website title

Lecturer Zone - The Vanishing Textbook

Michael Moran

(Reproduced by kind permission of the Political Studies Association from PSA News, June 2005)

The world of the Research Assessment Exercise has led to the extinction of many life forms in academia. The disappearance of some - freeloaders, idlers, chancers - is welcome. But some endangered species need protecting. Among the most important of these is the textbook. Confessing that you are writing a textbook nowadays is the surest way to be struck off the research dean's Christmas card list. Yet textbooks not only have an obvious importance in pedagogy; they are in their own way even more difficult to write than are the monographs and research papers that are now central to research activity

This last thought has been brought home to me forcefully by my own recent experience. In the last couple of years I have completed two very different books. The British Regulatory State: high modernism and hyper-innovation (OUP 2003) brings a smile of approval to the face of my Research Director: it is eminently suitable RAE fare. By contrast, Politics and Governance in the UK (Palgrave Macmillan 2005) will earn me few brownie points in my University - because it is a first level undergraduate text.

Yet here is the paradox: the student text was much the more difficult to write. There are four reasons for this. First, the textbook was more rigorously refereed: four anonymous readers crawled all over it in detail. By contrast, a couple of referees reviewed the monograph, and it is a very rare journal indeed that delivers four close referee reports on a submission. Second, in writing the research monograph I was working in a clearly defined specialist field, ready to repel boarders from my own secure domain. By contrast, as a textbook writer I had to write mostly about areas where I had no record of specialised research. I calculate that only three of the twenty four chapters of Politics and Governance in the UK were written out of my specialised research work; otherwise, I was at the mercy of the specialists in parties, voting behaviour, devolution, and so on. Third, a monograph writer addresses one audience - of peers, expert and committed, who are prepared to work out the author's meaning if expression is unclear or clumsy. But in writing the textbook I found, like every author before me, that I had simultaneously to address a variety of audiences: beginners, who cannot be expected to know the jargon, and cannot be trusted to work out meaning if expression is unclear; and peers, who have to be convinced that I know what I am talking about before they will recommend the book. Finally, in the monograph I could use one voice and one mode: uninterrupted textual exposition - more crudely, one damn word after another. Textbooks no longer work like that. The easiest part of the process was writing the words. The really tricky part was composing the accompaniment: photos, documents, briefing boxes, timelines, debates and issue boxes, cartoons, and so on.

We have arrived at an odd state of affairs. Our modern research culture offers no reward to - indeed often penalises - the activity of writing textbooks. Yet in a world of mass higher education the textbook is more important than ever. We have to think out some way of reshaping incentive systems, or the textbook will vanish as a life form altogether.

Michael Moran is Professor of Government at the University of Manchester. He has had a secret life as a textbook author for over twenty years.