I call myself a critical academic as it is important to acknowledge we operate in a ways that do harm as well as good, and so we need, especially in my line of work, to take account of critique that points to otherwise hidden harms often related to tendencies to dominate others. Below I focus on my use of the term critical but others use in other ways.
Academic work, like every work, is involved in systems that involve power – indeed universities were often founded as ways to dominate how people talked, thought and taught about things. In examining, an academic judges and evaluates people’s work, often with substantial effects on the people involved directly and on the people not in the academic system. In teaching the academic is passing all sorts of practices not just the universally useful and good ones we like to celebrate. Research work is dependent on all of sources influences other than a benign search for truth. Such influences include the researcher’s ego, status, funders’ wishes and organisational circumstances. As a critical academic that works on strategy, business & society and discourse taking account of critique is particularly important. An overly critical brain surgeon distracted by pondering the capitalistic function of brain/mind dualism in consumer health messages while trying to free a patient from a cancerous brain tumour would not be the most useful. The management consultant who is uncritical of mainstream management model for organizing a hospital is likely to be more dangerous.
Though the term critical is often associated with left-wing and socialist approaches, such commitments are not essential to be a critical scholar. Someone without political commitments or ones very different from mine, could be a critical academic if they acknowledged in their academic that their work was embedded in circumstances that cause harm and strove to take account of critiques of how those harms operate.
Many of the critiques that I use are from left-wing /socialist traditions. Many of Karl Marx’s insights into the capitalist nature of society that we currently live in seems really useful, for example the drive in capitalism to value things only as measured by market prices. Anti-colonial, feminist, anti-racist, ecological, postmodern critiques all have important points to make. Habermas’ works on how a public sphere and universities can help us to figure things out together is really important (for example, Habermas, 1984). These critiques are not doctrines you can cling to guarantee freedom from error. Alas nothing does that in my view, and we are always in the process of making our way across an uncertain sea in a flawed ship that we have to make better but drown if our repairs sink the ship (Quinn,1960). Of course, making things better can often involve rocking the boat and can also often involves sticking to a carefully established method.
Politically I am a socialist in the traditions of the Irish Labour party, the European Socialist Party and democratic international socialism. I am a member of Irish Labour party but do not let that commitment limit my academic responsibility.
I make use of critiques from traditions I politically oppose. An example would be that I find some of the things Hayek claims about dangers of centralization, abstract expertise and how social interactions can discover and coordinate knowledge (Hayek, 1945).
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