Part 2 of ‘The Foundations of Academic Organization’ blog series

Academic knowledge institutions developed piecemeal over centuries, yet each of seven pre-modern phases have left us with ‘legacy’ practices that are still with us today. Modern academia is thus a ‘layer cake’ of different ways of doing research.

About the other blogposts in ‘The Foundations of Academic Organization’ series

Published posts

Post 1 is a short introduction explaining the series’ overall aim of establishing some hopefully better foundations for new and established researchers to think in a more grounded or disciplined way about how academia works, the roles of disciplines and universities, and the operations of academic careers.

Posts still to come in the next few weeks…

Post 3 considers the main engine-rooms of scholarship, which are academic disciplines. I look at the tasks that pre-occupy university researchers, shape their distinctive culture, and (according to some critics) generate siloed views of the world.

Post 4 looks at the importance of discipline-bridging processes — the main circuits by which inter-disciplinary work gets done, and some of the disciplinary potential for over-siloing gets modified.

Post 5 then considers the endemic competition amongst researchers and scholars, and how that relates (perhaps in unstable ways) to the co-operative and collegial elements of academia.

Post 6 considers how academic competition and collegial working both translate into the diverse career trajectories that operate within universities and disciplines.

Post 7 finishes the series by briefly exploring modern universities as bureaucratic organizations, and showing that their ‘governance’ arrangements are perhaps not as unique as academics like to suppose.