Following on this theme, there's an interesting situation re barristers, barristers' clerks, and solicitors. Oncer upon a time the barrister was the senior of these three (I know, had a relative who'd worked his way up through recorder,
circuit judge etc to senior judge). Barristers' clerks would have been the junior facilitators; here's what they are employed to do.....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barristers%27_clerk
However - I also have a friend who is a barrister in a northern UK Chambers. From his (admittedly anecdotal) comments, the hierarchy has inverted somewhat. Barristers' clerks hold the whip hand in that they dictate who has what office space,
which barristers get the 'good' contracts, who gets sent where. Cross the barristers' clerks up the wrong way and you will, from the north of England, keep getting handed cases down in Exeter. You may also get lumbered with the solicitors who are slow at paying
- and here's another inversion, the barristers cannot afford to alienate the solicitors, so they must sometimes forego payment or accept very slow payment, as he who kicks up a fuss gets least work from these solicitors, or the worst/hardest/most tedious cases.
There must be a term for this professional 'inversion', and I wonder what other professions it might apply to ???
Dr Hillary J. Shaw
Director and Senior Research Consultant
Shaw Food Solutions
Newport
Shropshire
TF10 8QE
www.fooddeserts.org
-----Original Message-----
From: Buscher, Bram <
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To: CRIT-GEOG-FORUM <
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Sent: Wed, Dec 13, 2017 5:08 pm
Subject: Editorial on German Projekt deal and need to divest from the corporate publishing model
Dear all,
Joel Wainwright and I recently wrote and published a 2-page Geoforum editorial about the need to divest from Elsevier en the corporate publishing model that might be of interest to members on the list, building on and inspired by the German 'Projekt Deal':
https://brambuscher.com/2017/12/13/from-a-new-deal-to-projekt-deal-time-for-solidarity-with-german-scholars/
The commercial scientific publishing model is broken. The basic problem is simple. We scholars give the products of our labour our research papers, reviews, and so forth - for free to for-profit corporations. These corporations then sell the same products of
our labour back to us, via libraries. This arrangement might be acceptable if the publishing industry charged only modest fees or contributed some fundamental quality to the work. But they do neither. No matter how much they say they care about knowledge,
their main priority is - as with any for-profit corporation - maximizing returns for private investors. In pursuing this goal, they employ creative means to extract resources from the public purse to pay for exorbitant journal fees - funds that otherwise could
be invested in public research and education. In the process, the publishing corporations intensify a perverse focus on impact factors, citation counts, 'clickbait' articles and academic branding, rather than genuine engagement. All this degrades the quality
of academic work and serves to undermine the conditions in which many of us work.
The whole text:
https://brambuscher.com/2017/12/13/from-a-new-deal-to-projekt-deal-time-for-solidarity-with-german-scholars/
--------------------------------
Prof. Dr. Bram Büscher
Professor and chair, sociology of development and change, Wageningen University
Visiting Professor, Department of Geography, Environmental Management and Energy Studies - University of Johannesburg
Research Associate, Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Stellenbosch University
De Leeuwenborch, Hollandseweg 1, 6707 KN Wageningen, Netherlands.
T: +31317482015 E:
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http://brambuscher.com<http://brambuscher.com/> /
http://www.wageningenur.nl/en/Expertise-Services/Chair-groups/Social-Sciences/sdc.htm
Senior editor Conservation & Society: please consider submitting a paper! See:
http://www.conservationandsociety.org/<http://www.conservationandsociety.org./>
For recent publications, see:
https://brambuscher.com/publications/
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