Ann L. Cunliffe, “Wayfaring: A Scholarship of Possibilities or Let’s not get drunk on abstraction“:
Those of us doing non-mainstream work find ourselves in a paradoxical situation—on the one hand we are exhorted by journal editors to be “original”, “insightful”, “curious”, “theoretically radical”, and “fresh” (all adjectives taken from well-known journal mission statements) and told by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC, 2015: 2) that “Excellent social science needs people with the skills, curiosity and creativity to be truly innovative…”. Yet in my experience we are facing the opposite—a narrowing of scholarship through increasing normalization.
In a way, Cunliffe’s claim resonates with a recent discussion about the contrast between the macro, bombastic, paradigm-shifting claims in introductions that are then followed by micro, rigid, formalistic developments in the chapters–a fracture probably due to the inflation rhetoric of book and grant proposals in a competitive system.