Peer Review, Paradigm, Paralysis
When the cycle of paradigms was alive in Geography, editors used other quality control techniques than “peer review.”
(A shorter X-thread version of the points made in this post)
Nothing influential in 20th century academic Geography went through modern anonymous peer review. With every interesting and paradigm-launching work, the quality control mechanism was a knowledgeable editor who had total, “monarchical” authority over publication—an editor-monarch who did not outsource thinking, judgment and authority to anonymous reviewers.
This of course is shocking for younger academics who have no memory of life before the present quality control norm. They can only imagine that if the today’s quality control system didn’t prevail, then the work must have been very sloppy.
By the way, did you know that Einstein (1905) was not subject to modern-style blind peer review?
By the way, did you know that a lot of articles today, like Psychology articles based on fraudulant p-hacked data, nonreproducible experiments, and ideological clout-chasing, passed peer review with flying colors?
But back to Geography. In no particular order:
David Harvey, Limits to Capital (1982) — Authority with the editor. Authority not transferred to blind peer review.
David Harvey, Social Justice in the City (1973) — Authority with editor. Authority not transferred to blind peer review.
Neil Smith, Uneven Development (1984) — Authority with editor. Authority not transferred to blind peer review.
Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia (1974) — Authority with editor. Authority not transferred to blind peer review.
Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place (1977) — Authority with editor. Authority not transferred to blind peer review.
JK Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) (1996) — Authority with editor. Authority not transferred to blind peer review.
Anne Buttimer, Values in Geography (1976) — Authority with editor. Authority not transferred to blind peer review.
Carl Sauer, Morphology of Landscape (1925) — Authority with editor. Authority not transferred to blind peer review.
Halford Mackinder, “Geographic Pivot of History” (1904) — Authority with editor. Authority not transferred to blind peer review.
Halford Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919) — Authority with editor. Authority not transferred to blind peer review.
Sven Hedin, Trans-Himalaya (1909) — Authority with editor. Authority not transferred to blind peer review.
Ellsworth Huntington, Pulse of Asia (1907) — Authority with editor. Authority not transferred to blind peer review.
Ellen Semple, Influences of Geographic Environment (1911) — Authority with editor. Authority not transferred to blind peer review.
Torsten Hägerstrand, “Innovation Diffusion as a Spatial Process” (1967) — Authority with editor. Authority not transferred to blind peer review.
William Bunge, Theoretical Geography (1962) — Authority with editor. Authority not transferred to blind peer review.
William Bunge, Fitzgerald (1966) — Authority with editor. Authority not transferred to blind peer review.
Waldo Tobler, “A Computer Movie Simulating Urban Growth” (1970) — Authority with editor. Authority not transferred to blind peer review.
Nikolas Spykman, Geography of the Peace (1944) — Authority with editor. Authority not transferred to blind peer review.
Isaiah Bowman, The New World (1944) — Authority with editor. Authority not transferred to blind peer review.
Ed Soja, Postmodern Geographies (1944) — Authority with editor. Authority not transferred to blind peer review.
David Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity (1989) — Authority with editor. Authority not transferred to blind peer review.
Henri Lefebvre, Production of Space (1974) — Authority with editor. Authority not transferred to blind peer review.
William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis (1991) — Authority with editor. Authority not transferred to blind peer review.
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel (1997)— Authority with editor. Authority not transferred to blind peer review.
You get the idea. Our modern sense of peer review, where it’s blind and where the editor is essentially transferring authority away from himself or herself, and towards the anonymous reviewers, is an invention of the 1960s. The former system was that the editor was the monarch of the little barony-sized project of publishing the author’s book or article. The monarch had a network of advisors, equals (other editor-monarchs), and friends, but was also knowledgeable and had sufficient confidence in their knowledge that they didn’t leak authority away from themselves.
In the new system, the editor is a coordinator of anonymous reviewers: an accountant of good reviews vs. bad reviewers. In many presses and journals (the good ones) the editor retains an old-fashioned capacity to dismiss reviews which are negative or positive on grounds the editor deems spurious. Some editors retain the privilege of “deeming.” However, it is impossible for an editor in the new system to say “all of the reviews were negative but they were negative in a way I actually like and deem to be signals of good innovation.”
Now, this modern setup for quality control, though invented in the 60s within the hard sciences, didn’t really become predominant in the culturalist social sciences like Geography and Anthropology until the 1990s (this timing is more or less the case with the Humanities disciplines as well). I think that many academics of the Millennial and maybe even Gen-X generations do not grasp just how new and contrived this quality control regime, which we’ve been dealing with during our whole 21st century careers, really is. We younger acacademics are not so much like “fish who can’t see the water” as like “fish who can’t see they’ve been scooped out of the ocean and put into a little tank.”
As with the IRB, blind peer review is something which is presented during PhD training as “natural” (“this is just how our profession works”). But this “natural” thing is actually quite recent and is basically an experiment. Also as with the IRB (which I’ll focus on properly in some future post), this experiment has been running for a few decades now, and in the mid 2020s we have some clear patterns in what the real results have been.
In Geography: No Capacity for Paradigm Shift. Ideology Frozen in Permafrost. Zombification.
When the editor was king, Geography had paradigms; it had paradigm shifts. Thomas Kuhn’s understanding of healthy cycles in scientific reasoning more or less applied to the story of Geography. In anglosphere acacemic Geography in the 20th century, the paradigms were Environmental Determinism, Geopolitik, Humanism, the Quantitative Revolution, and the Critical Turn. Anomalies would build up in the reigning paradigm and eventually a new paradigm capable of explaining the anomalies and/or addressing itself at new questions entirely would come about. Anyone in the anglosphere who got a B.A. or grad degree in Geography in the 2000s or 2010s probably learned something about these paradigms and how one gave way to the other. (I get the sense that this intellectual history isn’t taught as much as it used to be…probably due to the zomification trend this post is partly about).
When the cycle of paradigms was strong and vital, each cycle lasted a bit longer than a generation—that is, long enough for a new generation to build upon but also begin to overthrow the generation which had trained them. So: a paradigm was roughly 25-30 years. But the Quantitative Revolution (1960s-present) and Critical Turn (1980s-present) have lasted much longer than this.
(An aside: the Quantitative Revolution and Critical Turn have been able to coexist as paradigms because the former is entirely concerned with methodology and the latter concerned with ideologially inflected “ultimate questions”. This means it’s quite easy for the two blocs to stay out of each other’s way and avoid zero-sum conflict. Furthermore, at this point it’s normal—even banal—for grad students to become both: a researcher interested in formulaic “social justice” questions and methodologically trained in GIS.)
By the old pattern, Geography was due for an intellectual paradigm shift during the 2010s. The Critical Turn, turning 30 years old at some point during Obama II, should have come to a close, just as the great paradigms of the 20th century eventually did. In all likelihood, it was also time for the Quantitative Revolution to be sunsetted as well, simply because, thanks to the proliferation of relevant software and aps, statistical mapping has become something quite accessible and available on the visual production side and not something which needs its own department in higher ed. (This trend has only acceleated during the AI decade of the 20s. And this in turn means that other social researchers working with large datasets can also produce the maps now, and do not need GIS specialists who are situated inside of Geography Departments.)
At any rate, the paradigm shift which the historical pattern suggested would come around 2015 or so did not occur and—despite some recent expressions of frustration here and there, such as this Substack—shows no sign of occuring. This intellectual hardening has to do with a lot of things (grant incentives, partisanization of the profession, orientation of the professional-training aspect of the grad seminar room around the NGO sector)—but the way quality control happens in the publishing process is an overlooked and extremely important one.
Basically, the way an author navigates modern peer review is by fitting—or force-fitting—their research and ideas into the predominant paradigm. You deal with anonymous reviewers by trying to anticipate and appease how they “probably think.” The predominant paradigm’s core value is that it’s the luminous guidemap for anticipating how this faceless, nameless gatekeeper-readership “probably thinks.”
Furthermore: any critiques a reviewer might have which aren’t of the straightforward fact-checking variety are very likely to be demands that the author “engage with the literature,” which is actually a demand to make the study fit inside of the existing paradigm.
These dynamics have made paradigm shift extremely unlikely to occur. And again: these dynamics were not present back when paradigm shifts were occuring.
An editor with monarchical power over the enterprise of publishing the book or article can make paradigmatic innovation happen simply by desiring it, and seeking out and developing authors with new ideas.
By contrast, the beige, “horizontal” (buck-passing) anonymity of the modern peer review logic cannot do this. If an article or book with a genuinely new paradigmatic sensibility gets through, it will only be because that press still grants the editor a lot of old-fashioned editorial authority.
Or it will be through extraordinary luck. An editor might accidentally send an article or manuscript to reviewers who are, deep down, exasperated with the reigning paradigm and not interested in keeping it going ad infinitum. But this situation would only come about by strange accident. The editor-as-review-coordinator is not going to have a rolodex of reviewers who quietly sympathize with the idea of defecting from the reigning intellectual reigme. And these “lucky” paradigm-defying books and articles will be too few and far between, too sociologically isolated, to function as foundational pieces for new paradigm shift in the way that, say, Harvey’s Social Justice in the City could function for the Critical Turn or Tuan’s Topophilia for Humanist Geography.
In short: something like the so-called “Old Boys Club” of scholarly editors with monarchical powers is needed again (they don’t have to be boys), if new intellectual paradigm shift is to occur. Otherwise, we’re stuck inside of a zombified form of the paradigms that arose in the last quarter of the 20th century.
And it’s important to emphasize that this isn’t really the same vital, living form that had existed in the 1980s and 90s. No Limits to Capital can happen today—because Limits has been institutionalized. The younger generation of aspiring “critical geographers” is busy trying to churn out studies efficient at scoring points in the game put forward by this institutionalized, “decline”-form. Indeed, they’re recruited if that is the thing they want to do. But who is looping back through first principles and rethinking everything, in the way Harvey did when he was much younger? Who is even looking for a person like that?