ABSTRACT
Although internationalism has been a part of science for a long time, national research contexts and cultures are now becoming increasingly bound up with the global tendencies of ‘academic capitalism’, characterized by a growing involvement in market activity (Slaughter and Leslie 1997; Ylijoki 2003) and increasing governance of science. Universities are becoming more and more dependent on external funding sources and are expected to contribute to the economy, tendencies which not only force them and their departments into competition with one another but also tend to homogenize research and publication practices across national boundaries: so that monitoring and ranking of the publishing practices of academic scholars is the order of the day in many countries. The recent geographical debates on Anglo-American hegemony and what ‘international’ means (Kitchin 2003) can be seen as a reaction against the practices associated with academic capitalism and predominant centre-periphery relations, where the modes of action and models created in strong academic centres are allowed to spread into the international community and homogenize earlier states of plurality and may even push aside elements that might be relevant in the periphery (Ylijoki 1998: 129). This question is particularly relevant in the social sciences and the humanities, which have normally been much more context-dependent than the natural sciences. Some authors have been more explicit and have suggested that we are experiencing—concomitantly with academic capitalism—a period of academic imperialism in which Anglo-Saxon social science is producing new vocabularies that are assumed to be universal representations of what is ‘international’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1999).
