As I mentioned before, I’m reading Michèle Lamont’s How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment for my professorial book club. And right at the beginning I find the following little gem:
I oppose a view of peer review that is driven only or primarily by a competitive logic (or the market) and suggest in addition that peer review is an interactional and an emotional undertaking.
Seriously, can anybody be more of a cliche? She’s a woman, so her unique perspective is to look at the “emotional and interactional”? Ugh.
Clarissa's Blog 
Ugh. What about peer-review being the sole way to double-check papers before they become part of the scientific canon?
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Well, it might be a cliche, but it’s not entirely untrue. Peer review, in the sciences at least as that’s what I have experience with, should be a dispassionate process, yet it is littered with human pettiness: referees requiring that their own papers be cited, sometimes blocking competing studies without good justification (except that they themselves are being threatened), sloppy or late or inaccurate reviews, downright viciously worded referee reports… I know that I get really pissed, which is an emotional response, when I have to review a poorly written paper, or a paper with insufficient references in the introduction, or a paper that blatantly ignores a large body of literature, or a paper I had previously reviewed that came back to me after revision and where the authors basically made no amendments to the manuscript at all yet wrote a really nasty 5-page rebuttal instead…
Also, I have received several reports on my single-author papers where the referees were apparently fascinated by the fact that I am a woman, and wrote the reports with the highest ever frequency of use of “she/her” per paragraph, referring to all that is wrong with me and my work.
But also you get reports that show someone took their time to read and understand your paper, and made such profound yet well-meaning suggestions that make the paper better than you thought possible, that you want to reach through the peer-review electronic system and give them a really big hug.
I have no idea what that book you mention goes on to explore, but in my experience peer review is very human and therefore full of signatures of human virtues and flaws, but it’s the best system we have.
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“Peer review, in the sciences at least as that’s what I have experience with, should be a dispassionate process, yet it is littered with human pettiness”
– Oh, I agree with you completely. I chair a committee that distributes research grants, and I’ve seen all kinds of outbursts. But what bothers me is that it’s always women who are stuck talking about the emotional and relational. If we want to combat the stereotype tht girls only understand emotions, maybe we should start moving away from only studying emotions and relationships.
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well, just the terms from your quote could have easily come from william james.
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