scripts with insight. This could in fact happen if they were to free their
own minds to think about the terms they use rather than robotically
following mandatory conditions. On the side of the academics who
impose, or are felt to impose, this situation, the reasons for their
actions lie in career-building. If students follow their lines, they will
take these with them and help to propagate their viewpoints. If their
advisorisinfluential in a network, the advisor can contrive to seed
various departments with their acolytes and so spread the word. We
are not making any of this up. Observations in the UK system show
that great influence can be wielded by high-ranking academics in
prestigious, old established universities who write references and give
recommendations for jobs to networks of colleagues in other univer-
sities. A kind of oligopoly is thus set up and maintained. Outside of the
UK we have also found by experience that one weapon academics can
wield on a student’s Ph.D. committee is to allow them reluctantly to
passbuttorefusetowritejobreferencesforthem.Theopposite
process occurs too. A professor may ensure that a poor dissertation is
accepted because the student then enters into a clientage relationship
with their sponsor. Voices of disagreement are overridden by a majority
vote, made most feasible when the committee contains, for example, a
married pair and one of their senior clients holding a position in the
same power network. Nepotism to this extent can smother the legiti-
macy of a whole program. Often it is not even that a single theoretical
viewpoint is at work; it can be pure patronage–clientage ties as
leverages of power. It is in this context also that another weapon is at
times deployed, ageism. Senior Faculty who take a different and inde-
pendent view of academic issues are made potential targets for margin-
alization and exclusion from influence, in terms of courses they teach
and in particular access to the training of graduate students through
being Advisors and getting in students who wish to work with them.
Micro-level processes of this kind eventuate into larger scale ones that
produce -isms of various kinds. We hasten again to say that much of this is
how science normally develops. What we wish to stress, however, is that
once a mode of analysis becomes institutionalized it tends to obliterate
other modes if its practitioners are powerful enough. Of course, it is the
practitioners and not the ideas themselves that bring all this about in
pursuit of extending their personal influence. Ideas are not agents, humans
are. Moving around from country to country provides an opportunity to
view this process at work without getting completely pulled into it.
9 AGAINST -ISMS 81