Cultural gatekeepers
Last night, came across a wonderful example of economic property rights (i.e. who actually controls an attribute) being used in status games.
Keith Windschuttle's The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering Our Past which was originally published in 1996, has been a very successful book in provoking debate. (It is also a very good book.)
Keith couldn't get it published in Australia. Fortunately, its concerns and examples are not Australia-specific, so two American publishers (Penguin and Simon & Schuster) both wanted to publish it. If Keith W. had accepted Penguin, there would have been the delicious situation of Penguin Australia importing from Penguin US a book it had refused to publish.
Clearly, the refusal from Australian publishers had nothing to do with the intellectual merit or commercial viability of the book. The refusal was ideological: Australian mainstream publishers were acting as cultural gatekeepers. The people making the decisions were using their control over the attribute "acceptance-to-publish" to block a book they found ideologically not kosher.
The mainstream Australian publishers dominate the distribution networks -- some bookshops only accept books from them. So those making decisions about acceptability are in a position to block books, or adjust them. (I remember one expatriate Oz academic telling me that he came under strong pressure from his Oz publisher not to refer to the Kennett government as a reforming government since right-of-centre governments couldn't be reforming, apparently by definition.)
Moreover, the use of control of an attribute to go against the ostensible purpose of the organisation (in this case, selling books at a profit) is endemic to organisations dominated by progressivist status games. From the ABC acting as a virtuous broadcaster rather than a national one to school curricula with a narrow ideological bias in text-selection to academe producing systematically silly stuff on "neoliberalism" use of attributes to buttress status games against the formal purposes of the organisation is pervasive.
Forget legal ownership. Who controls the attributes and what are their purposes? And yes, the ideological status games often labelled political correctness do matter and are noxious.
Keith Windschuttle's The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering Our Past which was originally published in 1996, has been a very successful book in provoking debate. (It is also a very good book.)
Keith couldn't get it published in Australia. Fortunately, its concerns and examples are not Australia-specific, so two American publishers (Penguin and Simon & Schuster) both wanted to publish it. If Keith W. had accepted Penguin, there would have been the delicious situation of Penguin Australia importing from Penguin US a book it had refused to publish.
Clearly, the refusal from Australian publishers had nothing to do with the intellectual merit or commercial viability of the book. The refusal was ideological: Australian mainstream publishers were acting as cultural gatekeepers. The people making the decisions were using their control over the attribute "acceptance-to-publish" to block a book they found ideologically not kosher.
The mainstream Australian publishers dominate the distribution networks -- some bookshops only accept books from them. So those making decisions about acceptability are in a position to block books, or adjust them. (I remember one expatriate Oz academic telling me that he came under strong pressure from his Oz publisher not to refer to the Kennett government as a reforming government since right-of-centre governments couldn't be reforming, apparently by definition.)
Moreover, the use of control of an attribute to go against the ostensible purpose of the organisation (in this case, selling books at a profit) is endemic to organisations dominated by progressivist status games. From the ABC acting as a virtuous broadcaster rather than a national one to school curricula with a narrow ideological bias in text-selection to academe producing systematically silly stuff on "neoliberalism" use of attributes to buttress status games against the formal purposes of the organisation is pervasive.
Forget legal ownership. Who controls the attributes and what are their purposes? And yes, the ideological status games often labelled political correctness do matter and are noxious.