(Professor) Roger Irrelevant

I'm increasingly frustrated with academic writing. There are many reasons for this but two stand out in reference to the research I'm currently doing - which, being in a business school, should be a thousand times more relevant than, say, someone studying the history of pockets.

First, there's the question of relevance. I've just completed a piece of work for the UK government research council examining the extent to which academics meet the research needs of industry. The answer, in a nutshell, is not at all. Don't get me wrong here - I'm not one of the children-of-Thatcher fascists who believe that academic research should be dictated by the economy. It's just that, if academia produces, for example 200 articles (funded by you) on management consultancy, it would be nice if management consultants actually read some of this research - but they don't.

The reason they don't is because our writing in inaccessible, elitist and needlessly complex. Another reason is that when you finally work out what an academic is really trying to say, it is either incredibly obvious (businesses exploit people; organisations make us think certain things) or too boring to warrant anyone else reading it.

Maybe one in every hundred articles I read will actuallyEven if one drops the 'relevance to the economy' criteria beloved of Thatcherites everywhere and seeks instead relevance against moral, social or 'progressive' (as if) criteria, we still fall short. be read by a policy maker and the odds are it will be ignored for the reasons already cited.

It appears that the sole audience for academic writings is....academics. There is a circle of intellectual masturbation by which academics write for other academics who then attempt to "improve" on their writing (more acurately, try to use it to get something published). The flaw in this entire incestuous orgy is that the knowledge social scientists create, unlike real scientists, is not cumulative - social scientists are no closer to understanding society, people or change that they were 100 years ago. They have simply splintered into a miriad of diverse groupings which talk past each other, babel-like, lampooning and misunderstanding in equal measure.

The cause of the problem is two-fold. The first are the funding bodies (and the RAE) which appear to rank highest those journals which are most inaccessible and irrelevant (Organization anyone?). The second is that, virus-like, post-structuralist have spread the theory (and practice) that, as no-one has 'real' interests, there is no point feeding the hungry, clothing the poor or healing the ill, because it is all socially constructed anyway - and it would be demeaning their identities to suggest they should not be happy with their lot.

I'm exaggerating to make a point here. But I think thirty years of postmodern writing has singularly failed to make a difference (or even wanted to). The old Marxists may have had a flawed ontology but at least they manned the baricades