Ceremonial Economics: A Social-Institutional Analysis of Universities, Disciplines, and Academic Positioning

Abstract

What is the future of the university? Many have attempted to unpack what emerging technologies, political pressures, and social scrutiny can do to the status and innovative capacity of universities. While much of the literature has focused on either documenting innovation over practice in research/teaching techniques, or critical reflections on how university business models and academic labor are under threat, less has been debated on the impacts and processes of such changes from a systemic institutional perspective. This article develops a three-fold social-institutional framework to explore the process, purpose, and positioning of changes in knowledge production. I use the case of the economics discipline to explore how institutional ceremonial values, the policing of knowledge creation, and academic cultures as a hierarchical system of prestige can indicate potential structural change. Existing tensions between instrumental innovations and traditional ceremonial aspects that permeate both the university system and the economics discipline suggest two hypotheses to understand future change: (i) a ceremonial encapsulation of new technologies by old structures, exacerbating existing inequalities and monopolies within expertise positioning; or (ii) the rise of new and inclusive cultures within the principles of epistemic democratization and pluralism, co-existing with a new economic and social model of knowledge