Ceremonial Economics: A Social-Institutional Analysis of Universities, Disciplines, and Academic Positioning

Abstract

What is the future of the university? Many have attempted to unpack what emerging technologies, political pressures, and social scrutiny can do to the status and innovative capacity of universities. While much of the literature has focused on either documenting innovation over practice in research/teaching techniques, or critical reflections on how university business models and academic labor are under threat, less has been debated on the impacts and processes of such changes from a systemic institutional perspective. This article develops a three-fold social-institutional framework to explore the process, purpose, and positioning of changes in knowledge production. I use the case of the economics discipline to explore how institutional ceremonial values, the policing of knowledge creation, and academic cultures as a hierarchical system of prestige can indicate potential structural change. Existing tensions between instrumental innovations and traditional ceremonial aspects that permeate both the university system and the economics discipline suggest two hypotheses to understand future change: (i) a ceremonial encapsulation of new technologies by old structures, exacerbating existing inequalities and monopolies within expertise positioning; or (ii) the rise of new and inclusive cultures within the principles of epistemic democratization and pluralism, co-existing with a new economic and social model of knowledge

Keywords:

• higher education
• economics discipline
• crisis of knowledge and expertise
• generative artificial intelligence
• Original Institutional Economics
• Michel Foucault
• social positioning theory

JEL Classification Codes:

• A11
• A14
• B41
• B52

Universities are changing at a fast pace. From public-funded institutions to avant-garde business model developers, it is no secret that the traditional model of higher education is becoming rarer. Technological, economic, and societal changes—such as generative artificial intelligence (GAI), de-funding of public research, post-truth, and pressures for knowledge democratization are threatening formal institutions and structures of knowledge production in contemporary society. The role of the academic expert, someone who holds specialist knowledge and is involved in the creation, dissemination, and assessment of ideas, is also changing accordingly. Increasing public scrutiny of experts’ abilities, open-mindedness, and biases toward a particular view of rigor and neutrality is challenging the ivory tower of intellectuals within universities and their social positioning in the community.

Alongside these trends are academic disciplines. Traditionally conceived as structured and well-defined fields of knowledge with specific definition, scope, paradigm, and practices, the evolution of disciplines has been crucial to understand how knowledge is created and maintained (Wallerstein 2003). Fields, however, are populated by academics—thus, an understanding of their individual/group practices, cultures, and hierarchies is key for capturing how disciplinary changes occur (Bourdieu 1993; Fligstein and McAdam 2012). Certain academic disciplines, notably physics, mathematics, biology, medicine, political science, philosophy, and economics (see, among others, Becher and Trowler 2001) are known for displaying rigid structures and containing important symbols and rituals of prestige for field members to achieve higher status. Nonetheless, these ceremonial structures founded in the academic “prestige economy” go in stark opposition to some of the pressures seen in the wider higher education sector—or at least experiencing a much slower pace for change. Academic experts are becoming a more exclusive breed, with increasing barriers to those that do not conform to current expected criteria (for example, top publications, substantial research funding, proven impact within and outside the discipline) to become a leading academic.

In the social sciences, academic expertise is often linked to understanding decision-making processes, explaining human behavior and collective dynamics. Experts unpack dimensions of social reality, including inequality, power, and ethics, and offer different theorizations and evidence to understand the interplay between social, political, and economic institutions, which may also come in the form of policy recommendations and consultancy for decision-makers (Evans 2008). Much has been said about the development and characteristics of academic expertise in certain social sciences, particularly in political science, psychology, and economics, as well as their demise as the “owners of truth” (Koppl 2013; Collins and Evans 2019; Friedman 2019). Amongst existing evidence on the problems of expertise and academic cultures, economics has been depicted as a challenging discipline. In particular, the “clan” of academic economists (Collier 2018) displays a sense of superiority (Fourcade, Ollion, and Algan 2015) that rewards exclusivity: in ways of theorizing, in methodology, and in wider community practices. The questioning of the economist’s capacity to deal with complexities and provide socially desirable recommendations has also led to intensive scrutiny about their problematic historical evolution as a profession (Fourcade 2009), their restrictive epistemic domains of action (Hirschman and Berman 2014), and their cultures of expertise for maintaining scientific status (Guizzo, Mearman and Berger 2021; Leins 2022).

This article offers a social-institutional theorization of the relationship between higher education structures, fields of knowledge, and academic experts. It focuses on the case of the economics discipline, providing a framework to better understand how current technological, social, and economic changes experienced by universities and the wider knowledge economy can impact knowledge creation, monopolization, as well as existing academic cultures in economics. It does so by expanding the interdisciplinary scholarship on the political economy of knowledge, offering a three-fold analysis of (i) the processes of production and circulation of knowledge, linking them to the notions of power and truth; (ii) the institutional structures of higher education and the possibility of change given wider institutional values; and (iii) the social positionality and hierarchies of academic expertise, exploring the possibility of practicing epistemic democratization and knowledge de-monopolization through a critique of the current expertise model in economics.

Existing literature within science and technology studies (STS) and the sociology of education explain the relationship between educational structures and academic disciplines as a process that emerges from actor-network interactions (Latour 2007), their co-performation (as a more intensive and mutually reinforcing system, as per Callon 2009) and how economic principles and governmentality affect the structures of production, valuation, and management in fields and universities (Jones et al. 2020). While such studies offer a rich analysis of institutional changes and their impacts over academic practices and cultures, less is said about the process, purpose, and positioning of these interactions. In particular, the meaning of institutional change, how truth values can be altered and their impact over power relations, and the different arrangements of rights and obligations that exist within universities and disciplines, mutually reinforcing each other.

Hence, an alternative social-institutional framework is proposed in this article. The next section (“How is Knowledge Constituted and How is it Related to the Pursuit of Scientific Truth?”) builds on Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of “knowledge as truth,” in which I discuss the association of “knowledge” and “scientific truth” as dominant elements in modern academic expertise, linking them to the exercise of power and the policing of truths within fields of knowledge. The subsequent section (“What are the Institutional Values and Arrangements in Higher Education?”) offers an analysis of “enculturation, empiricism and evolution” (Mayhew 2018) as provided by original institutionalist economists, in particular Thorstein Veblen and Clarence Ayres on the tensions between instrumentalism and ceremonialism when applied to knowledge production and higher education within capitalism. I then present core insights from social positioning theory (see section “In What Ways are Academics Positioned within Universities and Disciplines”), which interprets social relations as rights and obligations with specific functions under a regime of power, and explaining how the positioning of academics is crucial to understand how macro university structures and fields of knowledge are interconnected. This is followed by an overview of core challenges that currently permeate higher education (“A Tale of Two Crises: Universities and Disciplines in the Current Literature”), discussing the processes of knowledge monopolization within universities and how academic expertise is formed and positioned in social reality. In this context, the case of economics sheds light on how academic experts interact with existing practices, ceremonies, and power dynamics to establish, monopolize, and police certain truths. A social-institutional assessment based of the integration of the three core domains approached herein (process, purpose, and positioning) is then presented (see section “Assessing Change in Academic Knowledge Production through a Social-Institutional Framework”), highlighting how one can interpret institutional change in knowledge production. Lastly, the concluding remarks are presented.

How is Knowledge Constituted and how is it Related to the Pursuit of Scientific Truth?

What is the purpose of producing knowledge? What is the relationship between knowledge and truth? Do those that hold knowledge also hold a particular “truth”? French philosopher Michel Foucault is widely known for his works on the formation of systems of knowledge ([1970] 2001 and 2002), the manifestations of power within the social realm, and through forms of knowledge and governance (Foucault 2003; 2004; 2008), and the ethical constitution of the subject’s mode of being (Foucault 2010). Foucault’s intellectual effort in providing a “historical ontology of ourselves” (Foucault 1998) has translated into a formalization of a wider system on the circular connections between knowledge, power, and truth. This section briefly reconstructs Foucault’s framework for reinterpreting knowledge creation and dissemination in contemporary society. It expands on the Foucauldian conceptualization of the “will to know,” the desire or drive to seek knowledge and understanding, as a pathway to achieving truth, linking it to the contemporary view of the intellectual (or “expert,” as someone who has an authority of specialized knowledge) in society.

Foucault’s lectures on Will to Know (delivered in 1971 and published in 2013) explore the relationship between knowledge and truth, shedding light on how the creation, appropriation, and dissemination of forms of knowledge cannot be taken as an objective process and a neutral evolution. Foucault states that, throughout the history of truth regimes, “knowledge” has not always equated to “truth”: take for instance how societies have positioned truth as an ancestral rule, held by the wise, just, and enlightened (Foucault 2013 19), rather than by the formally educated. In a particular historical moment, knowledge became the pathway towards truth. But how? And how certain forms of knowledge are deemed to be accepted as “truthful” in comparison to others? By rejecting the view that our will to know is a natural and inevitable desire, Foucault analyzes how knowledge emerges as a product of power relations, institutions, and social contexts, driven by our collective desire for truth. The will to know, then, is a historical product; we feel the curiosity and the need to dominate or appropriate a certain (historically created) knowledge in contrast to the anxiety caused by the unknown.

By focusing on the emergence of discursive practices, that is, “the separation of a field of objects, the definition of a legitimate perspective for the subject of knowledge, and the fixing of norms for the elaboration of concepts and theories” (Foucault 2013, 224), Foucault unpacks how our wider attitude to desire and seek truth became associated with a “will to know” mainly through falsification and exclusion of certain statements and acceptance of others. There is an important interplay that governs exclusions and choices which will determine how truths are created and maintained through a meticulous game of power and policing of truth. That is, “discursive practices are not purely and simply modes of fabricating discourse. They take shape in technical ensembles, institutions, schemas of behavior, types of transmission and circulation, and in pedagogical forms which both impose them and maintain them” (Foucault 2013, 225). Thus, it is not enough to equate “truth” with evidence or “facts,” as Lorenzini (2023) claims: recent examples about failed economic policies, inequalities, discrimination, and the climate crisis may be enough to prove their existence; yet they are not enough to disrupt certain policies, behaviors, or conceptions about social reality.

Then, at which stage does a certain body of knowledge (connaissance) becomes established as a truthful and socially desired discourse (savoir)? For Foucault, truth itself is not a sufficient condition for certain propositions to be considered a truthful and accepted knowledge discourse. For this to happen, they need to suffice the will to truth of a certain moment in time and place, as it is often seen in truth/false demarcations in science, in order to become a regime of truth. Foucault defines this process as a “mode of transformation,” a set of modifications which may take place either outside knowledge itself as forms of production, in social relations, in political institutions, as well as in it through techniques for defining objects, in the refinement and adjustment of concepts, in the accumulation of information.

Here, Foucault’s exploration of the conditions of possibility of an enunciation (see Foucault 1970 and 2013) contrast two main philosophical approaches. First is the Aristotelian view based on Metaphysics and Nicomachean Ethics, which establishes the will to know as: (i) a product of humans’ natural desire for knowing, (ii) the existence of a link between sensation and pleasure, and (iii) visual perception offers sensations that makes one seek and desire truth, as knowledge (connaissance), pleasure, and truth are interlinked and motivated by our experience. Second, the Nietzschean definition of knowledge as posed in The Gay Science, or: (i) knowledge being an invention that contains instincts, impulses, desires, will to appropriation; (ii) it is a temporary event or a series of events, rather than a permanent state; (iii) it serves specific interests or instincts; and (iv) if a knowledge “passes itself off as knowledge of the truth, this is because it produces the truth through the action of a primary and always renewed falsification that posits the distinction between true and false” (Foucault 2013, 227). Some examples of forms of knowledge that were not enough to be accepted as truthful were Freudian psychoanalysis (Foucault 1957) and Mendel’s statistical approach to the hereditary trait (Foucault 1970). This is not to say that they were providing false statements, but they were not within a particular regime of truth in their own disciplinary discourses of their time to disrupt and transform what was considered true or false.

The will to truth, then, requires the establishment and renewal of systems of exclusion to materialize itself. These systems take place through social institutions and practices, such as universities, learning societies, laboratories, publishing structures, or libraries, and they must be constantly renewed “by the manner in which knowledge-savoir is established by a society, by which it is valorized, distributed, shared, and in a certain sense attributed” (Foucault 1970, 55). Such an institutional system that supports a particular will to truth also constrains and limits other forms of knowledge and discourse to exist—again, through various practices of exclusion and choice that maintain the dominant view and police other forms of knowledge.

Within such a system, intellectuals also play a central role in operating and maintaining our modern will to truth. In fact, it is through the social construction and imagery of the intellectual that a certain form of knowledge (connaissance) will be transformed into a savoir as an accepted and truthful discourse. On this, Foucault (2010) comments on Kant’s Was ist Aufklärung? (1784) and questions the Enlightenment as a primary moment of rupture, understood as (i) an attitude, a departure from the past that awards the intellectual a status of “hero,” bringing reason for the public use and releases us from the status of intellectual immaturity and serfdom; and (ii) a social positioning, the embodiment of the intellectual as a knowledgeable owner of truth. The Enlightenment segmented a traditional model of knowledge production and organization (or a “Mode 1,” see Gibbons et al. 1994). Under such a model, there are important inequalities that define and separate knowledge-creating activities, actors, and institutions from non-knowledge creating ones. In particular, “problems are set and solved in a context governed by the, largely academic, interests of a specific community” (Gibbons 1994, 3), which take place within a hierarchical, homogenous, and rigid structure of disciplinary boundaries, truth-policing mechanisms, and quality controls. Such a system maintains and reproduces existing knowledge forms (elevated to a status of truth), as well as the positioning of intellectuals as “experts,” or someone who has a “direct and localised relation with scientific knowledge and institutions, hounded by political powers on the knowledge at their disposal” (Foucault 1977, 12).

Post-Enlightenment, Foucault reports a secondary shift on how intellectuals are socially positioned and are placed within the political economy of truth. For him (1977), the Second World War represented a transition from “universal” intellectual to “specific” intellectual, also affecting the expert’s field of action, engagement with political debates, and their role in shaping truths. In Foucault’s view, the universal intellectual (from Enlightenment) is a free subject with universal consciousness that seeks to act independently of the state and capital, aiming for a sacred and neutral position. After the Second World War, intellectuals are expected to occupy a specific, politicized position: they must leave their ivory towers and engage in political everyday issues, applying their scientific knowledge at others’ disposal. Nonetheless, this should not be interpreted as a loss of power of the intellectual class. On the contrary, it is “a multiplication and reinforcement of their power-effects” (Foucault 1977, 12) as sensitive topics amongst the public debate now must seek the opinion and validity of experts.

If educational institutions represent an important field of action for the establishment, validity, and maintenance of truths through knowledge and the systems of power that emerge with it, in what ways has this taken place? What are the connections between the establishment of universities, the role of intellectuals as experts, and their ceremonial practices to establish and maintain specific truths? The next section offers an institutionalist reading of the university, emphasizing the instrumental-ceremonial dichotomy within social practices and positioning for the case of academic expertise.

What are the Institutional Values and Arrangements in Higher Education?

Science, education, and the formation of expertise have occupied a central role within Original Institutional Economics. Notably, the writings of Thorstein Veblen on the transformation of higher education in the United States (Veblen 1918), as well as Clarence Ayres’s works on the myths of science and the ceremonial-instrumental (C-I) dichotomy within social institutions (Ayres 1927 and 1962) shed important light on how institutions emerge and affect everyday life through an evolutionary process. Nonetheless, less is known about the institutionalist contribution to the understanding of the construction of knowledge, how scientific practices evolve, and to what extent do institutional structures enable or constrain this. This section seeks to fill this gap, focusing on the ceremonialism of science, higher education, and expertise offered by institutionalist interpretations as an important pillar within the political economy of knowledge and formation of truths.

Original institutionalism stems from Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class ([1899] 2017), which analyzes the norms and behaviors of the industrial socioeconomic elite of the late nineteenth century (the “leisure class”) as a socially positioned group with its own habits of consumption and leisure, behaviors, and symbolisms. Veblen demonstrates how processes of differentiation, elitism, and status appear as a result of capitalist industrialist societies and define the actions of the leisure class, done mainly through pecuniary emulation (Veblen 1899, chap. 2) and conspicuous leisure and consumption (Veblen 1899, chaps. 3 and 4), seeking to maintain and perpetuate their higher status. Further, Veblen also highlights the importance of maintaining archaic traits (Veblen 1899, chap. 9) to cultivate existing hierarchies, discrimination, symbolisms, and rituals that suit the power positioning of the upper classes. While much of the behaviors, consumption patterns and habits of thought of the emerging leisure class are a product of nineteenth century industrial transformations, their status and privileged positioning within the social realm is reinforced by archaic and backward-looking “ceremonial” practices. For Veblen, the combination of “old” ceremonial practices and institutions with the “new” values determined by the leisure class are key to understand modern institutional transformations and processes (Böck and Almeida 2018).

The formalization of a ceremonial-instrumental (C-I) dichotomy within the social realm is later proposed by Ayres (1962), expanding on Veblen’s initial theory about the values and patterns carried out by institutions. For Ayres, institutions are functional categories that refer to forms of social organization and behavior (Waller 1982). As such, a C-I dichotomy is key for a comprehensive understanding of how institutions emerge and transform as part of the process of social change, and which values, norms, and principles they can carry out during this process. Notably:

1. The ceremonial aspects of social activities involve deeply ingrained symbolic, traditional, and ritualistic elements of socioeconomic behavior, which may include customs, cultural norms, and social conventions that shape actions. They carry out normalizing power relations, given that ceremonial functions “serve to justify and legitimize the domination of particular control systems and groups over real technological developments” (Junker 1982, 144). Ceremonial behavior is both a) a type of power system given its controlling, normalizing, manipulating, and unequal nature; as well as b) a set of ideas and concepts organized to sustain inequality, oppression, imperialism, and hierarchies. As for the latter, these ideas and concepts materialize as commandments, emotional conditioning, sacred rites, and establishing a status system (Rutherford 1981; Junker 1982).

2. The instrumental aspects refer to technical, rational, and practical processes, which “involve the use of tools and a scientific method of reasoning to resolve problems” (Mayhew 2010, 216), directed towards the application of knowledge for the solution of specific social problems. Rather than equating instrumentalism to technological determinism and optimism, instrumental concepts are linkages, connections, and patterns amongst tools, epistemic concepts, and methods that promote democratizing and liberating relationships within the institutional setting. For original institutionalists, these instrumental aspects (notably technological innovation) are the motivators of institutional change (Tool 2000).

One must note that the C-I dichotomy does not exclude the possibility that instrumental aspects can be “encapsulated” by ceremonial ones, which would change their meaning and purpose. A ceremonial encapsulation would mean that new technologies, methods, and behaviors are shaped into existing institutions so that ceremonial values would remain “inert, even backward-looking, despite the pull from novel technology toward process and efficiency” (Papadopoulos 2015, 134). Thus, even though instrumental and ceremonial aspects are, by nature, in stark opposition, it does not mean that instrumental aspects cannot be used to control, manipulate, or exploit human beings when immersed or captured into ceremonial values. Similar to Foucault’s thesis (see section “How is Knowledge Constituted and how is it Related to the Pursuit of Scientific Truth?”), the evolution of knowledge and institutions does not necessarily mean an improvement, or freeing themselves from existing power relations—rather, new power relations and ways to maintain existing truths are created.

Ayres’s C-I dichotomy is particularly useful when approaching specific social institutions through their processes and practices, also offering analytical tools to verify if institutional change is possible. In the case of universities, knowledge production and the role of expertise, ceremonial values are those that defend the exclusive privileges, hierarchies, cultures of expertise and unequal treatment in research and education, while instrumental values would drive the efficient operations of the educational system for social progress, promoting epistemic democracy, pluralism, and inclusive academic/teaching practices for equal access. When exploring the state of higher education in the United States in The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Businessmen (1918), Veblen analyzes the university as a dual field of action, with existing tensions between the maintenance of ceremonial practices—disseminated through the vested interests of capitalist values—and the potential technological (instrumental) changes that would make it focused on the pursuit of knowledge, autonomy, and epistemic democracy.

For Veblen (1918), knowledge is an inherent part of any society, often kept within a selected body of specialists or “experts” (scientists, scholars, priests, shamans) and with great intrinsic value. Like Foucault, Veblen equates knowledge to truth, albeit differentiating their content, namely esoteric knowledge (or “higher” learning, of no economic or industrial effect) from exoteric knowledge (the knowledge of industrial processes and of natural phenomenon, or “lower” learning). However, Veblen highlights how higher learning has been subjugated to “the conditions imposed by the state of the industrial arts, the technological situation” (Veblen 1918, 39) that has shaped the scheme of knowledge, its scope and method, as well as its positioning within the economy; notably, how the profit motive and the pursuit of business have also affected the structural functioning of universities and intellectuals, which have now become interlinked with economic interests.

The modern university has played a central role in society as a site of knowledge production, dissemination, and formation of expertise, occupying a central position within the regime of scientific truth. As Arnoldi (2007, 51) claims, “expertise is granted its exclusive status through a social process, it must also be the product of a process of value attribution that, if historically varying, is dependent upon the changing dynamics of social and public recognition.” Such value attribution is a ceremonial aspect, founded in principles of hierarchy, differentiation, and status. With the capturing of higher education by industrial societies, Veblen (1918) sheds light on how ceremonial aspects founded in universities and intellectual practice did not disappear with the implementation of the business motive in universities. Rather, they were incorporated and became an intrinsic part of universities’ structure and activities, such as the expansion of vocational training, the pursuit of profit, and the managerial changes in academic careers existing within the ceremonial structures of elitism and prestige.

One of the reasons for that is how ceremonial structures and aspects emanate power, serving “a larger purpose […] to justify and legitimize the domination of particular control systems and groups over real technological developments” (Junker 1982, 144). For Ayres (1942), one of the reasons why instrumental and technological changes may not be capable to alter and change the course of ceremonial institutions relates to how the latter reflects societal structures and true values (understood as social qualities)—if a given society praises inequalities, hierarchies, and symbolisms, then instrumental changes are unlikely to alter their course.

On this, Pierre Bourdieu’s (1986) concept of cultural capital helps to explain how ceremonial differentiation has materialized within science and academia. Cultural capital is linked to social recognition, status, and the capturing of a particular form of intellectual value that exercises power within the social realm. In the case of contemporary western society, this normally takes place through certification, given by (i) formal education, (ii) professional validation (as it is the case of professional bodies and chartered societies); and/or (iii) public acknowledgement, through consulting or advisory roles. Nonetheless, part of the process of acquiring cultural capital is ceremonial: one must undergo formal education or public acknowledgement to secure their certification.

The C-I dichotomy offers a useful framework for understanding institutional change and which processes are required to alter the course of action of particular social structures. In the case of formal higher education and the positioning of the expert, both Veblen and Ayres’s theorizations highlight their ceremonial aspects that are manifested through practices and power relations that are reinforced by the entering of business values in universities. Structural change, then, is only possible if technological change can alter the hierarchical foundations of higher education and the social positioning of the intellectual. But how would these changes occur? Under which circumstances? And how would they change academic and disciplinary practices? These are still to be explained. Focusing on such practices and cultures (ceremonial aspects) helps to better capture the institutional triggers of change; nonetheless, an understanding of the “meso” level, or how academics are interrelated and positioned within disciplinary and university structures is key. The next section discusses the main contributions of social positioning theory as the connecting framework for unpacking how experts, fields, and institutions are interconnected and positioned within social reality, shedding further light on potential structural change.

In What Ways are Academics Positioned within Universities and Disciplines?

Reinterpreting universities and academic communities as social groupings and their positional arrangements are an important aspect for defining processes and change. Social positioning theory (SPT) focuses on the nature and relational arrangements of social reality, looking at how individuals and institutions are situated within it. For social positioning theorists (Lawson 2022), it is about uncovering how social phenomena emerge in processes where social totalities (human communities, artifacts, language and communication systems, social hierarchies) are formed. Or, putting it differently, explaining the processes by which social phenomena are related to human community formation (that is, totalities formed by human individuals—Pratten 2023). Connecting elements of these processes may include, among others, trust (Pratten 2017), power (Martins 2022), function (Pratten 2023), and inequalities (Bacevic 2023). The positioning of individuals and groups within scientific institutions is crucial for understanding the constitution of certain behaviors, patterns, and duties that will affect how knowledge is constructed and maintained.

A core notion within SPT is totalities. They can be either physical (for instance a house, a building, a university) or social (a particular community, that is, a family, a research group, a political party, a rock band). Once communities are formed, positional allocations are attributed, offering sets of community components—the specific elements and arrangements of each group. These components express the channels by which communities will operate. Positions within communities are constituted as “rights and obligations” of human members of such community, which will facilitate or constrain their actions. In the context of higher education, for instance, positions would develop depending on different rights, obligations, and arrangements, as Pratten describes it:

Individuals positioned, for example, as lecturers in the context of a modern UK university form community components that have various rights involving access to resources and certain obligations including preparing assessments, attending Faculty meetings and being available to see students at certain times of the academic year, etc. The rights of one positioned individual or group are configured in relation to the obligations of other positioned individuals or groups. The kinds of rights that lecturers possess are matched to obligations others have, specifically, in this example, perhaps the university management’s obligation to supply appropriate facilities. The rights that students possess, such as to attend lectures, are matched to the obligation lecturers have to prepare and deliver them. (Pratten 2023, 3)

A social position, then, is an accepted status that generates a particular social identity that its occupant has positional rights and obligations (Lawson 2022). One unifying element that ensures rights and obligations, however, is power: the establishment of power relations is done through the creation or transformation of particular rights and obligations attached to a social position (Martins 2022). Two remarks are noteworthy here: first, what is the agency between individuals and their position? Are individuals free to question, resist, or change their expected rights and obligations? Second, assuming individuals have an exit option and choose not to perform their expected rights and obligations, would there be any consequences to those that do?

Nuno Martins (2022) suggests that SPT considers individuals as constrained to their social position as a process of subjectification: power, then, is productive and normalizing as a form of government of the self and others, echoing a Foucauldian (2008) notion. While individuals have agency to question or resist power, the very act of practicing their rights and obligations is part of the process of creating and disseminating power. Here, the concept of function can shed light on the possible ways that rights and obligations can take place within social reality. Pratten (2023) offers a four-fold definition for functions: they can be (i) “system properties of integrated totalities,” which determine community positions; (ii) normative principles (what a person is supposed to do); (iii) accepted conditions; or (iv) relational components. This is not to say that positions and functions are essentially conditioned and immutable, but can change according to community components and broader social totalities.

Amongst the applications of SPT, epistemic communities (universities, fields, research groups, academics) is one of them. Namely, Jana Bacevic (2023) bridges feminist and intersectional theories of positionality with SPT to theorize the relationship between identity-based epistemic judgements—which derive from a specific positioning—and the reproduction of social inequalities, particularly those of gender and race in academia. While positionality in academia is commonly considered a source of epistemic value, “contemporary academic positioning has been used as a practice of devaluation” (Bacevic 2023, 2), uncovering the problematic arrangements of existing social totalities in academic communities, and the embedded power relations behind positional rights and obligations.

Indeed, a critical discussion of social positionality for understanding inequalities and hierarchies also requires the inclusion of privilege positioning and unequal endowments, capacities, and functions. Rather than simply assuming reality as pure constructivist or performative (Haraway 1988), a more realistic account of the interplay between institutions, fields, and actors would require including the specificalities of existing positionings (including unintentional and unconscious patterns reproduced through rights and obligations), as well as the characteristics and structures that exist in social totalities and in their functions. Applying SPT to better capture positional powers and processes within/between social institutions—such as higher education, academic fields, and experts—complements the existing theorizations explored in previous sections (“How is Knowledge Constituted and how is it Related to the Pursuit of Scientific Truth?”, and “What are the Institutional Values and Arrangements in Higher Education?”) and expands them further.

The next section pinpoints existing issues within higher education and the discipline of economics, building on existing evidence and discussions to demonstrate how existing structures, cultures, and practices can be better captured through a social-institutional framework.

A Tale of Two Crises: Universities and Disciplines in the Current Literature

The Sociology of Higher Education: Universities as Prestige Collectives Under Pressure

Universities currently represent a puzzle in the knowledge economy. Historically viewed as ivory-tower institutions producing rigorous, neutral knowledge and operating at critical distance from societal trends and pressures, much of its traditional reputation has been put under questioning. Sociologists of higher education discuss the impacts of neoliberalism and new public management technologies (Olssen and Peters 2005), the questioning of intellectual superiority (Scott 2018), and the monopolization of knowledge (Arnoldi 2007) in the university’s structures and functioning. Some (Littler 2017; Watermeyer and Rowe 2022) claim that much of the university’s uniqueness is consolidated by their operation within a self-containing hierarchical “prestige economy,” where competition fueled by market reforms have worsened academic inequalities (Fleming 2021), putting universities against each other in a rush to out-claim productive excellence and secure positional superiority (e.g., in rankings and league tables), prioritizing resource allocation for certain fields (e.g., Business & Management, STEM) in detriment of others, and adopting overly managerial structures.

Further questioning emerges on whether universities still hold an intellectual monopoly when other entities are becoming more prevalent in substantiating truths and generating new knowledge. Notably, the role of industry-based research practices outside traditional academia (Garrick, Chan, and Lai (2004), the dispute over knowledge ownership (Hess and Ostrom 2007), and the wider social questioning of scientific truths (McIntyre 2018) make one question if (and how) universities are moving toward a shared authority over the legitimization of what is defined as valid knowledge. For some, as John Garrick, Andrew Chan, and John Lai (2004) such monopoly no longer holds given the evolving trends and influences in how knowledge is produced and disseminated outside traditional academic domains. Rather, the monopoly is maintained through universities’ accreditation and certification powers. It is for that reason that some (Buckley 2012, 33–34) suggest a switch from the university’s attitude of “holding knowledge,” which entrenches the idea that universities hold a certain social power in the form of knowledge, towards “sharing knowledge,” which more accurately reflects the twenty-first-century environment universities must adapt toward.

The effect of recent technologies, including digitalization and generative artificial intelligence (GAI), is a prevalent theme regarding the evolving landscape of knowledge production and dissemination in higher education. Kevin Carey (2012) identifies the emergence of open-access digital educational platforms outside the traditional university system as a direct threat to the monopoly on disseminating knowledge universities have traditionally held, highlighting that there are no longer barriers to accessing university-level content, with a multitude of resources available for anyone to easily access for free. Also considering innovations in teaching arrangements, partnerships between Big Tech and elite universities may completely disrupt the landscape of higher education by offering hybrid online-offline degrees, since this learning model can accommodate a significantly higher capacity of students while being considerably more affordable (Walsh 2020). However, whether or not employers, government, and society will reach a level of acceptance for these new accreditations on par with traditional degrees remains unclear (Carey 2012), particularly given how leading universities (through prestige collectives, such as the Russell Group in the UK, and the Ivy League in the United States) can influence regulatory decision-making.

While universities may still maintain a monopoly over educational qualifications, this monopoly is crumbling in teaching and disseminating knowledge. Less is said, however, about the impacts of emerging technologies in disrupting knowledge creation by academic experts. Existing discussions (Watermeyer et al. 2023) point to the dualistic effects of GAI over academic practices, which may include positive pedagogical practices in terms of accessibility and creativity, but less disruptive when it comes to challenging the positional status of research and improving academic labor conditions. The growing use of and dissemination of artificial intelligence tools by and into university communities can represent a potential shift in the established educational order, albeit with less clarity on how this process would take place. GAI holds the capacity to reconfigure the prestige positioning of universities in ways that could redefine the boundaries of academia, paving the way for a more open knowledge ecosystem. However, considering the path-dependency of how universities have evolved over centuries as the “guardians of truth,” it raises questions whether universities are willing to challenge their position of prestige to explore and experiment with the transformative prospects of GAI, or implement operational measures to mitigate the potential of its disruptive effects on academic processes.

The initial impacts of GAI over academic practices have been assessed by some (Watermeyer et al. 2023) as offering potential relief for academics and a means to offset intensive demands from universities and students. While such studies emphasize the changing everyday practices that GAI may have over academic labor and the scholarly craftsmanship, questions remain on how collectively they may reconfigure university structures, fields of knowledge, and in what ways the balance of power between academics and universities will evolve. On this, STS theorists (Callon 2009) shed some light on the integrative performativity of technologies, discourses, and institutions through a process of “co-performation”: not only institutions and scientific statements can shape and construct sociocultural contexts through their own performative capacity, but it is a mutually reinforcing system in which one, as it is currently dispositioned within social reality, cannot exist without the other.

While co-performation is a helpful concept to explain the integrative process and influence of universities, disciplines, and academics, some theoretical gaps remain. First, assuming that technological changes will alter the course of knowledge production—as suggested by sociologists of higher education—in what ways can such process take place within university structures? Most of the literature has emphasized the disruptive powers of technology, but these have mostly taken place within the traditional university structures and regulations—normally at the level of a particular practice, rather than a broader change in process and/or structure. A first gap points to the need for a theory to understand structural change and the role of technology in significantly altering institutional dynamics, values, and performativity at university level. Second, in what ways can the processes of co-performation take place between universities, disciplines, and academic experts? Such inquiry would require a clearer understanding of how knowledge is produced, maintained, and positioned within society, benefiting from a deeper analysis of academic cultures, reproduction of truths, and power positions within disciplines and universities.

The Sociology of Disciplines: Academic Cultures and Monopolies in the Case of Economics

How does knowledge production take place within fields and disciplines? In what ways can academic cultures and the monopolization of knowledge reflect power relationships and the maintenance of truths? Do they reproduce hierarchies and ceremonial behaviors found in university structures?

This sub-section builds on the sociology of disciplines to better capture the “meso” level of higher education between universities and academics. Rather than analyzing the impact of university values and structures over academic practices, I focus on the transmission and interaction of power relations and norms via fields and disciplines as knowledge collectives. As traditional meso analyzes that aim to capture the “middle-layer” of groupings, community practices, and organizational characteristics, I focus on the example of economics as a field of action in which university institutional values are transmitted and reinforced. This is done through a brief historical description and functioning of the economics discipline, focusing on the practices of academic experts to explore the relationship between social knowledge, policymaking, and scientific rigor since the post-war as a hierarchical process of monopolization.

Economics is a useful example for such analysis, as the discipline’s academic cultures and valuation of expertise have a well-documented history—notably, highlighting its structural hierarchies, ceremonial cultures, and symbols of prestige, which mimic broader university structures as a form of exclusive knowledge. It has a negative reputation for its pretense of knowledge (Hayek 1974; Caballero 2010), a false sense of superiority (Fourcade, Ollion, and Algan 2015), a detachment from real-world issues (Coyle 2021) and an insistence in a narrow view of what scientific rigor and efficiency should be (Berman 2022). While some claim that such a powerful position is primarily context dependent, that is, economists tend to be more influential in situations which require technical knowledge, in comparison to politically heated themes (Hirschman and Berman 2014; Christensen 2017), others point to the fact that despite being under intense public scrutiny since the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2008 and the COVID Crisis, the discipline has neither seen a paradigmatic shift, nor a substantial change on its academic and professional practices (see, among others, Payson 2017). This is not to say that economics is the only discipline that has issues or elitist tendencies. Nonetheless, I demonstrate that existing evidence can offer support to better capture ceremonial structures and positional issues at both macro (university) level, and meso (disciplinary) level.

The literature on academic fields/disciplines (Becher and Trowler 2001; Wallerstein 2003) and on the limits and boundaries of academic expertise and knowledge (Gibbons et al.1994) helps to shed some light on the evolution of expert practices and their relationship to wider university structures. Indeed, academic cultures and disciplinary epistemology are intertwined: economics, considered as an epistemic field or “territory” is safeguarded by “tribes” of economists, which display a particular set of academic cultures, rituals, and idols to demarcate and protect their space within departments, universities, public institutions, and within the general public. Universities (and departments) work as contextual realizations of epistemic positionality, determining which forms of knowledge will have intellectual validity in a field.

Historically, the push for the professionalization of economics in the beginning of the twentieth century led to its specialization, technification, and exclusivity—and therefore to an increased ceremonialism. While the formation of economics as an independent discipline and specialism can be found in the turn of the twentieth century, the history of economics shows how the key characteristics of economics (and economists) are a more recent social construction; namely, since the post-war period in which economists became public advisors, model-builders, and business analysts working in collaboration with universities and research institutes (Fourcade, Ollion, and Algan 2015; Christensen 2017). The decades following the post-war period saw an important political change contributing to the exclusion and marginalization of economists who did not comply to the neoclassical paradigm. For instance, the rise of McCarthyism and aversion to communism in the United States, which quickly spread to other Western nations, led to a repression of radical and progressive approaches, particularly those advocating government interventionism or were contrary to the principles of market capitalism, such as Marxism, post-Keynesianism, and Institutionalism (Mata and Lee 2007).

Some (Colander 2010; Maesse 2015; Berman 2022) hint on how the narrowing of the scope and method of economics is closely related to seeking truth and establishing what are socially accepted truths from a specific standpoint, which manifests itself through the development of hierarchies of knowledge and cultures of expertise. Such process can also be understood from the perspective of the policing of truths via power, (Foucault 1971), in which the search for truth generates specific power relations that actively govern individual and collective conducts. That is, they create exclusionary barriers to ensure the functioning of a discipline that rewards those who conform to certain conducts. On this, Foucault (1970, 60) claims: “within its own limits, each discipline recognises true and false propositions; but it pushes back a whole teratology of knowledge beyond its margins. […] A proposition must fulfil complex and heavy requirements to be able to belong to the grouping of a discipline; before it can be called true or false.” These requirements manifest through academic practices and rituals, which together create a prestige collective within the discipline. Specific key practices in academic economics are related to:

1. Top Publications, Citations, Income Generation, and Impact as a Measure of Excellence and Good Science: In economics, selective evaluative practices involve the emphasis on top journals (the “top 5”) as a measure of scientific quality, which directly influences a scholar’s career and prestige (Heckman and Moktan 2020), such as tenure decisions, funding from government bodies, and appointments to prizes (e.g., the Sveriges Riksbank’s Prize in Economic Sciences and the John Bates Clark Medal). The number of citations and measures of impact factor are also seen as symbols of prestige related to publications (D’Ippoliti 2021), leading to a culture of “publish or perish” among economists that has severe backlash if not followed as expected (van Dalen 2021). Consequently, top journals and editorial boards demonstrate significant gatekeeping power: academics working in less prestigious sub-disciplines or topics may suffer significant backlash in comparison to those in more advantageous positions (Stockhammer, Dammerer, and Kapur 2021). Similarly, those who do not have access to financial resources or face language barriers to produce research may suffer additional exclusion within the discipline, particularly in peripheral countries (Guizzo et al. 2021). Some, however, highlight how the existing publication culture in economics is not a neutral measure. For instance, citations are found to reflect existing social ties between authors in the community (D’Ippoliti 2021), many authors who succeed in publishing in top journals have some connection with editorial boards (Colussi 2018).

2. Affiliations and Occupying Positions of Power Within the Field: Occupying positions of influence within the discipline is also an expected practice of prestige. These include, inter alia, sitting on journal editorial boards, funding and research evaluation assessment committees, committees of academic associations (such as the Royal Economic Society in the UK, and the American Economic Association in the United States), being affiliated to research centers, and acting as advisors or consultants to public institutions, such as central banks. Occupational power is a relevant element in guiding the wider culture in economics: those positioned in prestigious positions can reinforce certain patterns, allowing for prestige collectives to remain on top. For example, Kevin Hoover and Andrej Svorencik (2023) document that one of the discipline’s leading communities, the American Economic Association (AEA), is run by a very selective group from top universities, demonstrating a strongly hierarchical structure. Also, for the case of publications David Laband and Michael Piette (1994) find that articles for which there is a relationship between the author and journal editor are more likely to be published; and these articles also tend on average to attract higher citations. Similarly, authors publish twice as many papers in journals during times when those journals are edited by colleagues, compared to periods when this was not the case (Brogaard, Engelberg, and Parsons 2014). Indeed, editorial boards have influence in guiding and shaping a discipline’s research agenda and policing certain truths: Simon Angus et al. (2020) show how the diversity and representation of editorial boards in economics relates to the wider power dynamics within the discipline, highlighting the dominance of U.S.-centric research, and wider intersectionality patterns are perceived by economists as a white, male, and Global North-focused science (Guizzo et al. 2021).

3. Complying to Specific Methodologies and Approaches in the Discipline: A third documented practice within academic economics is the importance in adopting particular methodologies and approaches as an indicator of prestige. Economics is often classified as a quantitative social science, employing a combination of mathematical models and proofs, statistical descriptions, and econometric exercises to provide explanations and prove causalities (“whenever X, then Y”) (Reiss 2013). The most significant turn experienced by recent economics is the expansion and increased emphasis in applied works, that is, empirical studies employing econometric analysis with either self-created datasets or borrowed data, which represented almost two thirds of all articles published in three top general economics journals in 2011 (Hamermesh 2013). This “applied turn” is attributed to, inter alia, improvements in computing and data processing, data availability, and a wider necessity for evidence-based analyses and policy recommendations (Backhouse and Cherrier 2017), giving a higher status to data-driven studies. In addition to technological improvements, wider scientific practices also led to spillovers in economics—the development of laboratory experiments, randomized control trials, analysis of natural experiments and building of databases that can be originally found in the natural sciences have also gained space within leading economists (see, for instance, Duflo 2017).

Nonetheless, some argue about the existence of a methodological exclusion in economics (Heise 2016); that is, the defense of a single methodological approach characterized by positivism, objectivity, hypothetical-deductivism and mathematization (Lawson 2006). In practical terms, methodological exclusion takes shape as a form of academic gatekeeping that impedes the development or expansion of novel research considered to be of low-priority or not conforming to the discipline’s core principles. This happens, for instance, in top journals that prioritize certain topics or approaches over others (see Backhouse 1994 for a mapping exercise of the Economic Journal in prioritizing certain methods/topics), as well as putting quantitative methods to a higher standard in comparison to qualitative, non-numerical approaches (Lenger 2019). Further, a resistance to interdisciplinarity and insularity (Truc et al. 2023) suggests that economics as a collective field is less keen to open up. A potential justification is how economics lacks a disciplinary definition by object, which allows it to permeate other social sciences, but less so within its own domains (Lazear 2000).

However, some caveats are noteworthy. Sociologists of disciplines (Hirschman and Berman 2014; Rilinger 2022) note that professional cultures, practices, and hierarchies are context and content dependent: in the case of economists, their power tends to be stronger in academic domains, or in issues that require strict technical advice, rather than advising in politically heated topics (e.g., climate change, inflation, market controls, immigration laws). The positioning of economists within disciplines and social structures is therefore complex, requiring an integrative perspective of how truths are formed within intellectual debates and their relationship to knowledge and power. These are not separate from the institution of the university but embedded within it. The next section offers an overarching analysis of how a three-fold social-institutional framework would be possible and better situated to explain the complex interplay proposed in the present article.

Assessing Change in Academic Knowledge Production through a Social-Institutional Framework

Despite global trends in higher education and within academic fields, questions remain about the processes of knowledge production, and how fields of knowledge are impacted by them. What are the specific impacts of these institutional changes over academic practices? Will disciplines change their scope and paradigmatic evolution to cope with external technological and social pressures? Will new technologies change the ways that academic research is produced and assessed? Will academics (and universities) lose their monopoly of knowledge?

Answering these questions requires an understanding of the existing relationships between institutions and fields of knowledge, as well as the processes of how knowledge is produced and situated within academic cultures to remain truthful. Further, it also requires uncovering academic practices, cultures, values, and the wider political economy of knowledge that exists within separate disciplines. Rather than approaching different domains (the university, disciplines, academic practices, and positioning) as separate entities, a social-institutional theorization allows for an integrative reading of existing phenomena, helping to identify and pinpoint where (and how) potential changes would take place. Such contribution expands Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam’s (2012) theorization of strategic action fields, offering further insights on institutional structures, purpose, and truth-power relations.

The proposed integrative reading combines the three core elements (“3 Ps”) of the social-institutional reading proposed herein, following the content presented in previous sections. These are: (i) process, (ii) purpose, and (iii) positioning. Visually, a 3 Ps framework (see figure A1, Appendix) captures how macro institutions (universities), meso levels (fields and disciplines, such as economics), and micro aspects (the positioning of academics) are interconnected at different layers. Each has its own specificity and characteristics, yet integrated within shared institutional ceremonial values and key defining aspects related to knowledge production, the pursuit of truth, and power relations necessary to maintain such system. I now explain each element in detail.

Process: The Meaning of Institutional Change

The university is at crossroads, with research showing how the monopoly of knowledge held by traditional university models is changing—mainly led by technological and market changes. A growing body of literature explores the effects of generative artificial intelligence over higher education (see, among others, Goel 2023; Lim et al. 2023; Watermeyer et al. 2023) highlighting the transformations on the creation and transmission of ideas, learning techniques for students, and academic processes (such as admissions and managerial tasks). This may support Robyn Klingler-Vidra and Yesha Sivan’s (2016) argument that the current university model is no longer auspicious for generating high-quality knowledge and teaching outcomes given its replaceability, suggesting that private research organizations and centers are better positioned to be at the cutting edge of research, and alternative digital teaching methods are better suited for the current generation of learners compared to the classic classroom model.

However, instrumental changes are still largely conceived and applicable within existing university boundaries, suggesting that most changes are not disruptive enough—at least in the short run for research activities, rather than teaching. Vincent Larivière et al.’s (2018) quantitative analysis comparing the contributions of universities, industry, and government to global and country-level knowledge production since the late 1970s show that universities have not yet lost their monopoly over knowledge production when considering scientific articles, highlighting that industry and governments are relying more heavily on collaborations with universities when producing publications, rather than replacing universities and doing them independently. The authors demonstrate that universities still play a central role in the production of knowledge in terms of academic publications but also stress that knowledge production is taking on alternate forms outside traditional academia.

Existing tensions and uncertainty regarding the future of knowledge point to the institutionalist scholarship, in particular Ayres’s ceremonial encapsulation. Even though emerging technologies and social pressures represent a move toward instrumentalism given their emphasis on efficiency, problem-solving solutions, and democratization of knowledge, such changes are currently being captured and immersed within existing boundaries of higher education. Technological innovations are absorbed into “behavioral patterns only to the extent that the community believes that the previously existing degree of ceremonial dominance can be maintained” (Bush 1987, 1093). This is referred to as a “past-binding” type of institutional change (Bush 1987) in which innovations can offer problem-solving solutions and efficiency, but without challenging the hierarchical structures, regulations, monopolies, or prestigious social roles (positioning) of individuals and communities.

Such framework sheds light on the current issues experienced both by universities and the discipline of economics: while changes over process and procedure have taken place, existing pressures (GAI, post-truth, privatization of education) have not yet caused a rupture. As institutionalists claim, actual progress is hard to achieve—and normally it is disguised as “future-binding” type of changes (Bush, 1987). These refer to ceremonial encapsulations that involve the active development of technological innovations that strengthen and extend the control of vested interests (profit, exploitation, inequalities) over social life, rather than promoting meaningful change. Indeed, current examples found in the literature emphasize the subjugation of educational institutions for corporate interests (Olssen and Peters 2005) and how knowledge production is embedded within networks of global capitalism (Bacevic 2021), which explains why certain ceremonial aspects have become exacerbated rather than mitigated by the implementation of the market and income generating principles in universities.

These question whether GAI can make higher education more democratic, or if it will be captured by current monopolistic interests. Existing evidence suggests the latter, given the Big Tech monopoly over GAI tools (Verdegem 2022) and the historical trajectory of technological advancements as reinforcing monopolies and inequalities between workers (labor) and firms (capital), rather than promoting freedom (Acemoglu and Johnson 2023), unless a truly collective common framework can be implemented. Overall, outside academia artificial intelligence tools have been reported to further monitor and control workers (Belloc et al. 2023) and lead to a general worsening of wages and job opportunities (Acemoglu and Restrepo 2017), suggesting that in a first moment, technologies exacerbate existing ceremonial structures. Then, the process of institutional democratization would occur only if instrumental elements (led by technologies, social demands, political change) can alter core institutional arrangements, values, and practices.

Purpose: How Universities and Disciplines Share and Maintain Truth-Power Values

Institutional changes are not empty sets—they contain particular arrangements of power relations that carry out a notion of truth, as demonstrated by Foucault’s theory, as well as specific rights and obligations as per social positioning theory. As previously discussed, universities and disciplines share key institutional values regarding ceremonialism, prestige, hierarchies, and pro-excellence cultures within a performance-based system, often reinforced by a neoliberal culture of “targets and terror” (Jones et al. 2020). But what do they represent for the purpose of knowledge production and expertise? How will changes in the social construction of knowledge also affect truth claims and their policing?

Rather than questioning the formal or ethical purpose of universities and higher education systems, a social-institutional framework helps to pinpoint other purposes related to the transformations within their social structures, practices, and positioning. On this, the discussion about truth and how it guides social arrangements is crucial for understanding potential institutional change, both at universities and within fields of knowledge. After all, truth is a practice: in our contemporary society we are obsessed with truths about tangible and intangible things, about others, and about ourselves (Lorenzini 2023). What is “truthful” has higher value, esteem, and prestige: hence our constant will to truth. Embedded in the values of the university is the development and expansion of scientific knowledge as a social asset, offering both technical skills and critical thinking for promoting economic and social change (Connell 2019). Thus, practices that produce knowledge with the purpose to achieve truth—an essence, a material adequacy condition, a universally accurate representation—are a defining feature of expertise (Chi, Feltovich, and Glaser 1981), and held to higher esteem.

However, a closer look into the trends exposed in “A Tale of Two Crises: Universities and Disciplines in the Current Literature” suggest that the purpose of “seeking truth” can be more accurately defined as “owning and maintaining truth.” If a particular regime of truth requires a meticulous and wide-ranging set of practices and powers to maintain itself, these will be manifested in the form of a policing of truth through actions that maintain prestige collectives and ensure the monopoly of knowledge. Practically, these will take place both at the disciplinary/field and university level, given that the latter mainly holds the accreditation powers to certify a given knowledge. Universities’ business models are also shaped by this purpose, benefiting from the ownership and maintenance of truth. The implementation of the market mechanism has not made universities more focused on innovative inquiry and expanding knowledge frontiers (Chubb and Watermeyer 2017; Frank and Gower, 2019); rather, it maintained existing ceremonial structures while exacerbating inequalities. Similarly, attracting students and securing funding is largely based on reputation and tradition (Cyrenne and Grant 2009), and less so on actual performance and quality.

One can draw similar conclusions for the economics discipline given its expertise culture that rewards prestige and exclusionary practices, in which the purpose of seeking truth has been replaced by “maintaining the prestige of truth.” Research on the development of economics scholarship has shown less emphasis on innovative, risky and “blue skies” research in comparison to more traditional scholarship (D’Ippoliti 2020; Stockhammer, Dammerer, and Kapur 2021), with academics reporting the professional costs of not following and pursuing the expected core symbols of prestige, as top publications, citations, research grants, and measurable societal impact (Guizzo et al. 2021). The existing dynamics within the discipline therefore represent a mutual reinforcement between ceremonial structures that maintain the ownership of truth and the marketization of universities and research activities. These can limit how knowledge and scientific inquiry develops. Then, Foucault’s (2010) notion of parrhesia, the act of “speaking truth” as a form of resistance and the costs associated with it, is therefore appropriate to better capture how such shift from the pursuit to the maintenance of truth has taken place at the level of universities and disciplines.

An “epistemological electroshock therapy” (Haraway 1988, 578) relates to the challenges posed by generative artificial intelligence and the production of truths outside traditional institutions. GAI may have the capacity to fulfil society’s will to truth, albeit without the prestigious positioning to be accepted and replace the university. After all, facts are not the same as truths: for them to become truths, we as a society have to attribute a truth value to it (Lorenzini 2023), for instance through accreditations and certifications of the generating sources. If truths can be generated outside formal positions of knowledge and prestige, existing tensions between the symbolic value of ceremonial institutions and the instrumental value of technology points out to two alternatives. First, the reinforcement of the current model of an “econocracy” (Earle, Moran, and Ward-Perkins 2016), in which emerging technologies and pressures for change will make universities increasingly prestigious, elitist, and populated by the few—at least for research-focused activities that aim to broaden knowledge frontiers. Second, the rise of a new social model of knowledge, in which innovations also mean “expanding knowledge through the efforts of the entire community, not just some academic or scientific elite” (Bush 1987, 1088). This could be done through outside traditional knowledge creation channels and institutions—as existing movements for knowledge commons advocate. Nonetheless, alternative models do not necessarily mean more epistemic democracy, plural rationalities, or the end of the prestige economy that surrounds knowledge creation if other hierarchical powers (e.g. Big Tech companies) arise.

Positioning: How Academic Rights and Obligations can Change

The third pillar of the proposed social-institutional framework is positioning, aiming to unpack “social constitution through human community organization” (Lawson 2022, 36) when considering the existing arrangements and social interactions within higher education and fields of knowledge as social totalities. After all, academic experts are embedded in a particular reality that shapes how they do things—their identity is dependent on human interaction and interpretation (Lawson 2014). Here, SPT is useful for understanding the relationships between social transformation and human interactions, focusing on positional changes amongst community members when broader social change (technological, political, economic) occurs.

In economics, academic experts (with research and teaching duties) normally hold a set of rights and obligations, including the rights to carry out scholarly work on economic issues, disseminate their findings, and educate students about economics. They also are obliged to perform according to academic norms—led by the discipline, the institution, and the higher education sector—particularly regarding research quality, impact, and income generation, as well as teaching obligations (marking assessments, office hours). As Lawson (2014) claims, these rights and obligations are not available to any member of the general public, so that these rights and obligations position academics as such. However, two remarks are noteworthy: firstly, their positioning is relational (Slade-Caffarel 2022), that is, the rights/obligations in one group over individuals are matched by the obligations of the latter group members with respect to the former (e.g., students are expected to attend lectures and sit exams set up by lecturers, or editorial board members of a scientific journal have the obligation to review papers submitted by academics, as part of the latter’s professional obligation). Secondly, academic positioning emerges, at least partially, from the result of formal higher education regulations to enable a space of action (that is, the UK government has to determine that only universities have the right to offer an undergraduate degree in economics); otherwise, certain totalities would not exist in the first place.

How would positioning be assessed in times of instability and social change—notably, with technological change and the social pressures that question the role of the university? One of the issues is the pursuit of knowledge and its relationship to truth, normally done via research. While in our contemporary society we frequently see those formally educated (with a Master’s degree and/or PhD) and somehow affiliated to a university of research centre positioning themselves as, for instance, academic economists and carrying out research in economics, this is not a right in comparison to, let’s say, having the right to teaching in a university undergraduate programme. The latter requires obligations from academics in order to access a position as a lecturer and enjoy exclusive rights. Then, main functions of the university—research and teaching—contain two distinct sets of rights and obligations, and while many regulatory and quality assurance bodies determine how teaching activities have to be delivered (number of contact hours, assessment structures, graduation requirements), this is not the case for research.

In research, academics are subject to a set of rights and obligations that are largely ceremonially and economically instituted, following Ayres’s description in section 3: they are established by the field’s academic culture, as well as by higher education’s current business model that only fundable/impactful research is feasible—or at least, put to a higher esteem, as it is the case of economics. Nonetheless, certain mechanisms such as technological change can alter positional collective practices and their associated rights/obligations (Lawson, 2014). Then, the dissemination of GAI amongst academia can alter the positional system of power of research and teaching differently. For example, GAI may change the peer-review system in academic research (Checco et al. 2021), how core “naïve” research tasks to “breakthrough” ones (Van Belkom 2020), as well as speeding up findings and increasing research competitiveness (Chubb, Cowling, and Reed 2022), which can transform (or even eliminate) most of the rights that experts access today. Not only these will change the practice and process of scientific inquiry, but they may also transform the prestigious positioning of the expert as “truth-owner” within the knowledge economy.

Similarly, we can also see positional consequences emerging for teaching activities, although its arrangement can be considered sanction-based, rather than culture-based as in research. Education as a positional relationship is determined by national regulations, which allow exclusive powers to universities and teaching institutes to award degrees as a form of certification. While the rights and obligations of lecturers and students may remain if, e.g., a corporation such as Google or YouTube is granted degree-awarding powers (as the act of education as a relational positioning would continue), they may shift the positioning of lecturers with regard to certain rights: for instance, with an increased worsening and precarity of academic working conditions and loss of intellectual autonomy. Then, the element of purpose within institutional foundations will determine how a change in rights and obligations may take place.

Concluding Remarks

This article has addressed a three-fold social-institutional framework to analyze the co-performative relationship between/within the university, disciplines, and academics. It focused on the case of economics as a discipline with a reported history of ceremonial cultures, hierarchies, and imperialism within the social domain, also relying on existing discussions in the sociology of higher education and academic expertise. Through the combination of three distinct theoretical frameworks, namely (i) Michel Foucault’s social philosophy on the relationship between knowledge, power and truth; (ii) Original Institutional Economics on the ceremonial-instrumental dichotomy and the processes of institutional change; and (iii) Cambridge’s Social Positioning Theory, I developed an assessment of current events in the macro, meso, and micro levels of higher education based on three main indicators of change (a 3-Ps framework): process, purpose, and positioning.

Rather than offering a prediction of what will happen given technological and social pressures, the proposed framework explored potential changes based on how things are done (Lawson 2014), at the macro (university), meso (economics discipline), and micro (academics) levels. Specifically, the analysis highlighted how ceremonial values and arrangements found in the university and in economics can affect how (and if) changes may take place. These ceremonial aspects are not empty sets: they reflect a particular purpose in knowledge production (owning and maintaining truths), as well as a positioning of prestige with specific rights and obligations. The analysis proposed herein expands traditional approaches to performativity in higher education and strategic action fields by combining these three levels and exposing their mutual reinforcement mechanisms. Cultures of expertise and prestige affect institutional arrangements, disciplinary/knowledge processes, as well as how academics are expected to comply to particular obligations.

For assessing structural change, key takeaways are noteworthy. First, the strength and continuity of ceremonial aspects within higher education and in economics. Innovative practices and social pressures (usage of GAI, knowledge democratization) are still being encapsulated within existing boundaries of higher education, and such process has not experienced significant shifts with the marketization of universities and research activities. While vested interests have captured particular tasks and, to some extent, the purpose of knowledge creation/dissemination (maintaining and policing truths), these still take place within existing hierarchies and academic cultures. The mutual reinforcement between ceremonialism and neoliberalism in universities and disciplines represents an important obstacle toward new and inclusive cultures that foster epistemic democratization and pluralism, given how they exacerbate existing hierarchies, elitism, and inequalities. Then, unless change happens within core institutional aspects (both in process and purpose), emerging technologies and social pressures will only reinforce existing challenges.

Second, even though predictions are inconclusive at this stage and generalizing explanations cannot be made, an in-depth analysis of the 3-Ps suggest that the ways in which universities, disciplines, and academic experts will be affected also depends on how research and teaching activities are structured and connected within different communities. Their purpose and positioning contain important differences: while research is largely associated to culture-based activities, symbols of prestige, and positioning (seeking and policing truths) while including an element of “creativity,” teaching is based on sanctions and formal regulations that enable one to become an educator and enter the higher education system to disseminate knowledge through “routine tasks.” Such heterogeneity can also shed light on how particular rights/obligations can be modified or disappear in the face of GAI, monopoly arrangements, and social pressures to democratize the university, which therefore require a significant rethinking of how teaching and research are conceived as socially valuable roles.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Danielle Guizzo

Danielle Guizzo is in the School of Economics at the University of Bristol, United Kingdom. The author thanks (alphabetically) Felipe Almeida, Maríndia Brites, Victor Cruz e Silva, Pavel Kuchar, Tony Lawson, Bárbara Morais, Imko Meyemburg, Mark Pennington, the participants of the “Cambridge Realist Workshop” (University of Cambridge), and the “Symposium on Markets, Power, and the Cultural Production of Knowledge” (supported by the John Templeton Foundation and King’s College London) for comments on earlier versions of this article. The usual disclaimers apply.

Appendix

Figure A1: A Social-Institutional Framework for Understanding Process, Purpose, and Positioning in Academic Knowledge Production