Current Sociology

Please welcome our Sociologist of the Month for April 2022, Janet Arnado (Department of Sociology and Behavioral Sciences, De La Salle University, Manila, Philippines). Her article for Current Sociology, Structured inequalities and authors’ positionalities in academic publishing: The case of Philippine international migration scholarship is Free Access this month.

Janet Arnado

Could you please tell us about yourself? How did you come to your field of study?

J. Arnado: My research interests revolve around structured inequalities and mobility of marginalized categories through migration, violent conflict, Third World feminism, and knowledge production. While I am US-educated and living in Germany, my sociological imagination takes root in my biography as a woman from the rural south of the Global South, with parents being first in their families to graduate from college and pursuing graduate school while having full-time jobs and raising five children. For this family that persistently waited for a boy to carry the family name, I am the fourth girl-child, considered dark among the siblings with lighter skin tone. I grew up in Mindanao where civil strife was part of everyday life. I am a national of the Philippines where numerous adults migrate internationally and leave their families behind. Coming from this field of experience, I specialized in social inequality when I worked on my Ph.D. at Virginia Tech many years ago.

What prompted you to research the area of your article, “Structured inequalities and authors’ positionalities in academic publishing: The case of Philippine international migration scholarship”?

J. Arnado: At De La Salle University in Manila where I work, my colleague Bubbles Asor and I wanted to map the Philippine migration scholarship over a thirty-year period. Because of a change of circumstance, she has temporarily shelved this project. I reviewed not only the field of Filipino migration but also the insider-outsider positionality of the scholars in the global publishing field. The subjects of my study evolved from domestic workers to knowledge workers. This article examines academic positionality in publishing inequality. Bourdieu’s work on field, habitus, and cultural capital provided the needed lens to view how academics are positioned (structure) and positioning (agency) in the publishing field, and how the deeply rooted habitus is modified through cultural capital accumulation.

What do you see as the key findings of your article?

J. Arnado: The study finds enormous inequality in the distribution of published articles and their influence, based on the authors’ ethnicity and institutional affiliation. These inequalities are manifested in the (1) distribution of articles published in all journals, (2) prestigious migration-related journals, and (3) scholarly influence through citations. Authors affiliated in institutions outside the Philippines at the time of publication dominate the field of Filipino international migration scholarship. In contrast, homeland-based Filipinos are positioned in the periphery of knowledge production. While the author’s ethnic identity is frequently invisible in publications data, when uncovered, it presents a contradictory picture of solidarity and inequality between homeland-based and overseas Filipino authors. Overseas Filipino authors, whose institutional affiliations are in their host countries, performed remarkably, representing twice the publications count as their counterparts at ‘home’ – unofficially raising the overall Filipino contribution to 43% of all articles published. In more prestigious journals, Philippine-based authors are absent in all but one, while overseas Filipinos are better represented, although not as well as other nationalities. In terms of scholarly influence, however, Filipinos are on a par with other nationalities; in particular, overseas Filipinos receive higher citation numbers compared to all other nationalities combined, with US-affiliated Filipino scholars obtaining the highest citations compared to any other country of affiliation. In sharp contrast, Philippine-based authors have half the citations of authors outside the country.

The findings show that authors institutionally affiliated in the Global North (insiders) dominate the field (publication count and citations), while homeland-based Filipino scholars are in the periphery (outsiders). With their insider-leaning hybrid positionality, overseas Filipino scholars in the Global North accrue network-mediated benefits. They have respectable representation in publication count and are the most frequently cited authors.

What are the wider social implications of your research in the current social climate? How do you think things will change in the future?

J. Arnado: Humans are limited by their social structure. Migration is life-changing for it allows people to move into another structure where they redefine themselves aided by new rules and resources. This article has broadened the conception of positionality and used it in a Bourdieusian analysis of inequality in the publishing field, where ‘insiders’ define the terms of the game that restrict outsider access. Insider-outsider positionality helps explain the unequal distribution of academic publications. It also showcases the ‘locus of struggle’ in the field depicted in agents’ outside-to-inside mobility through cultural capital, thereby gaining an insider’s disposition that facilitates success in publishing. The explication of insider-outsider positionality in the publishing field is my theoretical contribution to Bourdieu’s work on the social reproduction of inequality and the agents’ maneuvering for mobility.

Two things can happen in the future. Either peripheral academics continue to leave their countries and find fulfillment in the Global North, or peripheral countries such as the Philippines will pay more attention to knowledge production as it can help push for social and economic development. It will take time, resources, and priority.