The DECAY of Merton’s scientific norms and the new academic ethos

ABSTRACT This article provides a conceptual reformulation of Merton’s scientific ethos widely known by the acronym CUDOS (i.e. communism, universalism, disinterestedness and organised scepticism). While Merton perceived the threat to the autonomy of science as coming from outside the walls of academe, mainly in the form of nationalism and racism, the subsequent rise of neoliberalism and global market forces means that the scientific ethos is being undermined largely from within the university itself, leading to the DECAY (i.e. differentialism, egoism, capitalism and advocacy) of CUDOS. The STEM-ification of the humanities and social sciences academic community has led to the rise of a post-academic ethos. This manifests itself in professional pragmatism with academics facing both ways at the same time by remaining largely committed to Mertonian norms in theory but needing to adapt to the performative demands of DECAY as a new set of institutional norms that prevails in practice.


Introduction
In a paper published in 1942 Robert Merton asserted that 'four sets of institutional imperatives -universalism, communism, disinterestedness, organized scepticism (CUDOS) -comprise the ethos of modern science' (Merton, 1942, p. 118).Merton's ethos, influenced by Weber, Parsons and Bernal, has subsequently become a powerful symbol of liberal academic virtues.It has helped to reinforce arguments that the academic community is morally capable of self-monitoring by upholding a culture that is in society's collective best interests (Turner, 2007).Merton made clear that CUDOS is a set of institutional norms, not personal values, though individuals may concur or disagree with them.Communism is about a virtuous benevolence in freely sharing academic ideas and materials as part of the collective academic endeavour to bring about human progress.Universalism refers to the goal of pursuing the possibilities of generating universal truths through research that transcends differences in relation to race, class, politics and religion.Disinterestedness implies that scientists (or 'academics' in the language of today) ought to put aside egotistical and monetary motives in order to uphold intellectual integrity in the pursuit of truth.Finally, organised scepticism demands a circumspect attitude to research

The DECAY of CUDOS
The rationale for the formation of CUDOS, as proposed by Merton (1942), needs to be understood by reference to the social and political context of the late 1930s.In an earlier paper Merton explored this context shaped by the rise of Nazism and 'the dogma of "race and purity"' (Merton, 1938, p. 322).Jewish scholars were purged and the world was witness to the triumph of nationalism over scientific rationality.In the type of environment that prevailed in Nazi Germany in the 1930s academics were 'called upon to relinquish adherence to all institutional norms which, in the opinion of political authorities, conflict with those of the State' (Merton, 1938, p. 325).Merton explains the clash between nationalism and the scientific ethos in the following way: The ethos of science involves the functionally necessary demand that theories or generalizations be evaluated in terms of their logical consistency and consonance with facts.The political ethic would introduce the hitherto irrelevant criteria of the race or political creed of the theorist.(p. 326) Here Merton is building the case for a scientific ethos by arguing that the values essential to academic life are threatened by the climate of nationalism and anti-intellectualism.In this paper he also identifies the way in which a schism opened up between academe and society partly as a consequence of the increasing specialisation of science and the 'cult of unintelligibility ' (p. 333).Academics have become the 'subject of reproach' (p.330) seen as morally responsible for 'socially undesirable' (p.332) scientific discoveries.This context helps to explain why he thought there was a need for a scientific ethos.He gives his first version of this, prior to his better known paper from 1942, in the following passage in which reference is also made to two of the four elements of CUDOS -organised scepticism and disinterestedness.
The sentiments embodied in the ethos of science -characterised by such terms as intellectual honesty, organized scepticism, disinterestedness, impersonality -are outraged by the new set of sentiments which the State would impose in the sphere of scientific research (p.327).
Merton's norms have attracted a disproportionate amount of attention in relation to STEM fields as opposed to HSS (e.g.Karachalios, 2008;Ziman, 1983).This is largely due to the way in which STEM fields were industrialised from the late 1940s onwards eroding Mertonian norms in the process.The growth of patenting from the early 1950s is an exemplar representing the commercial exploitation of scientific discoveries contrary to the norm of communism (Colleret & Gingras, 2022).However, the so-called industrialisation or 'collectivization of science' (Ziman, 1983, p. 1) has now occurred in the HSS as well as STEM fields.Team-based, interdisciplinary research involving high levels of coauthorship, increasing academic productivity, has become the norm for HSS academics who are now evaluated in much the same way as those working in STEM fields.This means that HSS research is being judged via bibliometric indicators such as Web of Science and Scopus even though these citation databases systematically underrepresent such scholarship (Tennant, 2020).These pressures are leading to HSS researchers adopting a STEM culture: publishing and co-authoring more as members of research teams, using quantitative methods (Henriksen, 2016), and writing papers in journals rather than books (Savage & Olejniczak, 2022).
Eighty years ago Merton (1942, p. 115) perceived the threat to the autonomy of science as coming from outside the walls of academe, commenting that 'a tower of ivory becomes untenable when its walls are under assault'.He regarded patriotism, religion and race theory -prominent due to the rise of Fascism in Europe during the 1930s -as threats to the universalism of science because it undermined judging academics on purely objective criteria through the quality of their work rather than their national, religious or racial identity.Merton saw democracy as a progressive influence that would uphold universalistic standards in the sense of enhancing equality of opportunity.Yet while Merton recognised the threat of nationalism in the 1930s, he could not have foreseen the later rise of neoliberalism and the exposure of the university to global market forces.CUDOS has been re-shaped by neoliberalism especially in institutional contexts heavily influenced by the assumptions of neoliberalism or those where isomorphic tendencies have led to a mimicry of elite forms of higher education (see Figure 1).This is a trend that means that the threat to CUDOS is now represented as much by the university itself as by conventional anti-intellectual forces, such as the church and autocratic government, outside of it.
Internal forces contributing to the anti-intellectual threat include the growth of proxy measures for measuring the research 'quality' of academics such as the h-index, department and university-level lists of 'top journals' in academic fields determined solely on journal impact factor (JIF), and channelling institutional research funding towards inter-disciplinary research themes that seek to tackle so-called 'global' problems.These forces are re-shaping the scholarly direction and norms of academics in ways that negatively affect academic freedom and encourage gaming and corrupt behaviour.The way that these internal forces are supported and promoted by universities, such as reward and recognition systems that are driven in some contexts primarily on bibliometrics data rather than qualitative, peerbased judgements as an assurance of research quality, may be explored further by reformulating CUDOS into a new acronym, DECAY.

From communism to capitalism
While the word communism has clear political associations, Merton's use of this term to describe his first norm needs to be understood as an expression of an essentially  libertarian position, that of sharing rather than profiting from intellectual goods.In the context of the intellectual climate of the 1930s and early 1940s, though, there was deep sympathy for communist principles and so he chose to present his claim by using the 'language of the left' (Turner, 2007, p. 161).The only way in which academics ought to profit from their intellectual work, in Merton's view, was by the enhancement of their reputation.He wrote disapprovingly about the commercialisation of science and the application for patents to profit from discoveries.During the 1940s universities were not commercial enterprises and the massification of student numbers had yet to occur.The dependence of the higher education system on largescale state funding and the introduction of modern managerial systems were still two generations away.This meant that academics were under few demands from their institutions in respect to their research activities, if any in the contemporary sense.Very few British academics possessed a PhD in the 1930s and 1940s, especially in HSS, and 'teaching was the primary condition of his employment' (Herrenden-Harker, 1935, p. 110).
The displacement of communism with academic capitalism, a phrase coined by Nisbet (1971), and defined by Slaughter and Leslie (2001, p. 154) as 'market and market-like behaviours on the part of universities and faculty', is well documented.While Slaughter and Leslie (1997) originally focused on academics working at the borders of academe and industry, it has subsequently been recognised that academic capitalism has expanded well beyond this initial conceptualisation to include the commercialisation and marketisation of knowledge production.At a disciplinary level, researchers based in some fields, especially where there are significant commercial applications, may be reluctant to publish work-in-progress or early data from research projects.Despite the urgent global imperative for sharing, even climate scientists have a 'tendency to withhold results until publication' (Bray & von Storch, 2017).At an institutional level, other universities are regarded as 'competitors' and 'rivals' rather than collegial brethren.Intellectual capital is now treated as a private property to be leveraged for its market value.At the soft end of this spectrum are publications included in performance review metrics that help to determine institutional funding for research from government agencies and at the harder end are commercialisation opportunities connected with patents, copyright and other forms of intellectual property.
At an individual level, there has been a 'quasi-commodification of mental labour as an input' (Jessop, 2018, p. 105) symbolised by use of the term 'outputs' to refer to an academics' publications.The individual HSS academic is now seen as not just a unit of resource but as an entrepreneurial grant-getter who needs to generate the income to at least pay for his or her time in conducting research.Only twenty-five years ago Sinclair Goodlad (1995) identified 'sponsorism' as one of the heresies (or vices) of higher education.Yet, this now appears to be an unquestioned institutional virtue.What was formerly referred to as 'independent research' or 'free inquiry' has now been linguistically othered as 'unfunded research' or 'curiosity-driven' work.In the modern research university, obtaining funded research is paramount in order to validate the academic credibility of the scholarship being undertaken, regardless of its actual intellectual contribution to the advance of knowledge.While many HSS academics may not directly 'need' research funding to carry out their scholarly work compared with STEM colleagues, grant-getting is increasingly seen as a necessary means of self-financing.
Even the virtue of collaboration, a cornerstone of the enlightenment ideal of the republic of letters (see Polanyi, 1962), has now been domesticated and redirected in the service of academic capitalism.The growth of research teams and collaboration since the end of the Second World War has helped to drive increasing levels of academic publication across nearly all disciplines via multiple authorship (Alexander, 1953) even though almost a half of all such papers fail to meet internationally agreed standards for minimum contributions to justify an authorship credit (Sauermann & Haeussler, 2017).In many disciplines there have been significant increases in the level of multiple authorship, especially when quantitative methods and large research teams are in place.This is occurring in virtually all HSS fields including sociology, psychology, public administration, management, economics, anthropology, and information science.Between 1980 and 2013 in sociology and anthropology, for example, the proportion of multi-authored articles rose from between 4.3% to 42.6% and 16.3% to 74.4%, respectively (Henriksen, 2016).These statistics illustrate the transformation of an academic field from a predominantly single-authored one into a predominantly multiple-authored mode of production.When HSS academics are asked why collaborative publications have increased they rank performance-based and competitive pressures more highly than any other explanation despite the perhaps more obvious affordances of the internet and technology (Macfarlane et al., 2017).

From universalism to differentialism
The search for truth, uninhibited by religious dogma, is at the cornerstone of the renaissance ideal and the intellectual starting point for the modern idea of the university.It is about the rejection of the metaphysical in favour of the empirical, conceptual and discoverable and the 'unprejudiced and open-minded search for the truth' (Watt, 1964, p. 372).The emphasis on discovering 'the' truth was reflected in the language used about teaching and research in the university during both the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century.Newman's (1910, p. ix) view of the university, as 'a place of teaching universal knowledge', was still being echoed in the 1960s by higher education scholars such as Ashby (1967) and Fletcher (1968).
Merton was concerned about the way in which universalism was being undermined in the 1930s and 1940s by the rise of race theory and the expulsion and undermining of many Jewish academics from academic institutions.For him the value of universalism was as much about the rejection of nationalism and racism as about anything else in a methodological sense.However, since the latter part of the twentieth century the universal paradigm as a cosmopolitan project has been subject to critique and re-evaluation.This critique relates to the way in which scientific universalism has been recast as a Western or European project that often neglects the importance of local and indigenous knowledge (Somsen, 2008).It is a critique that has found expression in the movement to de-colonise the university curriculum, especially in countries that have a colonial legacy such as South Africa.De Sousa Santos (2016) and others have argued that notions of global social justice need to incorporate cognitive justice too in order to reverse the 'epistemicide' of indigenous knowledge which has been purged by the dominance of Western knowledge.Despite the rhetoric around the importance of differentialism in modern academic scholarship there remain significant barriers to living out this new norm.Scopus and Web of Science, relied upon extensively by many universities to evaluate the performance of their academic staff, not only excludes a good deal of scholarly publication in the HSS field but also fails to sufficiently capture research being produced in non-Western contexts and written in languages other than English (Tennant, 2020).
The critique of universalism has manifested itself in methodological terms as well and the perception of such a scholarly goal has fallen into disrepute.The alternative value of differentialism (or particularism) has powerfully emerged to displace it.(Cultural) differentialism is about recognising and protecting differences, especially those related to culture, ethnicity and locality (Huntington, 1996).What constitutes the 'truth', and legitimacy in seeking to establish a 'truth' as a researcher, has altered quite radically from an emphasis on sacred forms in the medieval university through to the pragmatic scientific rationalism of the mid-twentieth century.In what has been termed the 'unknowing' university, the search for knowledge as truth is now regarded as an impossibly naïve endeavour (Barnett & Bengtsen, 2017).
The conventional idea of the objectivity of the researcher as an outsider without a personal involvement or investment in the community or phenomenon under investigation has been turned on its head.Insiderism, whilst previously regarded as a vice, started to emerge as a virtue in the 1960s and 1970s, especially in the context of social epistemology (Merton, 1972, p. 103).This type of identity politics now goes well beyond the example cited by Merton of black academics being seen as more legitimate and appropriate investigators of black history.Insider researchers now assert their moral investment and authority as investigators.This is what Cousin (2010, p. 9) calls 'positional piety'.HSS researchers are encouraged to surface their positionality as a source of legitimisation whereas previously any degree of personal investment might have been seen as undermining a research project.
Differentialism represents the triumph of cultural relativism over universalism in academic life and institutions have artfully exploited the popularity of differentialism where this has suited their corporate goals.Asserting that it is important to respect alternative sets of 'cultural' values even where local realities may conflict with universal principles of international human rights is a common way of defending branch campuses in contexts associated with human rights abuses such as China, Singapore and several parts of the Middle East.A prime example of this line of argument can be found in the decision to establish a branch campus of New York University in Abu Dhabi in 2010.The investment led to considerable criticism from faculty members and human rights organisations highlighting allegations of the mistreatment of South Asian labourers in the construction of the campus (Kaminer & O'Driscoll, 2014), reports of restrictions on academics broaching sensitive issues in the classroom such as AIDS or prostitution (Lindsey, 2012), and concerns that professors enjoyed a so-called 'cultural free zone' not shared by local academics (Wheeler, 2011).However, New York's then President, John Sexton, robustly defended the branch campus suggesting that criticising societies in which universities (or individual academics) find themselves living would be akin to cultural imperialism (Lindsey, 2012).This is an example of cynically mobilising the norm of differentialism in the financial self-interest of the university.

From disinterestedness to egoism
Of the four scientific norms that Merton identified, disinterestedness is perhaps the one under the most contemporary pressure, and empirical evidence indicates that it is also the least popular (Macfarlane & Cheng, 2008).Merton saw science, or academic research more generally, as a moral pursuit stating that 'it is customary to think of the scientist as a dispassionate, impersonal individual' (Merton, 1938, p. 334).Disinterestedness has long represented a central plank of the morality of science in this broadly liberal tradition.Hamerton (1911, pp. 62-63) argued that, while other virtues such as 'industry, perseverance, courage, discipline, humility' were important to research enquiry, disinterestedness was the 'most essential'.Disinterestedness requires a self-discipline in tightly controlling, and putting to one side, emotions and predispositions in order to ensure that research results are unaffected by personal bias.Religious commitments were once seen as the main barrier to rational enquiry, while disinterestedness was about trying to break free from these types of commitments and attaining what Hamerton (1911, p. 67) described as a 'mental independence'.
While egoism has always existed in academic life, the ideal of disinterestedness was an enlightenment virtue.The only legitimate role for egoism was in respect to the desire to make a breakthrough or discovery, something that Merton acknowledged when he stated that:'The scientist's claim to "his" intellectual "property" is limited to that of recognition and esteem . ..' (Merton, 1942, p. 121).Beyond this, however, Merton was an advocate of disinterestedness.The type of discipline required to live out this virtue was role-modelled by Beatrice Webb, one of the most influential social scientists of the twentieth century.She kept her political activities as a campaigning socialist strictly separate from her work as a sociologist, insisting on applying scientific methods to the study of social problems (Webb, 1906).In the process she pursued what has been described as 'a career of disinterested research' (Thane, 2020, p. 137).Merton thought that public trust in science would be protected through academic self-policing but recognised that risks to disinterestedness existed:'Cultism, informal cliques, prolific but trivial publications -these and other techniques may be used for selfaggrandizement.' (Merton, 1942, pp. 124-125).However, he commented optimistically that, while such practices existed, 'spurious claims appear to be negligible and ineffective' (Merton, 1942, p. 125).The conditions of contemporary university life, though, make it increasingly difficult for academics to resist the lure of egoism, especially given the emphasis on performativity evidenced by bibliometrics.Proxy indicators of quality such as the h-index and citation counts play a significant role in how the work of academics is now evaluated, even though they can be of dubious reliability, inclusivity and accuracy in evidencing intellectual contributions to scholarship.The h-index is now being used by many universities as an evaluative tool (Hicks et al., 2015) but privileging data over qualitative judgement overlooks the fact that both Web of Science and Scopus have a structural in-built bias against research from the arts, humanities and social sciences (Tennant, 2020).Google Scholar (GS), despite its limitations, is a more inclusive alternative but less often relied on in institutional evaluation.It is estimated that between 8.6% and 28.2% of highly cited publications in HSS go unrecognised as a result (Martín-Martín et al., 2018).
Academics are encouraged to track and find ways to boost their citations and h-index through the marketing of their publications through social media.This is transforming the modern academic CV from a sober historical record into a personal marketing tool (Macfarlane, 2020).In addition to details about citation counts, h-index and the impact factor of journals in which academics publish, the size and relative prestige of their research grants is a further basis for self-promotion.None of these esteem indicators are, of course, the equivalent to an intellectual contribution to knowledge or professional practice, but proxy measures that have become significant self-marketing tools.
The STEM-ification of academe means that books, and especially book chapters, have become a curiously disesteemed 'output' since they do not represent an important element of the scholarly tradition of the natural and applied sciences.By contrast, for many HSS academics, writing a single authored monograph or editing a book represents an achievement of note in a number of disciplinary traditions, such as history.Yet, the status of journal articles as 'the de facto "currency"' of research in many STEM fields, has led to social scientists mimicking this publication trend (Savage & Olejniczak, 2022, p. 12).As bibliometrics took hold in the 2010s there was a significant decline in the proportion of books produced compared with journal articles.Books decreased by between 31% and 54% in all disciplines in the social sciences from 2011 to 2019 (Savage & Olejniczak, 2022).Many HSS academics are now actively discouraged by their universities from publishing book chapters and directed instead to produce journal papers.The effect of this directive can even be seen in history, a discipline conventionally associated with writing books.This has resulted in a decline in the percentage of books being written by historians and a substantial increase in journal articles (Higher Education Funding Council for England [HEFCE], 2015).
Merton refers to 'informal cliques' as a threat to academic integrity and this phrase is relevant to understanding the practice of citation rings, or citation 'farms', where a small, closed group of academics habitually cite each other's work, thereby boosting their citation scores.Self-citation is a 'hallmark of productive authors' (Mishra et al., 2018, p. 1) and there can be good reasons for doing so, especially by academics who have already contributed a lot to their field.Excessive self-citation though is another selfseeking way in which some researchers increase their total citations.It has been estimated that self-citation accounts for more than 40% of the total citations of the 1,000 world's most cited scientists, while 8,500 have a self-citation score of more than 23% (Ioannidis et al., 2019).Even the median self-citation, estimated at just below 13%, is indicative of the contemporary importance of self-citation (Ioannidis et al., 2019).
There are many other effects that have arisen from the rise of performativity and bibliometrics.These include manipulative practices to boost the JIF, such as journal editors desk rejecting papers that do not include at least one paper previously published in their journal.Multiple authorship also needs to be understood both as a shift to a high production model of academic endeavour that feeds the ambitions of academic capitalism and sometimes as a further indicator of egoism since it facilitates a bulking up of individual academic productivity.It is widely associated with ethical abuses involving the misattribution of authorship credit in ways that are deceptive and encourage parasitical behaviour (Macfarlane, 2017).In the natural sciences, an empirical study of climate scientists showed that they had 'the tendency to assign the significance of authored work according to the status of the author rather than content of the paper' (Bray & von Storch, 2017, p. 1351).Hence, it is likely that the growing practice of multiple authorship in HSS is bringing with it a set of values and assumptions that are based on a transfer of 'traditions' in STEM fields.B. MACFARLANE

From organised scepticism to advocacy
At an individual level scepticism used to be seen as an unqualified virtue ensuring that the researcher only evaluated evidence-based knowledge claims.At an institutional level, following von Humboldt's thinking, the university was seen as an independent ivory tower in a positive rather than negative sense.Ivory towerism was regarded as a virtue because it enabled universities to better serve society, and governments, in conducting its research free from requirements to directly contribute to socio-political agendas.This did not mean that universities were not of society but that they served common interests more, in the Humboldtian ideal, as independent entities without social and political commitments beyond the need to rigorously pursue the search for truth.Humboldt's logic was that they were more likely to serve society's long-term interests through being independent rather than being tethered to the social and political agenda of the day.In the 1930s Abraham Flexner and others restated this view clearly:'The modern university must neither fear the world nor make itself responsible for its conduct.' (Flexner, 1930, p. 24);'Most institutions demand unqualified faith; but the institution of science makes scepticism a virtue.' (Merton, 1938, p. 327).This view contrasts with the evolution of identity politics as an integral part of academic life since the latter half of the twentieth century.The background to this shift needs to be understood by reference to the way in which the power of science was being rapidly weaponised for nationalistic purposes in the 1930s and 1940s.This bred a growing anxiety about academics being indifferent to the application of their research, something which Merton (1938, p. 332) reflected on when he stated that 'the goods of science are no longer considered an unqualified blessing'.The development of the atomic bomb in the 1940s as a result of the splitting of the atom in the late 1930s served as a significant turning point in the way in which the obligations of science and the university were interpreted.After the Second World War ivory towerism started to be seen as a vice rather than a virtue as the funding for universities increased and perceptions about the public responsibilities of science were redefined.
In a UK context, the intent of the so-called Haldane principle, a term christened by Lord Hailsham in the early 1960s (Edgerton, 2009), was to keep decisions about what to fund out of the hands of politicians.However, the principle has been steadily eroded and ever more so with the creation of the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) that instituted challenge-led funding determined by government.Emboldened by such developments, many research-intensive universities now market themselves as socially active institutions addressing the world's most pressing social and economic problems such as climate change, poverty, social inequality and so on.These 'global' or 'grand' challenges are integrated into university strategy statements and have led to the growth of interdisciplinary research themes and centres harnessing the financial muscle of institutions and their sponsors.In this environment there is no room for those sceptical about the identification of such a socio-economic agenda as part of the new mission of the university and its potentially negative effects on academic freedom.Academics who choose not to compete for challenge-led funding lose out on career-defining opportunities.Few contemporary voices are raised in opposition to this social advocacy representing, as it does, an abandonment of the Humboldtian ideal of independence and the Haldane principle.Fish (2003, para.2) is one of the few who echoes the views of Flexner, Merton, Jaspers and others when he states that 'no university, and therefore no university official, should ever take a stand on any social, political, or moral issue'.
One interpretation of the contemporary popularity of advocacy is that this is part of the 'responsibilisation' of researchers by making it their duty to tackle global problems such as climate change or social inequality being employed, in effect, as agents of international development for government.This represents a direct example of the migration of neo liberalism from the macro to the institutional level (Ong, 2007).Universities frequently now espouse the centrality of UN sustainable development goals as well, something that chips away at the extent to which organised scepticism may be preserved as socio-political goals are directly endorsed.This thinking, one of advocacy rather than organised scepticism, is now part of a new received wisdom with large interdisciplinary research teams being established in universities and through funding support to address the world's most pressing social issues, a trend that has been heralded as part of a golden age for the social sciences by those who support advocacy (Buyalskaya et al., 2021).

The norms of professional pragmatism
My argument in this article is that a big part of the reason for the withering of Mertonian norms are the very institutions that have conventionally provided academics with a protective environment in which to conduct their research.Universities have now embraced values that sharply contrast with those of CUDOS.This is represented by the way in which the ivory tower cliché has become a profanity in the neoliberal university, one committed to the rhetoric of impact and knowledge transfer rather than independence and autonomy from external control.Hence it is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that in Kim and Kim's (2018) empirical study of attitudes to CUDOS among Korean scientists, they found that those working in universities were less likely to be supportive of communism and disinterestedness than those in research institutes.
The liberal idealism of CUDOS has been supplanted in practice by the industrialisation of research as identified by Ziman (1983), something which Bieliński and Tomczyńska (2019) describe as post-academic science.They use this term to represent the convergence of Mertonian norms with the industrial research tradition.'Post-academic' researchers select research problems that are partly local, in the industrial science tradition, and partly universal following a Mertonian orientation.They accept the control exercised by external funding bodies and so the norm of disinterestedness is the most adversely affected, while others such as communism and organised scepticism are less impacted (Bieliński & Tomczyńska, 2019).Other empirical researchers who have explored attitudes to CUDOS have discovered tensions between liberal and industrial academic norms too (e.g.Kim & Kim, 2018).The post-academic science ethos is really a combination of conflicting philosophies and so, in effect, scholars are facing two ways at the same time.Around 18% of Bieliński and Tomczyńska's (2019, p. 167) sample were identified as agnostics in the sense of having no ethos, neither Mertonian nor industrial, a phenomenon referred to as 'opportunistic adaptation'.These are the pragmatists who will do what it takes to play the game according to the prevailing rules and tend to have a higher than average research productivity.They simply adopt an amoral position.
While CUDOS and DECAY represent theoretical opposites, the way in which academics have responded to the shifting conditions under which they work might be best described as 'professional pragmatism' (Chubb & Watermeyer, 2017, p. 2361), a phrase used in a critical sense to suggest that they have been prepared to compromise their Mertonian values by adapting their scholarship to the demands of academic capitalism.This pragmatic theme is echoed in the work of Kolsaker (2008, p. 522) whose empirical survey of English academics showed 'that academics are reasonably comfortable working within managerialist regimes, and that they are instrumental in sustaining them'.
As a result of this pragmatic approach, academics have recrafted their self-identity in order to conform with performance-based systems modelled in large part on the assumptions of STEM research.Behaviours that represent this type of orientation among HSS scholars include: publishing journal papers rather than books or book chapters, as the latter become increasingly disesteemed; targeting high impact factor journals; entering into co-authorship to maximise citation counts; and collaborating in large research teams to capture major grant funding.This is about doing what it takes to succeed by adapting, opportunistically, to the contemporary environment.Academic research is being STEMified and HSS researchers are subject to its assumptions -publication via journals, based on externally-funded projects, using quantitative methods and with a large team of collaborators and co-authors.
Bibliometric measures are increasingly taken into account by universities in their promotion decisions for HSS as well as STEM scholars (see DeSanto & Nichols, 2017;Thelwall & Kousha, 2021).An example of how professional pragmatism and the STEMification of HSS research works in practice may be drawn from the Journal of Educational Philosophy and Theory published by Sage.Between 1969, when the journal was founded, and 1980, 112 papers were published in two issues per volume.Just two papers during this period were authored by two as opposed to one person: a strong indicator of the conventional single author publication culture in philosophy.By contrast, almost the equivalent number of papers (i.e.113) were contained in the 2021 volume alone and the average multi-author ratio had, by this time, risen to 2.08 per paper (i.e.236 authors).Since 2014 the journal has published 14 issues per year, between 5 and 10 of which are special issues.Moreover, an increasing number of papers are authored by large groups of individuals.While multiple authorship in HSS may be portrayed as part of a collegially-based collective writing exercise, their intent and effect also need to be understood in the broader context of professional pragmatism.On 25 June 2020 the Journal of Educational Philosophy and Theory published a paper with 35 co-authors (Peters et al., 2022), one in a series of mass authored papers that have continued to appear in the journal subsequently.The paper, and others of its ilk, are written 'collectively' by each person (or occasionally two) writing a separate individual reflection about a topic typically of around 200 words which are then gathered together to form a paper.By 28 April 2023, and partly as a result of self-citation, given the number of co-authors involved, this paper had accrued 229 GS citations.For eight of the 25 co-authors with GS accounts this represented their highest cited paper while for a further nine co-authors it was in their top five.This paper will also have had an effect in significantly increasing the h-index of many contributors, especially those in early-to mid-career.Boosted by mass authorship papers and multiple special issues, the journal's own h-index more than quadrupled between 2012 and 2021 enabling it to climb influential journal ranking lists used by many universities.

Conclusion
Empirical evidence shows that in practice most HSS researchers still believe in CUDOS (Bieliński & Tomczyńska, 2019) but they must work in an environment in which a different set of norms dominates.To thrive, or perhaps even to survive, HSS scholars in the modern research-intensive university must comply with the assumptions of DECAY.Reward and recognition in contemporary higher education depends on HSS scholars conforming with the STEM-ification of research.This means that CUDOS has been inverted by the antiintellectualism of the very institutions that ought to protect its ethos.Those who wish to continue to resist the demands of an industrialised research academy are likely to represent a dwindling group of individuals hanging on to a set of values that universities treat as outdated idealism.Little space remains to resist the migration of neoliberalism into micro institutional forms unless a scholar decides to operate in open defiance of performative expectations, a luxury few can afford to exercise in practice except, perhaps, towards the end of an academic career.There are, though, some grounds for optimism that more universities and research organisations worldwide will reject proxy measurements, such as the JIF, in evaluating academic research performance, and commit to a broader appreciation of research quality by signing up to the Declaration on Research Assessment (or 'DORA' see https://sfdora.org/)and the Leiden Manifesto (Hicks et al., 2015).This will help in the struggle to stem the corrupting effects of bibliometrics and represents a ray of hope that the global academic community is still committed to a liberal scientific ethos.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Bruce Macfarlane is Chair Professor of educational leadership at the Education University of Hong Kong, where he is also Dean of the Faculty of Education and Human Development.His work centres on developing conceptual frameworks for interpreting academic practice, ethics and leadership in higher education and his publications include Freedom to Learn (2017), Intellectual Leadership in Higher Education (2012), Researching with Integrity (2009), The Academic Citizen (2007) and Teaching with Integrity (2004).