well as contempt and combativeness are laden with
moral values, particularly the virtue of productiveness. These values intersect
with and propel post-socialist efforts to re-establish idea(l)s of meritocracy
through competitive forms of assessment among more senior academics. The
 SCIENCE AS CULTURE 19

other two prongs refer to key components within these modes of affect gener-
ation. The affective labor of combat and equanimity is indispensable for modu-
lating and managing emotions in publishing relations, and the dynamics of thrill
corporeally energize these affective orientations in relation to assessment
procedures.
These four modes of affect generation and management are mutually impli-
cated in and complementary to fueling an enterprising culture (Rose, 1999) of
academic publishing that enacts and values productivity, performance and per-
sistence and is understood as apolitical. They show how different emotions such
as hope, contempt, pleasure, and excitement render scientists’ bodies hopeful,
combative, and excited in the process of scientific publishing. In so doing,
they have the capacity to flexibly underwrite more than one mode of ordering
research organizations and subjectivities (Law, 1994): the economy of hope
encourages everyday vocational commitment together with an enterprising
regard for published output, just as the moral-political economy of publishing
propels the administrative adoption of assessment procedures as well as voca-
tional standards of integrity. In this way, the affective dynamics I describe also
undergird modes of research conduct, organization, and researchers’ identities
in current performance cultures.
Despite this capaciousness I have also shown that these affective dynamics are
not all-encompassing. The presence of scientists who publish less and junior
‘affect aliens’ (Ahmed, 2010) attests to the limits of a productivist culture of pub-
lishing. But while some of these researchers offered far-reaching suggestions for
alternative publication practices, those who were differently affected by the
objects of research, writing, and publishing tended to remain on the margins
of the research institution. A crucial point here is that a publishing culture
that thrives on adrenaline, combativeness, and hope renders some practices
and feelings inappropriate: depression or a lack of excitement and hopefulness;
knowledge work that does not result in measurable output; and a questioning of
the (societal) usefulness of published research.
A mark of the productivist publishing regime that my approach makes palp-
able is the partial inclusion of this negativity: that is, while these issues rarely
became the subject of a collective discussion, they were never wholly absent
either. Instead, the presence of doubts, frustration, and failure served as an
immanent driving force for many senior academics. Thus, the awareness of dis-
honest publication practices, biased reviews, and uncertainty underwrote the
(pleasurable) labor of combat and equanimity. The fact that most junior
researchers are unlikely to find permanent positions in science despite their pub-
lication history strengthened senior scientists’ support for an assessment-based
approach to organizing research, where it was assumed talent would rise to the
top. This suggests that a performative publishing regime is sustained not just
because it institutes assessment technologies as a ‘new disciplinary grid’
(Shore and Wright, 1999, p. 569) or because ‘those who run […] universities
20 D. LORENZ-MEYER

are interested in power’ (Čulík, 2014), but also because it morally and viscerally
stimulates and sustains optimism, adrenaline, and pleasure.
If power circulates through these feelings and moral valuations, what does this
mean for STS intervention? In my interactions with laboratory leaders, I found it
difficult to leverage failures and exclusions towards criticism of performance-
oriented modes of research and publishing. That is, my attempt to render the
failures of peer review and the practices of caring for the objects and subjects
of research as a matter of collective concern were dismissed as inadvertent collu-
sion with the remnants of a historically outmoded state-socialist form of
research organization. This attempt could perhaps have been more productive
if I had taken into account the pleasure and thrill in these (unacknowledged)
practices: the pleasure of postponing publication in order to investigate some-
thing more extensively, and the thrill of contesting a referee report or helping
a student flourish. In other words, the stories we tell about the academic produc-
tivist regime of publishing might incite different kinds of engagements if they
account for the multiple affective and moral entanglements publication practices
have with the histories and technologies of research organization. This can
include encouraging researchers to articulate and share their doubts and frustra-
tion more collectively as much as helping to highlight diverse forms of pleasure
in collaborating and making scientific knowledge public.
The four-pronged approach to the analysis of affective dynamics seeks to make
such affective entanglements and absent presences explicit so that they can be
more widely reflected upon. The current convergences of performative regimes
in entrepreneurial universities (Clark, 1998; Felt and Stöckelová, 2009) suggest
that the dynamics of the economy of hope, the moral-political economy of pub-
lishing, affective labor and visceral thrill are likely to be found in other academic
settings as well. At the same time there is a need to examine how local and
national histories of research organization (including nepotism and other kinds
of inequalities) are entangled with the affective dynamics, everyday practices
and the endorsement (or rejection) of particular modes of assessment also in
relation to research and teaching. The approach developed here is a call to inves-
tigate these affective, moral and political entanglements in knowledge production
more widely. It is a reminder that modes of analysis that assume that enterprising
regimes are imposed from the outside are likely to remain ineffective for under-
standing and supporting changes in the contemporary academy.

Notes
1. Within cultural studies affect often denotes visceral forces of embodied intensity that
are not captured in language. Emotions in contrast are considered forces of semanti-
cally qualified intensity. But since bodily sentiments and social categories of feelings do
not constitute distinct realms of human experience in this article I do not strictly dis-
tinguish between the terms affect, emotion and feelings.
 SCIENCE AS CULTURE 21

2. The notion of orientation is informed by the work of Sara Ahmed (2004), who argues
that emotions move bodies towards (or away) from certain ‘objects’; bodies are shaped
through these encounters that foster forms of affective (re)orientation.
3. Hardt and Negri (2000) put forth the similar notion of affective labor to denote the
creation and manipulation of corporeal affect to produce ‘a feeling of ease, well-
being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion’ (2000, p. 293) in information technologies.
4. The research explored gender and knowledge-making practices in the natural and
social sciences also in Austria, Finland, Slovakia, and the UK and was funded by the
European Commission (SAS-CT-2005-017617).
5. The Czech research institution, for example, has been registering patents and trade-
marking drugs since the early 1980s. Research participants described the period after
1989 as one of ‘empty labs,’ when many scientists took up postdoctoral positions at
Western institutions, while others left for the private sector. National R&D policy was
introduced in 2000 and only from 2007 began to translate publication performance
into public funding (Linková and Stöckelová, 2012).
6. The following job advertising encapsulates the increasing emphasis on publications as
a unit of performance measurement:

Postdoctoral Fellow – 1 year. A postdoctoral position in [field] is available starting in

April 2012 […] Salary: 40,000 Kc/month (1500 Euro/month). Additional require-
ments: PhD obtained 2008–2011; Number of publications: 5 or more (sum of IF
over 7); Number of citations: 10 or more (without self-citations); Czech language
and English (FCE); Teaching skills. (online ad, n.d.)
7. In a recent interview one scientist widely published internationally characterised this
complacency as follows:

In the Czech Republic the majority of scientists think they are excellent. We have centres
of excellence, university centres of excellence, excellent groups […] Often this has
nothing to do with excellence […] Institutions that do have excellent groups often do
not support them in any way, but are more likely to strive to level them so that
nobody stands out. The general endeavour is that everyone likes each other, is friends
so that all feel alike, comfortable and no one feels aggrieved […] So it’s inappropriate
to talk about someone doing bad or ultimately even unethical research. But true excel-
lence cannot be built this way. (ceskapozice.lidovky.cz 19.6.2017)
8. See Linková (2014, p. 84) for an overview of some of these strategies, which include
‘camouflage (dressing up one result as another which counts) […], gaming techniques
such as salami publishing and shingling (publishing the same result with a different
twist in differently “focused” papers)’.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their suggestions that
helped clarifying the argument. Thanks to Robin Cassling for helpful language edits.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
22 D. LORENZ-MEYER

Funding
This work was supported by the Czech Ministerstvo školství, mládeže a tělovýchovy’s Insti-
tutional Support for the Long-Term Development of Research Organizations, Faculty of
Humanities, Charles University [Grant Number MŠMT 2017].

Notes on contributor
Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer is senior researcher at the department of gender studies at the Faculty
of Humanities at Charles University in Prague. She has published on processes of gendering
in science, epistemic communities and new materialism, and currently works on the techno-
ecologies of solar energy. Her recent work has been published in Women: A Cultural Review;
Science, Technology & Human Values; Women’s Studies Forum International and Sociological
Research Online.

ORCID
Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3582-6430

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