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This is the fucking world. Like it or not it's about putting yourself out there and networking. Doesn't matter how bright you are. I wish it wasn't but it is.
I'm trying to imagine a job where being a disagreeable antisocial recluse is an advantage and I'm coming up blank.
That is hardly the idea the author is trying to give...
IT Business Analyst
IT is super hierarchical and requires immense political skills to get anything done.
Overnight security guard
Owner of Twitter?
To put it bluntly, science costs money, and persuading people who control money to spend that money is itself a skill.
Or, zooming out, science requires resources: physical commodities, equipment, the skilled labor of entire teams. The most effective way to marshal those resources is with money, and management/sales skills are necessary to get those resources working together in concert.
notes down: "capitalism is the problem"
👍
Capitalism is always the problem
Science was political in non-capitalistic societies, as well. That's the point of my second paragraph: science requires resources and however a society steers resources to productive uses, a scientist will need to advocate for their research in order for it to get done.
As someone who can see the flaws in the capitalist model and doesn't agree with it in its current form... This is just silly. In any socioeconomic system there will be limited resources. People will still have to convince those that control the resources to give them the resources. The biggest difference between science in a capitalist system versus in a socialist system is that the end result of the science might benefit the common person more.
For instance: Superfest. Near unbreakable drinking glasses made in Eastern Germany that didn't sell well internationally due to lack of profit potential. Basically, the entire glass industry revolves around the principle that glass can be broken. When your glass breaks, you buy a new one. But if your glass doesn't break then you don't need to buy a new one and therefore you do not. So if everyone buys Superfest then the industry dies since no one needs to buy glass any longer. And this is great for the people, great for the environment, but terrible if you're a profit driven company. But whether it's a state-owned endeavour or a for-profit organization, you'd still need to convince someone to invest in your work.
Going to start you off with Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managerialism
If you've ever heard of "publish or perish", than you've heard of the main outcome of managerialism applied to academia and research. There are many critiques, I won't mention them all. And if you hate bureaucracy, filling out all those endless forms as if your job is to fill out forms, that's because of managerialism. You're writing the inputs for that system to work. That goes for the healthcare system too, and for many others.
What we have put forward in this speaking out essay, is, that in its attempt to counter the apocalyp- tical pictured neoliberal competition, the management of a typical university is responding in a Derridean self-harming reflex of power. The university risks turning itself into a mere corporate factory of publications and diplomas, in which quantity is mistaken for quality and control for freedom, thereby derailing itself further and further from its societal function and orientation. By mimicking a hypercompetition inside the organization in order to adapt to the imaginary of a sur- vival-threatening hypercompetition, the modern university has been turning the competition against itself, resulting in a vicious suicidal circle of repression (Derrida, 2003: 100). Worryingly and sadly, the university, that self-declared bastion of autonomous, free, and critical thinking, has been transforming itself more and more into a remarkably oppressive and straitened bureaucratic organization (McCann et al., 2020). https://dspace.library.uu.nl/bitstream/handle/1874/427450/1350508420975347.pdf?sequence=1 (PDF)
Managerialism is the "capitalist organization science". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management
As managerialism changes the operating paradigm from producing scientific knowledge to "scoring points", there are long-term consequences that lead to the failure of the system. If you don't get the importance of a paradigm shift, read Donella Meadows.