Imagine sitting in the cinema, enjoying a movie. Suddenly, the person in front of you stands up in their seat to get a better view. Now you have to stand up, too, and soon, people around you are climbing on chairs, pushing and shoving. Everyone is now substantially less comfortable, but the movie is still the same. This is a common metaphor for involution.
Anthropologist Clifford Geertz describes a society as involuted when increased efforts do not result in more output. The concept resurfaced three years ago, when a student at an elite Chinese university was photographed working on his laptop while riding a bike to make the most of his time between classes. Online, he was crowned the ‘involution king’.
Reading about UM’s Sustainable Employability Monitor outcomes last week, involution was the first word that came to my mind. Like all academics worldwide, I need to publish - metaphorically speaking, while riding a bike between classes. Globally, researchers are publishing more papers than can possibly be read – according to a comment in Nature, thousands of researchers publish a paper every five days, a chemist who made the news last week publishes one every 37 hours. An industry of predatory journals has sprung up to cater to these outgrowths. And UM is not immune either – the publishing records of current assistant professors far exceed those of their senior professors when they were UDs. Yet, according to a recent analysis, papers and patents continue to become less and less innovative worldwide.
More effort, less outcome, involution.
Geertz suggests that for societies to escape involution, they need to collectively focus on purpose and meaningfulness. For example, can we incentivise quality over quantity, rethink what research quality means beyond impact factors, decrease competition for funding, share research insights more effectively? By evolving rather than involuting, we can create space for those with care responsibilities and health concerns, with fewer than seven check marks, and the 34 per cent of UM researchers reportedly at immediate risk of burnout. To increase innovation, we need everyone’s voices, and we need to hear them.
Therese Grohnert, assistant professor at the School of Business and Economics