Leadership changes amount to little more than a rearrangement of positions within a system whose underlying incentives remain substantially unchanged.
university system: status brokerage
Leadership changes amount to little more than a rearrangement of positions within a system whose underlying incentives remain substantially unchanged.
This is how a system built to produce knowledge becomes a system for reproducing the conditions under which its existing knowledge remains authoritative.
What we call strategy in world events is almost never that. Significant historical events are routinely narrated as the product of careful planning, institutional continuity, and deliberate intent, yet the public record more reliably shows decisions taken under pressure, justified after the fact, and sustained long after anyone can clearly explain why they began. Narratives […]
Diagnostic minimalism is the necessary opening move in any serious encounter with a communications system that looks impossibly complex and yet, because of that same complexity, repeatedly falls back into rudimentary behaviour; before adding theory, metaphor, or moral posture, one subtracts, removes inherited ontological furniture, suspends the reflex to personalise what is structural, and asks […]
What strikes me most about the current president of the United States is a strange inversion that would be almost comic if it were not so consequential. He shows little regard for the role he occupies, scant respect for the law, and no evident commitment to the country beyond what it can deliver to him […]
Academic publishing has become (but perhaps always was) a hall of self-congratulatory mirrors and narcissistic pomp. What passes for validation is too often citation upon citation, a chain of references with no ground beneath it. The rhetoric of fact-checking and peer review masks a system that rewards repetition (and compliance), not discovery, and hierarchy, not […]