I Like Your Old Stuff Better Than Your New Stuff
A new Futures journal article, current reading, and an archive update.
In this issue:
New Futures Journal Article
Current Reading
Academia.edu Archive Updates
New Futures Journal Article
The Elsevier academic journal Futures has published a new article by me on the book contributions of Foundation Professor Richard Slaughter to futures studies and strategic foresight. The published version is free to download for the next 30 days, or you can read the author accepted manuscript version also for free. You can also read a 2005 article I wrote on Slaughter’'s scholarship, and a 2001 book review of The Foresight Principle. I studied with Slaughter in 2002-04 in Swinburne University of Technology’s former Strategic Foresight program, and during a 2003 internship at the former Australian Foresight Institute. My new journal article covers some of the institutional and university dynamics from this period.
Current Reading
The Book Proposal Book: A Guide for Scholarly Authors by Laura Portwood-Stacer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021). I’m in the process of pitching my 2020 Monash University PhD to an interested academic publisher. Portwood-Stacer’s book demystifies the book proposal process and explains how to consider things like audience, tone, and marketing.
Post Corona: From Crisis To Opportunity by Scott Galloway (New York: Portfolio, 2020). Galloway is a Professor of Marketing at New York University. His book considers the COVID-19 virus and its disruptive impact on the United States such as the stockmarket volatility in early 2020. The book has an interesting section on the future of universities and higher education, due to their (financialised) debt structures and employee cost-cutting.
Dark Academia: How Universities Die by Peter Fleming (London: Pluto Press, 2021). Fleming is a Professor at the University of Technology Sydney who researches the future of work. This is the latest in a series of books on the neoliberal culture of overwork and how it manifests in higher education. Helpful for Early Career Academics to understand some of the structural and the organisational dynamics that they work in.
The Banks Did It: An Anatomy of the Financial Crisis by Neil Fligstein (Boston MA: Harvard University Press, 2021). Fligstein is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California Berkeley and one of the world’s leading sociologists on organisational fields. This is one of several new books that examine the 2007-08 Great Recession or Global Financial Crisis: Fligstein focuses on the crucial role of the mortgage-backed securities market and banks. This book illustrates the kind of empirical research that I hope to do in the future.
Academia.edu Archive Updates
I’m in the process of updating my Academia.edu archive with new and historical content. You can now read all of my 2010-20 PhD documentation from Monash University, including a sample chapter from my embargoed dissertation (for publication reasons), and some researcher development resources. Disinformation website publisher Gary Baddeley has also given permission for me to re-post some of my content - so I will be focusing on the classic era of 1998-2003 that I was involved in (I left The Disinformation Company Ltd in 2008 when my services were no longer required).
Previous Issues and Sites
The Trick Is To Keep Breathing: the academic work environment.
Deaths of Despair: a short note on intergenerational inequality and poverty transmission.
Alex Burns: my professional academic site.
Vega Theory: a regular blog about my research program.
My Academia.edu profile and academic research archive.
My Twitter account with daily updates.