Fast Food Research in the Era of Unplanned Obsolescence

• Author: Michael Marinetto
• Published date: 01 September 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12338
• Date: 01 September 2018

Fast Food Research in the Era of Unplanned

Obsolescence

Michael Marinetto

Cardiff University

TRAGEDY, FARCE AND FAST FOOD (RESEARCH)

Karl Marx once complained how those intellectual skunks, as he liked to call academics,

only studied for the sole ‘purpose of finding new dead ends in every corner of the world’.

The real point of any intellectual endeavour, for Marx, is not to interpret the world in

various ways, but to change it.

For today’s ‘academic skunks’, it proves hard enough getting their various interpreta-

tions of the world read, let alone actually changing anything. But this tragic truth is also

farcical. Academics don’t mind being ignored so long as their interpretations about their

dead-end corners of the world get published in some respectable (dead-end) journal. As

a professional academic myself, I am no different.

And I am no different because the professionally regulated market for scholastic

knowledge, where I operate, expects research which is seen but not read. The professio-

nal conventions of academic life, and the institutional arrangements that support aca-

demic research, promote constant productivity which necessitates and requires merciless

standardisation. As a cultural dope of the contemporary university, I like many of my peers

follow these conventional arrangements without question. The results: vast amounts of

commodified but disposable knowledge. You could say that what we are producing is

fast food research.

Address for reprints: Michael Marinetto, Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, Aberconway Building,

Colum Drive, Cardiff, CF10 3EU, UK (MarinettoM@cardiff.ac.uk).

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which

permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

V

C2018 The Authors

Journal of Management Studies published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd and

Society for the Advancement of Management Studies

Journal of Management Studies

doi: 10.1111/joms.12338

55:6 September 2018

For your comments about this di scussion, please visit http://www.so cadms.org.uk/

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