Abstract
How to Fast-track Your Academic Career: A Guide for Mid-Career Researchers is a book that might do exactly what it promises. Depending on your perspective, that is its greatest merit or greatest flaw.
For the most part comprising chapters previously published as editorials in Industrial Marketing Management, the editors and a range of collaborators offer a variety of “how to” guides for academics: how to prioritize one’s time, how to develop good ideas, how to write and revise manuscripts, how to get your research cited, how to put together a promotion dossier, etc. It is unashamedly a self-help book, and—appropriately for the genre—the advice is generic, low-precision and low-context.
When read on its own terms, the advice is not even necessarily bad. I do not think it is “great,” as did another reviewer (Delgado, 2023), but I can understand why one might think so. Arguably, the challenges that mid-career researchers in the modern university face are fairly generic, and so are amenable to correspondingly generic responses.
There is also not much inherently wrong with the underpinning analysis of what it means to have a career in the modern university. Everyone knows that you have to publish often and in highly ranked journals, that you need to get good teaching evaluations, network, get cited, get funded, not upset reviewers. For better or worse, these ideas surprise no one. The stand-out feature of the analysis is its blandness.
What is interesting about the book is the brazenness with which it presents the implications of that analysis. It is saying the quiet part out loud, as it were. Here, for instance, is what the authors say about the value of research: “Research is what builds one’s reputation, and research is necessary for meeting requirements for tenure and promotion. Probably more than any other task, research is transportable: a strong research record can be attractive to other schools and provide opportunities for career advancement through relocation” (p. 39). This is undoubtedly true, but it cannot be the whole story. Did we become academics merely to advance rapidly through the professorial pay scale? Surely we would not tell budding PhD students that this is the purpose of entering the academy? The book does not state outright that ideals—about the cultivation of curiosity, the pursuit of knowledge, the life of the mind, investment in other people’s kids, the betterment of society—are for losers, but it’s hard to avoid reading this as its subtext.
It is as if the author read The Quantified Scholar (Pardo-Guerra, 2022) as the ruleset for a boardgame and then thought long and hard about how to “Moneyball” it, completely ignoring the consequences of this optimization for the game. And there are systemic consequences of the ideas that the book is pushing: declining disruptiveness of science (Park et al., 2023), slowed scientific progress (Chu and Evans, 2021), disincentivization of novelty (Besancenot and Vranceanu, 2024). Indeed, in response to the authors’ own question as to why we don’t see more original, courageous research being published, one might point precisely to books like this as the prime culprits, aided by the numerous seminars and workshops that regurgitate similar advice. It does not seem outrageous to expect a book like this to include reflections on its own side-effects, however unintended.
As individuals, we do not have to buy into this Moneyballed academy (a good place to start would be to not let this book be the book you read). Indeed there are ways to be an academic in the modern university without living in the fast lane (Berg and Seeber, 2016). We should not expect people to abnegate self-interest entirely, but it does not have to be fast-tracking all the way down. We do not have to focus our seminar discussions on publication strategies, or talk about our colleagues in terms of their AJG box-ticking, or push the publish-or-perish imperative on our doctoral students so forcefully. We do still have some measure of latitude to think about the big questions, and to recenter our craft and communities in our work much, much more (e.g. Bechky and Davis, 2025). Individual and collegial efforts do matter.
However, structural problems probably need structural solutions. In this regard, it gives me some hope that in decisions about hiring, promotions and evaluation, schools and departments can contribute to those structural solutions. They do have discretion, even if that discretion is not always exercised. They do not have to hire the longest CV and call it meritocracy—sometimes it is, but other times doing so is myopic and facile. To say that good research in a business school equals what gets published in the AJG or FT50 is stiflingly unimaginative and hardly conducive to bold and courageous environments.
I do not necessarily believe (self-help style) “hacks” can fix a system decades in the making, but there are things we can do when it comes to research evaluation. We should probably stop using Google Scholar citation counts or journal ranking, as described for instance in the San Fransisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). We could foreground curiosity on our assessment practices, stop asking people for work they have published, and start asking for the best ideas they are currently working on. We could foreground judgment and peer review, stop asking for that multi-page publication list, and ask instead for work that shows people at their most original or at the peak of their empirical craft.
Some would say that I am pushing at an open door here, that we are already heading in that direction, and that the book’s journal ranking fetish will soon be anachronistic. The most recent version of the UK’s REF actively discouraged reliance on metrics and rankings, and DORA and similar declarations are proliferating. Alas, at least one study of that most recent REF seems to suggest that the adoption of broader evaluation practices has been largely symbolic and their impact negligible (Morgan-Thomas et al., 2024). So far, “responsible research assessment” looks more like virtue signaling than practice.
I find that bluntly unsurprising. One issue is that these things take time to matter, and another is that declarations are just declarations. Rankings and metrics still hold immense sway over our thinking. While something like the REF might not be “looking at” metrics and ranking, what it assesses is work that got published under their influence. It does not see work that did not get through the review process at “top journals,” or how research was framed in order to get through, or the research agendas that were abandoned because of it, or the work of people who opted out of academia. We still live in the academy of this book’s diagnosis.
Reading How to Fast-track Your Academic Career, I remind myself to stop lamenting the current state of affairs. That all too easily sounds like bellyaching and nostalgia. Instead, there are many good functionalist arguments that need to be made, and made more often, to highlight precisely how the fetishization of rankings and metrics undermines goals that many would, still, surely, want the university to pursue. What we currently have is research for producing careers, not insight, and nobody outside the academy wants that. We know that the research we want depends on tolerance for (early) failure, rewards for long-term success, and freedom to experiment (e.g. Azoulay et al., 2011), and yet that is exactly what the fast academy rules out. We need to talk about the fact that nobody needs the university at the end of this fast track.
