Evan Doran (e.doran@sydney.edu.au)
School of Languages and Cultures, The University of Sydney, 2025
Abstract
In its quest to climb the international higher educational rankings, Indonesia has trodden the well-worn path of using a publish or perish scheme to encourage academics to write and publish as often as possible and eventually institutionalise a ‘research culture’. The potential benefits and risks of publish or perish are well understood—output is likely to go up but at the risk of diminishing returns for useful knowledge. There is a long-standing concern that this is what is happening with Indonesian knowledge production. Indonesian academics are publishing more than ever but mostly in ‘peripheral’ or predatory journals raising questions about quality. It is generally considered that a research culture—supportive, collegial, curious, critical and academically free—is essential for minimising the risks and maximising the benefits of publishing incentives and that Indonesia has not historically possessed that kind of research culture and that there has been a tendency toward insularity. Publish or perish is notionally aimed at redressing that cultural deficit by making publishing internationally more materially rewarding. The tensions start there. In this thesis I consider whether this policy intervention is changing Indonesian social science academic culture away from insularity and toward being more aspirational, competitive, meritocratic and critical. I take the academic’s perspective, using a survey and interviews with academics from three Indonesian state universities to gather accounts of research and publishing. I use a critical realist approach to studying cultural change, focusing on the strength of ideas and the situational logics (a logic for acting one way or another given the situation) that arise when ideas align or contradict. Publish or perish rules are a structural change in rejigging rewards and penalties for academic work and a cultural change in elevating the prestige of international publishing. The situational logics around academic research and publishing have changed. My fieldwork shows that international publication is more structurally and culturally significant for academic careers than it once was. Publish or perish rules for international publication align managerial and professional logics regarding excellence and are widely accepted as legitimate but also charge fundamental tensions such as teaching-research priorities, international-national focus and intrinsic-extrinsic motivations. An international publication-based meritocracy suits and favours some more than others. Differentially positioned structurally, culturally, and agentially, academics can optimise, satisfice, game or avoid international publication. I use the concept of situational logics to theorise the impact of publish or perish on academic culture and work. The strategic choice to optimise, satisfice, game or avoid is partly dependent on the capacity to deal with structural constraints of workload, low pay and cultural commitments, for example to the teaching mission of academic work but also on an individual’s professional project—not every academic is internationally or writerly ambitious. Avoiding internationalising your work comes at a cost a few can bear but most will have to try, making practices such as publishing in less-demanding peripheral journals a more appealing option dependent on the degree of coupling to the task. Using publish or perish will change practice and can change culture but significant structural and cultural contradictions remain to undermine optimising and make satisficing, gaming and avoiding international publications situationally rational. Indonesia’s social science productivity will likely continue to grow as the idea of publications as excellence and the expectation of publishing become part of the fabric of academic work for more social scientists in more universities. It is also likely that quality will improve, substantively as skills and experience develop and demonstratively as more gets published in higher-ranked journals. What this means for the development of Indonesian social science is less certain. Publish or perish could contribute to developing a competitive publication-based meritocracy but incentives can promote opportunism and performativity as well as productivity. It is generally accepted that securing the benefits and minimising the risks of publishing incentives requires strengthening the intellectual commons and giving academics time and space to think, analyse and write. If quality is to mean more than pointing to a ranking metric, time and space also need to be given for diversity of views and critical inquiry. Should those conditions be met, it might be expected that more Indonesian social scientists will be enabled to realise their hitherto thwarted international ambition. For that to happen the ideas of time and academic freedom as indispensable will need to have as much cultural clout as the idea of publications as excellence.
Methods
Mixed: Interviews and survey of Indonesian academics at the three state universities.