Author: akshay

A good worker is someone who produces so much value that they become irreplaceable.

 

As Cal Newport writes in the book “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” knowledge workers who have the most satisfying careers don’t just “follow their passion”. Instead, they build rare and valuable skills that they leverage to negotiate better career positions.

If you want a satisfying career, become so good at what you do that they cannot ignore you and they cannot replace you. Become irreplaceable.

But when you are a leader, you need to think differently. Leaders do whatever it takes to achieve their vision and make an impact. And one of the things that they have to necessarily do is to make more leaders and make themselves replaceable. If a movement has a single leader – a single point of failure, a bus factor of 1 – that movement is poised to fail when that leader falls. And like all humans, leaders fall.

Good leaders don’t wait for their own end to think about replacing themselves. Good leaders think about replacing themselves from day 1. Because that’s the most sustainable way forward. That’s the way things scale out of control.

If you want a successful movement, become replaceable and replace yourself as soon as you can.

PS: I’ve deliberately not talked about the intersection between leaders and workers. I believe good leaders have to necessarily be good workers. That’s an implementation detail I will cover in a future blog post.

Well kempt, clean shaven man dressed in a coat, pant, shoes, and a tie. That’s the typical figure of leadership. Anarchists hate that. Feminists hate that. Why should leadership look a certain way and act a certain way? Who is excluded from the ideal image of a leader?

In medical school, for example, it was me against the white coat. I hate white coat for it is a symbol of power. For those who think there are practical advantages of white coat, I am talking about the white coat that doctors wear in out-patient consultation rooms, for photo-ops, and even for doing theory lectures. Why should doctors use this uniform of power in such situations?

They are building on stereotypes. The white coat has certain stereotypes associated with it. That built by generations of doctors who have lived earlier. By wearing a white coat they’re saying – “I am a part of this legacy. The respect you have for this legacy, give me that.”

But stereotypes (biases) are the reason why the world is full of problems. Sexism, casteism, racism, colonialism – everything is built on stereotypes.

How do you tap into the benefits of stereotypes on one hand (reinforcing those stereotypes while doing so) and yet fight these large issues on the other hand? It is a contradictory position. Which is why activists (anarchists, feminists) make political statements with their body. Women cut hair, men grow long hair. Those who can grow beard, grow it long. They wear chappals. They wear Burka. They show up in places where they are not expected. They show up in ways that break stereotypes. Because breaking stereotypes is a political tool.

I too found the logic that a doctor should present themselves as “smart” (by shaving clean, etc) unreasonable. Why should doctors care about the biases of the patient? More importantly, if that’s the direction we go, then what about patients who are biased against women doctors, or black doctors, or Dalit doctors?

One of the biggest arguments against this all-or-nothing fight against biases is that there are things one can control and things one can’t – I can’t change which family I was born into, but I can shave my facial hair – and that only the biases against things one can’t change need to be removed from society; that it is fair to be biased against things that are in one’s control.

Fat shaming is a grey area then. Some people can’t grow thin and it is out of their control. For some it might be possible, but how do we know it is possible?

What about clothing? Is it in one’s control? Does everyone have access to all kinds of clothing? That’s when some people say that dressing smart is not about wearing expensive clothes, but about wearing clothes smartly. They are thinking about leaders who wear cotton kurtas or saris.

Nevertheless surely, everyone can afford a shaving blade, a mirror, and some water, right? So it is in one’s control? What about those who have religious beliefs against shaving?

Suffice to say, I’m not completely convinced by the separation between biases based on controllable features and uncontrollable features. For one, biases aren’t always nuanced. A bias doesn’t take into account the background of the person whom you’re biased against/for. A bias is difficult to reason with.

To me, this is sufficient reason to fight against all biases.

But that’s where pragmatism entered my life. Sure, we should fight against all biases. But, is personally breaking stereotypes the most effective form of fighting biases? Also should we only do bias-fighting? Aren’t there other battles too?

When one looks at this larger picture, the problem becomes more about what our goals are and what the most ethical and effective ways to reach our goals are.

And therein I have to measure on a balance the pros and cons of using individual attributes to harvest biases vs the pros and cons of breaking stereotypes using body politics.

That’s how I decided to shave beard.

PS: See also the clothing choices of BR Ambedkar and MK Gandhi

There are enough number of people in the world who will tell you that the world is becoming “increasingly polarized”, that respectful political debate is “a thing of the past”, that people talk past each other “all the time”.

You will also be forced to pick a side. “You’re either with us or against us.”

These ideas come from a binary understanding of the world. By looking at things from a single dimension. Even in that dimension, the middle ground is stripped and only the two extremes remain as options.

How do I know? Because I’ve straddled that path, found it unlivable, and found a better alternative.

I must thank Adam Grant for the book “Think Again” which helped me with timely insights while I was going through this journey. And I would recommend it to you (along with Eugenia Cheng’s x + y).

So, what’s the answer?

The short answer is that you shouldn’t worry a lot.

The long answer is fairly complicated. Let’s first go through some axioms.

The human world is complex and chaotic

Chaos meaning nothing is predictable. And complex meaning we don’t yet know what to make of things. Economists, sociologists, stock market analysts – people who work very closely with the human world – are the most successful if they embrace this complexity and chaos. Adam Grant gives the example of the election forecaster who predicted that Donald Trump would become President of the United States much before anyone else did. The reason?

“The single most important driver of forecasters’ success was how often they updated their beliefs. The best forecasters went through more rethinking cycles. They had the confident humility to doubt their judgments and the curiosity to discover new information that led them to revise their predictions.”

This is so because the world is very chaotic and unpredictable. At best we can predict things just before things are going to happen – only if we are constantly holding our beliefs to scrutiny.

It is not that nothing can be predicted. There are several things which will follow patterns – but in controlled settings, where all the confounding variables have been controlled. And we can’t isolate all confounding variables in the real world.

This is the reason smart people in public health research use tools like realist evaluation framework.

This is why it is useful to think of the world in terms of complex adaptive systems.

Simple, pure points are rarely correct

Even if Twitter didn’t have character limits, people would choose simple straightforward “pure” intellectual positions. These are easier to articulate, easier to think about, and easier to argue for/against.

But if a point is being made about the real world and it doesn’t capture the nuance of the chaos and complexity then chances are high that the point is incorrect or at least incomplete.

Almost all perspectives are correct

This doesn’t contradict the previous point. Different people look at things from different perspectives. The human brain is amazingly capable in that it sums up all the experiences it has had in the past when looking at an issue – and it does this automatically. Each perspective that a human brings to any conversation is a summary of that person’s entire life experience – even if they aren’t conscious of it.

The secret is in finding the convergence of differing viewpoints. Before we discuss that, we will discuss the reason why there seem to be irreconcilable differences.

Brain’s ability to reason and articulate such reasons is far too limited

Our brain produces incredible insights through “gut feeling”. But when it comes to explaining these or articulating the exact feeling, it falters. This is based in neurobiology. Reasoning is a brain function that is different from the decision making function. Therefore, while our brain maybe excellent in making certain decisions, it could be very poor in articulating the reason for those decisions. This is not just a deficiency of language. It is also a symptom of how nuanced our brain’s responses are – and how it summarizes one’s life experiences. It is much easier to do things than to explain why. Even if one beautifully explains why, the explanation would probably not have captured the complete picture.

Disagreements result from lack of nuance

When different perspectives are seemingly irreconcilable, the reason is that they’re articulated in simple, pure ways which conceal the underlying (reconcilable) shared values. If people are able to pour their insides out, they’ll find that everyone is looking forward to achieving essentially the same things. One perspective might consider an “obtuse point” as “checks and balance”, while another perspective considers those checks as the “main thing”.

Also, everyone doesn’t have the same set of life experiences. Therefore, one person’s nuance will be missing in another person’s nuance. It is often helpful to figure out the life experiences that someone brings in which leads them to a particular nuance. Because when you put several different experiences together (and experience those, even second hand), you get to produce better nuanced positions.

What to do with these axioms?

Think like a scientist. Adam Grant uses these exact words. But that’s also what MK Gandhi used to do. Think like you’re perpetually seeking the truth. Look for answers everywhere. Take every perspective as an empirical observation. And expand your theory to fit those observations (bring nuance). Everyone has theories about the world (that’s how our brain works). Make your theory all encompassing. That way, you won’t have opponents at all – you’ll only have a theory that accounts for nuances. Don’t be scared to get into debates. But get into debates with an intention to expand your view. (Of course, social conventions apply.) Watch other people argue and while you grab popcorn, also grab your microscope to analyze why different people are saying different things. Ask clarifying questions. Make it not about you or them, make it about the “truth”. And remember that the truth is probably more nuanced than anyone can ever understand.

PS: This view of nuance unsettles a lot of people with strong opinions. They get scared that such “pragmatism” means a corruption of morals and politics. But, what I’ve experienced is that it is possible to fight a stronger fight when you’re able to find flaws in your own political positions – and address them proactively. It also helps in building bridges with “opposition” – because you would not have a large number in the opposition anyhow. It is also severely practical. It accomplishes a lot more than a purist politics.

I’m sure you have something to add. Comments are welcome. I will add the nuance you bring into my theory 😀

One can be a leader only when one desires something to happen in the world. This something can be called “change”. Leaders want to change the world (or a part of it) in some way.

The change that a leader wants to see in the world – the impact they want to make – that is their vision.

Having a random vision isn’t very helpful. A successful leader has a vision that is borne out of the needs and wants of the humans around them. A vision that is rooted in humanity. One that benefits the human kind.

A leader effectively communicates this vision to others, in an attempt to inspire others to work towards the same vision. The quantity of how much a leader is able to inspire action could be the measure of someone’s leadership.

Such communication can occur in many ways – through talking (sometimes even story-telling), writing, or through setting examples. When a vision is completely new, leaders are forced to communicate more verbally. But when the vision has already been articulated (by other leaders, for example), leaders can inspire by setting examples through their own work.

Change requires work (often hard work). One person can only do so much work. Leaders create coalitions with people to get more work done towards their vision. These coalitions can look like organizations, companies, networks, groups, actual coalitions, etc. We could call them movements. Leaders lead movements.

Movements may have strategies, planning, coordination, structure. And these keep evolving with time, based on the real world position of the movement.

At this point, one may ask, is leadership hierarchical? Should there be one leader (or a hierarchy of leaders) for one movement?

Before we answer that we will have to answer a related question – Is everyone a leader?

The romantic answer to this question is that everyone is a leader. But that’s similar to saying all human beings are equal. Everyone can be a leader given the right circumstances. And everyone should be a leader. But everyone is not a leader. One becomes a leader only when one is able to accomplish a vision through leadership as stated before.

When one looks at leadership with such raw sincerity, we will see that the stronger leaders automatically are able to get more work done and a hierarchy is inevitable no matter how hard we try to avoid it. Saying this hierarchy doesn’t exist is like erasing caste/race/class from our society.

A slightly more romantic way to look at it is by imaging every individual as a leader of their own movement – where movements overlap with each other significantly. Each individual can be thought of as a celestial body with their mass (leadership capacity) determining how much gravitational pull they exert towards their vision on the people around them. The most massive leader will have the strongest pull.

Consequently, if everyone are equal leaders, there would be no hierarchies and vice versa.

There are social, economic, and political determinants for any individual’s leadership mass. Someone born with privileges – of caste, gender, sexuality, class, race, disability, and others – might find that their leadership mass is already greater than someone without those privileges. In many situations, for example, money speaks. And someone with money – or access to money – might have it easier to “lead” others. Social capital is another example.

Leadership mass can increase (and decrease) over time. This can happen through education, scholarship, credentials, affiliations, positions, jobs, work, association, mobilization, agitation, talking, writing, creativity, relationships, etc. Even gaining a follower base on Twitter can increase someone’s leadership mass (through psychology of mass appeal).

This leadership mass is called “power” in the formal language. While vision determines the direction a leader pulls people in, power determines how strong the pull will be. It is impossible to be a leader without power (of some or the other kind).

This is where things get intensely human and psychological. Power works through human emotions. Fear, love, hatred, joy, laziness, anger, sorrow, confidence, trust, aggression, etc. But not every human has the same emotion when confronted with the same stimulus. An anti-establishmentarian will look at you with scorn when you tell them that you’re from the ministry (of whatever) whereas someone who is awed by such positions will be psychologically receptive to what you want to say. It is safe to say that most people will be pulled by mainstream sources of power (because majority acceptance is what makes these sources mainstream).

Effective leadership thereby also becomes a performance. Like doctors need to be chameleons and be the doctor that each patient needs, leaders will have to be the leader that each individual needs. If someone is motivated by solving complex challenges, the leader can get them excited by presenting their vision as a complex challenge. If someone is interested in creative expression, leader can find avenues for creative expression that advances their vision.

At this point, the conscientious reader will ask whether leadership is emotional manipulation.

Manipulation has negative connotations. Perhaps “emotional guidance” captures the nuance of what leadership does with emotions. Leadership is about emotionally guiding people. There can be effective leaders with selfish motives and they can turn this into manipulation and abuse. But you can’t blame any individual for being too sincere towards their own vision, albeit a bad one.

Also, the human mind is trapped such that it can never be free of influences. Everything that happens, every interaction, every thought, every idea – everything changes the mind. And therefore, the only way someone can never “manipulate” your thoughts is by never coming in contact with you.

The same reader will also ask whether this view of leadership considers people (followers) as lacking agency (autonomy).

In this world, nobody has complete agency. Every human is delicately dependent on other human beings in this society. Complete independence is not possible for any human. And therefore, a transactional view of individual relationships where every relationship is that of giving and taking models the society in a better way.

Considering the sensitive nature of the relationship that a leader has with others, it is very important that leaders are empathetic and emotionally intelligent. Leaders must be quick to identify an emotion, to label it, and to address it. That includes self-awareness and awareness of one’s own emotions. They need to think of things from the perspective of multiple others and bring those perspectives together in their vision.

This empathy also gives leaders humility. That they do not know all the answers, and that their answers have to include all the perspectives from people around them. That if the answers did not entrench empathy this way, they wouldn’t be able to achieve their vision. That it is unlikely that one human being’s vision is greater than everyone else’s.

An intense desire to create more and more powerful leaders around them arises in leaders from this humility. They see that the world is better served by a multitude of visions and that for each vision to succeed there must be leaders taking those visions forward. They strive to turn people around them into leaders who can pull weight. That’s how the best leadership is scalable – by being infectious.

When enough leaders pull weight in the same direction, no vision is too far to achieve.

Why does the world need leaders to pull though? Can’t well articulated vision statements automatically attract people?

Inertia is the problem. Human beings are resistant to change – individually and as a society. It might be explained by evolutionary psychology. Human beings have evolved past the stage where they need to be held hostage by biology, yet we are biological beings. And we are not rational beings by design.

If we were rational we wouldn’t have problems like global warming, poverty, and war in our world.

Leaders appeal to both the irrational and the rational sides of human beings at once. That’s how they pull people out of their inertia. Once people are moving, systems move too. Especially if you pull the heavier people.

Leaders, hence, are balancing-artists. They have to handle conflicts all the time and find balance. There is strategy, but there is vision. There is rationality and irrationality. There is movement and there is stasis. There are tensions and counter-tensions. There is pressure to lead and pressure to follow. Leaders make judgement calls all the time. They can go wrong many times. And over time the number of right calls decide whether they become effective leaders or not.

Is leadership a teachable/learnable skill?

Leadership requires a lot of practice. But it is also important to know what to practice. That is where the learning/teaching part of leadership lies. There are plenty of books written about leadership. Plenty of stories to read and learn from. Concepts like “ownership”, “thinking big”, “delivering”. Almost every major (successful) organization has leadership principles which have been documented. Exposure to leadership philosophies can accelerate someone’s growth as a leader. Consuming content about leadership helps think in different ways and gain new perspectives.

What now?

Think about whether you have a vision for the world. Think about how effective you are as a leader in taking the world towards that vision. Talk to people around you about leadership. Read. Find avenues for your own growth as a leader. Find people with similar values and vision. Grow each other. Grow yourself. And change the world.

In my post about giving up ideological purism, I talked about how it felt like activism was weak resistance, and not something powerful. I still hadn’t discovered an answer as to how to engage with and change the system powerfully. I have an answer now.

Power.

To make powerful change, one has to have power. Thinking about power as an anathema is not helpful.

The first place I saw this articulated unambiguously is in a tweet thread by Jonathan Smucker. Jonathan talks in no uncertain terms about how “Knowledge of what is wrong with a social system and knowledge of how to change the system are two completely different categories of knowledge.”

That’s true. And that’s where I was wrong too.

What’s wrong with the system (from my perspective) is concentration of power in the hands of a few. My naive solution to this was to fight power itself. To not pick up power. To disown and discredit power. But it was indeed naive. One can’t defeat power structures by shying away from power.

The rest of Jonathan’s thread is about how to organize politically and gain power. There was an article linked by someone else in reply about how to use words like “Power” and “Money” with transformational meaning.

From the little I know, Ambedkar also was a proponent of this method. Ambedkar asked people to “educate, agitate, organize”. Ambedkar was essentially laying down the blueprint on how to change the system.

Today I had a chat with Prashanth
on these same topics. Through many examples, daktre articulated the
same idea, although daktre used the words “legitimacy” and spoke through
the field of academics and the power that academic work lends you.

Daktre could also identify what was holding me back. The ambition of wanting to make large impact AND be perfect at the same time. The desire to make huge changes to the world (savior complex, but in an extreme scale) is fine. But the desire to be perfect while doing so is what causes problems. What if one is willing to let go of the want to be perfect? What if one is ready to make compromises in return of accomplishing a larger goal? One might personally become “blemished”, might get called out for being a hypocrite. But in the larger picture, one might be able to accomplish more.

Yesterday Swathi and I were having a conversation over our lives and Swathi mentioned how it is screwed up to think that we can make large impact, that we can accomplish all we want. I was resisting by saying that we can indeed make large impact, we just have to find a way.

I think the path in front of me is clear. Embrace pragmatism. Gain power. Wield it carefully. Be willing to make compromises (and be called out by others for it). Helpful to keep a group of close friends who can call out quickly. Don’t think of myself as the complete and perfect solution. Think of myself only as a piece of a larger solution.

Now I know why Anivar was asking me to get a PhD. I think I won’t take the academic route to power. I’m looking towards the entrepreneurial route. Let us see where we reach.

In debates around reservation and merit, there is a recurring pattern.

First, someone will say “There is no level playing field. Someone starts from privilege, someone starts from lack of it. Therefore, merit is just privilege.”

Then, the opponent will say “What makes you think I’m privileged? My parents struggled to make their ends meet. I burned the midnight oil.”

The first person says “Do you know what inter-generational trauma that people from X background goes through?”

Then the opponent will say “Well, but the beneficiaries of reservation are from well off families”

This debate goes circularly with both sides saying they’re being unreasonable.

That’s when someone else will come in and say “Reservation is not a poverty alleviation measure, it is about representation”

That particular argument has a lot going on in it, which I’ll try to unpack here.

***

Is merit a result of privilege?

This is complicated by two things – we don’t know how to objectively define merit, and we don’t know how to objectively measure privileges.

What is merit? Is merit the ability to score very high marks in an exam with multiple choice questions? Is merit the ability to use language very fluently? Is merit the ability to impress an interviewer? Is merit the ability to get a job done in real world? Merit could be defined as any of these. Who should define this? That’s a tough question.

What about privilege? Is privilege one’s economic status? Is privilege one’s social capital? Gender? Caste? Ability? Skin-tone? Body shape? Which of the countless things that gives a person an advantage in the society should be counted towards one’s total privilege? And how should their influence be added up? Which ones should be given more weight and which ones less? This is probably the subject of what is called Oppression Olympics.

Both of these questions can be answered definitively in very subjective ways. But, it is next to impossible to arrive at a public consensus on such answers. Nevertheless, the discussions around these are very educational and thought-provoking. And discussions can happen even if consensus cannot be reached.

***

What’s the importance of the statement “Reservation is not a poverty alleviation measure, it is about representation”?

It shifts the perspective from the subjective field of defining merit and measuring privilege into the objective field of representative democracy and distributive justice.

Not that that comes without questions. The questions shift to “What is democracy?”, “What is justice?”

What is democracy? The naive answer to this is that democracy is rule of the majority. But that’s not democracy. That’s an elective monarchy – where the majority elects a monarch and the monarch rules over the subjects in an authoritarian fashion. Democracies stand in contrast to such monarchies. Democracies are founded on values – equality, justice, liberty, fraternity, etc. That there are elections in democracies is just a side effect of these founding principles.

That’s where the value “justice” comes in. What is justice? Justice is possibly a subjective matter as well. But it can be (circularly) defined as “fairness”. What is fairness? It is easy to jump from here to the earlier point and say “Someone who has struggled should be rewarded – is fairness”. But that’s a very individualistic view of fairness. The questions around reservation are not about individuals. It is about the democracy. For a democracy to be fair, it has to distribute power and resources among its citizens in a way that is “fair”. And at the level of the nation, that involves distributing power to socially marginalized sections of the society. That is justice.

***

See how switching from the discussion on individual privileges to that of democratic justice gives lesser loopholes for people to endlessly argue on?

In that perspective, when you look at merit, you don’t see merit as privilege. You don’t say that “What we call merit is just accumulated privilege.” Instead, you see it as entitlement. You say “What entitles you to claim that your “merit” should be considered above the values of our democracy?”

That, arguably, is a stronger way to make the case for justice.

In the debates around “merit”, the conservatives have a very straightforward view – “hierarchy is natural, one should only care about oneself and getting ahead in one’s life”. The liberals, on the other hand, are the confused bunch. They have a hatred for hierarchy, but they live and breathe hierarchy too. They hate that people get ahead of others without caring for others, but they are compelled to do the same too.

And conservatives are quick to spot this. They will ask the liberal who talks about equity – “Why do you hold on to your privileges and ask others to give up theirs?”

I think they have a point. Why do liberals hold on to their privileges and ask others to give up theirs?

In x + y, Eugenia Cheng talks about how the world is set up for competition. That the world rewards those who do not care about others and in turn those who don’t care for others “succeed”. And Eugenia Cheng also urges us to look for solutions all around us, to try and convert competitions into collaborations.

But how many liberals are actually able to do that?

Aren’t liberals using their accumulated privileges to accumulate more privileges?

Aren’t liberals continuing in power hierarchies without destroying the hierarchy?

Aren’t liberals legitimizing the very structures they hold responsible for the problems?

Aren’t liberals trying to get ahead of others? Aren’t they competing? Aren’t they reinforcing the very notions of merit that they oppose?

If liberals don’t change how they live their life, why would conservatives do?

Even if the cost of journals were low and affordable, open access to scientific knowledge is the ethically correct and practically useful position for humankind.

Internet has made publishing costs near zero.

Why do journals still continue to exist? And why are they so expensive to society?

A common defense of journals is that “peer review” is important to ensure scientific integrity. We know from Retraction Watch and Pubpeer that peer review is not perfect. We also know how peer review can reinforce social inequities. 

We have an alternate model too – post-publication peer review. After all, what is peer review if not the entire world reviewing an article and weighing it for its pros and cons? Can reviewer 1 and reviewer 2 do better than that?

In the editorial ‘Open’ relationships: reflections on the role of the journal in the contemporary scholarly publishing landscape the authors state that there are a few more reasons why journals exist:

“One could optimistically assert that a journal can be multiple: both a brand, with a value indicated by the impact factor and the level of income it can generate for a corporate publisher on the one hand, and on the other, the home of a community of scholars with a history and (we hope) a future of pushing the frontiers of scholarship in public health.”

It goes without saying that there is a conflict of interest here because it is an editorial. And therefore let us critically examine the reasons the editors propose to justify their own existence.

Are journals a brand with a value indicated by impact factor and income? Absolutely. Yes. Journals are blogs. But they are decades old. Sure, in “blogs”, peer review is rare. But platforms like medium.com, and ghost.org do allow private publication that can be reviewed by others. If peer review is a genuine need for which authors publish in journals, there are countless ways to achieve that through the internet using blogs, etc (combining with post-publication peer review as described earlier).

Peer review is just a facade. It is the “impact factor” and the “brand” that authors use journals for.

The reason why we should end the meritocracy of impact factor is the subject of a recent editorial (irony intended): The merit privilege: examining dubious claims of merit in public health and public policy

Now, let us come to the only remaining argument for journals. 

Are journals a community of scholars with a history, who push the frontiers of scholarship?

First I’ll make the assertion that the editorial doesn’t include any citations on this claim. They use their belief and self-selected appreciation from readers to base this claim on. But I will take their word for it. Let us assume that people do appreciate this specific journal. But the editorial starts with the question “What are academic journals for?” We cannot generalize the experience of the editorial team of one journal to all academic journals. Therefore let us examine this claim more objectively.

First, we will examine whether it is reasonable for a community of scholars who share a history to work together.

We do know that human beings are very social. Shared history gives a shared sense of purpose and shared sense of identity. But it can also come with disadvantages. Identity as a group has the tendency to create conflicts with people outside the group. There is also chance for nepotism and favoritism. While scrutiny and skepticism is good for academic rigor, nepotism and favoritism are not good. So, shared history can be advantageous and problematic.

The next question is whether frontiers of scholarship is pushed by communities. Communities reinforce the beliefs of each other and help people go to extremes. And it is at the extremes that scholarship needs to be pushed. But communities can also reinforce falsehoods and false methodologies. We know in psychological experiments that humans tend to conform rather than stand out. Communities could cause this effect too. It can make people take less risks for the fear of being ousted from communities. Again, pushing frontier through communities has disadvantages and advantages.

Now let us come to the most important question. Are journals communities?

My answer is that they aren’t.

Wikipedia says that a community “is a social unit (a group of living things) with commonality such as norms, religion, values, customs, or identity.”

What is the commonality among groups around journals?

One might be tempted to say that the group has a common vision – the vision that the journal articulates.

But in my experience, most journals have a broad vision that makes them non-unique.

For example, let us take the journal from which the editorial is quoted:

Critical Public Health (CPH) is an international peer reviewed journal publishing critically engaged research in public health, health promotion and related fields.

Critical Public Health provides a dedicated forum for innovative analyses of theory and practice and to explore new ways of thinking about public health, bringing together international scholarship from social scientists and health researchers.

The journal explores issues of equity, power, social justice and oppression in health and covers contemporary empirical and theoretical work from a wide range of disciplines including anthropology, sociology, politics, cultural studies, health studies, medicine, psychology and nursing.

Now, this is a broad vision that I subjectively think most journals in public health will have. So I went to google and search “public health journal” and came up with the aims & scopes of some other journals.

Here are some.

European Journal of Public Health

The European Journal of Public Health is a multidisciplinary journal in the field of public health, publishing contributions from social medicine, epidemiology, health services research, management, ethics and law, health economics, social sciences, and environmental health.

The journal provides a forum for discussion and debate of current international public health issues with a focus on the European region

Global Public Health

 Global Public Health is an international journal that publishes research on public health including the social and cultural aspects of global health issues.

Global Public Health addresses public health issues that come to the fore in the global environment, such as epidemics of newly emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, the globalization of trade and the increase in chronic illnesses.

The journal is characterized by a global and multidisciplinary focus, its emphasis on significant global health issues and its concern to understand resource-poor and resource-rich countries including the public health challenges they face as part of a single, interacting and global system.

Journal of Community Health

The Journal of Community Health, a peer-reviewed publication, offers original articles on the practice, teaching, and research of community health. Coverage includes preventive medicine, new forms of health manpower, analysis of environmental factors, delivery of health care services, and the study of health maintenance and health insurance programs. Serving as a forum for the exchange of ideas and clarification, the journal features articles on projects that make a significant impact on the education of health personnel.

BMC Public Health

BMC Public Health is an open access, peer-reviewed journal that considers articles on the epidemiology of disease and the understanding of all aspects of public health. The journal has a special focus on the social determinants of health, the environmental, behavioral, and occupational correlates of health and disease, and the impact of health policies, practices and interventions on the community. BMC Public Health does not publish clinical research: this should be submitted to the relevant BMC Series medical journal.

Of course you wouldn’t find an article about public health in the Nature journal or a paper about cellular pathways in a public health journal. But within each broad field of “public health”, “life science”, “medicine” there are many journals with similar aims & scope. So, I do not think the aims & scope of a journal are unique to a journal.

Nevertheless, as the editorial claims, it might be possible to build a shared history around a particular journal’s aims & scopes.

In fact, I know a few such journals. The Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, for example has a very vibrant community with people who have a shared history in the public health movement of India. But here is a very important thing about IJME:

 As a policy, since its inception, the IJME has never charged authors for publication of their writings, and all material available on the website of the journal is free and offers open access to all

How is IJME possible to publish all articles as open access through just donations? My answer is that they have a real community behind them.

In essence, it is indeed possible to build a community with shared history through a journal – through a democratic spirit of openness and accessibility.

But is this generalizable across all academic journals? My hunch is that it is not. My hunch is that most academic journals have a group of editors who care for the chance to build a community like that, but cannot do so by design.

If journals could truly form communities, they wouldn’t struggle with the problem of underrepresentation.

If journals could truly form communities, they wouldn’t have to make meritocratic excuses like “the underrepresented are underrepresented because they do not have the privilege to volunteer time or because they do not fulfill the prerequisite of a broad network”

Journals are part of a feudalistic system. One where the title of the journal is owned by a publisher (the feudal lord), who give powers to a set of editors (vassals) in return of profit (fief), and the authors have no choice other than writing articles in these journals (serfs). The only difference, one might say, is that serfs in the academic publication industry have the mobility to change journals. But wherever they go, they are serfs indeed.

If this is true, this also gives us a way out of this feudalistic system. Here’s a paragraph from a law library article:

Predictably, the relationship between lord and vassal became a struggle for a reduction in the services required by the fief. Lords, as vassals of the king, joined their own vassals in revolt against the high cost of the feudal arrangement. In England, this struggle culminated in the MAGNA CHARTA, a constitutional document sealed by King John (1199–1216) in 1215 that signaled the beginning of the end for feudalism. The Magna Charta, forced on King John by his lords, contained 38 chapters outlining demands for liberty from the Crown, including limitations on the rights of the Crown over land.

As seen in the CPH editorial, there is already tension between publishers and editorials. Publishers are also in a strained relationship with the King (through initiatives like Plan-S). The logical conclusion is that within a few years, there will be a revolution where the right to own knowledge will be taken away from the academic industry and be given back to the producers of knowledge themselves.

Until then, the current generation of journals will try to justify their existence.