Yeah, your point (especially the parenthetical) is probably correct. If not that study, though—which, you’ll be happy to hear, was the controversial topic du jour around here a few months ago—it’s not clear what he was cracking about.

(For those interested in the research in question, which is quite wonderful, see here. Prepare your “model the cow as a perfect sphere” jokes in anticipation of Figure 2!)

You know, first they ignore you, then they mock you, then they co-opt your ideas into a musical number on the Brady Bunch Variety Hour. As far as I can tell, no one in my little sub-field has been denounced in the popular media, so it’d be great to get this stuff rolling.

Say, you’ve got a point…

There’s a business professor called Amar Bhide who has made this basic argument (sophisticated consumer markets as an important source of comparative advantage) at somewhat tedious length (the book is called The Venturesome Economy and has some 500 pages as best as I recall; the argument and real evidence could be summarized nicely in a 30 page pamphlet).

Why not? After all, no one would dispute that Fry and Greenberg and so-on have had serious influence on painting; why is it odd to think that the same applies to film and television?

In lots of disciplines, including economics, there are no genuinely international general journals (there are some in subfields like mathematical economics and econometrics). The leading general journal is the American Economic Review, and the runners-up are mostly house journals of US universities, followed by some UK journals. As far as applied work is concerned, these journals are (reasonably enough in one sense) parochial. The American Economic Review is much more likely to publish articles on US policy issues using US data than similar-quality articles about Australia.

So, if you want to applied work about Australia, you’re going to spend a lot of time publishing in Australian journals. If this is to be rewarded in an output-based funding system, those journals have to be rated A+.

The difficulty is that only a minority of economic work is directly applied in this way, and the general standard of articles is consistent with the ranking that puts the American Economic Review at the top and its Australian equivalent (the Economic Record) nowhere. (There’s also an Australian Economic Review, which sticks to good applied and policy pieces, and is very handy for those of us who like to mention a recent acceptance by AER!).

Nice!

As a quip, it’s decent. But does it describe a real state of affairs? It seems to me that there are very few humanties scholars out there who “base [their] career” on theory of any sort, let alone one specific theorist. In the past few years, the English department at my university, once a theory powerhouse, received funding for three hires in “theory” of some sort (as a way to regain some lost glory). One remains unfilled, and the other two went to people whose work on literature is theoretically inflected: in other words, ordinary literary scholars. This is how most people in the humanities use theory, anyway: as a tool that helps them talk about the things they really want to talk about (which are rarely terrorism or the internet).

In broad terms, the article mostly takes what Bourdieu told us about the dynamics of fields a generation ago and dresses it up in the current financial crisis. It’s clever, but not nearly as clever as it thinks it is.

(I’m actually in favour of media studies even in the knowledge that most people who study it don’t get a job in the media. One of the critical factors in maintaining the UK as a global media hub is that we’ve got a very discerning and sophisticated domestic market indeed. It’s kind of like having gastronomy on the curriculum in Lyons; the aim would be to perpetuate a regional cultural strength. Adam Smith, iirc, claimed that the ins and outs of cutlery-making were practically normal conversation in public-houses in Sheffield, and I think there’s a definite benefit in having conversations about irony, cultural appropriation and the social role of the media being standard pub-table fodder in Soho).

Hmm. Well a colleague in the a related discipline did once try the argument on me that academic research in cinema and tv is to actual (and lucrative) cultural production in those areas as medical research is to medicine. I didn’t believe him though.

I’d love to know, specifically, which remarks of Zizek’s turned out to be practically useful in the way you describe ….. But even if you were to come up with them, I don’t think it would establish what you need. After all, lots of genuinely great art has been produced under the influence of very dodgy theory in the past. It doesn’t redeem the theory, as theory.

“Duality or Dualities?” and “Love on the Chain Gang: Forbidden Contact Between Social Strata.”

I’ll get my coat.