Every day practices in the scientific community such as verbal abuse, demeaning reports, demotion or dismissal are working to shame scientists and discredit their reputations, often with dire personal, professional and social consequences - even as extreme as suicide!
In a paper soon to appear in the Taylor & Francis journal Prometheus, Professor Brian Martin, from the School of Social Sciences, University of Wollongong and Dr Sandrine Thérèse, Honorary Research Fellow in Anthropology, University of Queensland, investigate a sample of well documented cases to identify key features and impacts of scientific degradation rituals.
Professor Martin says: "While degradation rituals have been widely studied in an array of settings such as psychiatric wards, courtroom proceedings and media practices, they have remained largely unexplored in the scientific world."
As a key form of currency in science, reputations can be targets for attack for a number of reasons, such as undermining competitors or eliminating potential threats to vested professional, political or economic interests.
Sandrine and Martin have identified types of degrading agents, the variety of contexts of degradation, the means or methods used to degrade and a spectrum of severity in degradation rituals, such as impacts on formal status and reputation. They have also identified the importance of relatively informal and private degradation rituals, such as when a superior berates an individual in the confines of an office. The researchers argue these forms of degradation can have devastating emotional and psychological consequences, such as depression or worse, and may deter scientists from continuing their research in the future.
Sandrine Thérèse and Brian Martin (2010) ‘Shame Scientist! Degradation Rituals in Science.’ Prometheus, 28, 2, pp.1-14.
Prometheus is an international, multidisciplinary journal publishing papers on innovation.
