This post is inspired by my brother Max Urai, the better writer of the family – two steps ahead in his thinking, as always. Why literature is a gift-economy (Rekto:Verso, in Dutch). I shamelessly copied some quotations.
The pursuit of scientific knowledge works by virtue of the work of others. We stand on the shoulders of giants, re-mix and improve, discuss and critique; and we hope to leave our communities a bit better than we found them.
Such intellectual exchange can be characterised as a gift economy. This system operates very differently than the familiar market economy, where a trade of specified value is made, and both parties then go their own way. In the gift economy, on the other hand, our gifts cannot be precisely quantified. Rather, receiving gifts ties us the broader community, and commits us to return a gift – at some point, in some form, to someone (but never exactly).
Reciprocity in life and in the academy is a feature of infinite play. Reciprocity colonizes your future by enrolling you in longitudinal practices of giving and getting. When your child finishes college, you do not present them with a bill for all of the expenses they cost you growing up. If you do, you are planning to never see them again.
Bruce R. Caron, 2021
The value of scientific knowledge is undeterminable, practically and principally. In practice, as some work may only find its audience many decades later. In principle, as ideas and understanding have intrinsic value, specific to each context and individual, which cannot be expressed in a common currency. In this way, academic work is very much like art, literature, social connection, and other good things that make life worthwhile.
Accepting the scientific work of others creates the commitment to be part of the same community, an indebtedness to contribute back:
Laura Bohannan writes about arriving in a Tiv community in rural Nigeria; neighbors immediately began arriving bearing little gifts: “two ears corn, one vegetable marrow, one chicken, five tomatoes, one handful peanuts.” Having no idea what was expected of her, she thanked them and wrote down in a notebook their names and what they had brought. Eventually, two women adopted her and explained that all such gifts did have to be returned. It would be entirely inappropriate to simply accept three eggs from a neighbor and never bring anything back. One did not have to bring back eggs, but one should bring something back of approximately the same value. One could even bring money—there was nothing inappropriate in that—provided one did so at a discreet interval, and above all, that one did not bring the exact cost of the eggs. It had to be either a bit more or a bit less. To bring back nothing at all would be to cast oneself as an exploiter or a parasite. To bring back an exact equivalent would be to suggest that one no longer wishes to have anything to do with the neighbor. Tiv women, she learned, might spend a good part of the day walking for miles to distant homesteads to return a handful of okra or a tiny bit of change, ‘in an endless circle of gifts to which no one ever handed over the precise value of the object last received’—and in doing so, they were continually creating their society.
David Graeber, Debt
In academia, this community-sustaining work is unfortunately named ‘service’ (a term implying a one-way exchange). Perhaps ‘community gifts’ is more appropriate for the continued work of editing journals, mentoring students, reviewing PhD theses, giving feedback on writing, fixing that problem in your neighbour’s lab, writing open software, giving career advice, organizing seminar series, peer review, … [insert your own].
Now for a reality check. Real scarcity in secure academic positions and resources result in market-based thinking: after all, a position can only be awarded once. This can easily permeate across the academic system, resulting in a bean-counting mindset where our work needs to be quantifiable and promotable to be considered worthwhile. Symptoms may include; citation rings, article paywalls, data hidden in filedrawers, patents and monetisation of publicly-funded research, and plenty of career advice to do as little service as possible (and only when it looks good on your CV).
These erodes our commons, and moves academic research from the precious sphere of the gift economy into the harsh world of the market.
The fight against market evasion and the preservation of our commons are continuous processes, in which most scientists I know gladly take part (I’ve yet to meet one who’s in it for the money, although some may be in it for the fame). Academics work to wrestle publishing from the hands of Elsevier, we share our code, we organize mentoring lunches, we spend our summers teaching. In mentoring especially, we pass on the specific cultural practices that create a common space for scientific communities to function.
Can a more explicit recognition of academic work as a gift economy help us in ensuring that we don’t let it turn into a market? I like to think I’m an optimist.
Further reading
- Open access and the academic gift economy
- Caron, B. R. (2021). Building a gift economy: the dance of open science culture. In OSH (1st ed.). https://doi.org/10.21428/8bbb7f85.57059b87
- Berg M, Seeber BK (2016) The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. University of Toronto Press.
CoCoSys lab 