There are a variety of groups who have a "stake" (vested socioeconomic interests) in various elements of the existing system of scholarly communication. The cultural capital approach of Bourdieu in studying the long term expectations, assumptions, power relationships, and other background elements of these stakeholders is useful in analyzing the issues involved in transitioning to the Internet as a medium of scholarly communication, and the prospects for such a transition occuring successfully.

By "stakeholders" I mean identifiable groups which hold a particular kind of relevant capital in one of Bourdieu’s senses; a group which occupies a particular location in the possible space of power relationships involved in scholarly communication. Key stakeholders in traditional academic communication will be studied. They include: senior faculty controlling tenure decisions, junior scholars (both junior non-tenured faculty and graduate students seeking advanced degrees), publishers oriented toward academic material, and "facilitators" of the process (librarians primarily, but also museum curators, and finally university administrators who allocate funds for libraries, archives, and other kinds of repositories of objectified culutral capital). Key internet stakeholders will also be studied, including those groups who would be involved in a transition to the internet as a medium of scholarly communication.

It is essential to first be clear about the core and peripheral domains of scholarly communication in this context. In a sociologicalanalysis of the kind that Bourdieu makes, the essential features to be grasped are power relationships. In this sense, the core items of scholarly communication are those works which are involved in the two key stages of the reproduction of the corps: a) the dissertations of graduate students seeking advanced degrees, and b) the tenure review materials of junior faculty seeking institutional tenure. There are obviously an enormous number of other kinds of academic communication that are outside of these narrow categories: textbooks, syllabi, handbooks, journal articles and monographs not used for tenure review, conference presentations, indexes and finding aids, other instructional materials, etc. The point is that dissertations and tenure review items are the key products of scholars which must be accepted by senior faculty if junior scholars are to progress in the educational system and eventually become senior faculty members themselves. This is the fundamental communication cycle in academic renewal. Therefore, as the categories suggest, the analysis must center on the disposition of these core items, and deal with the peripheral items subsequently.

Following Bourdieu's broad methodology, it is equally important to understand the changing statistical features of the key stakeholders under study, their demographics, and economic circumstances. I do not propose here to undertake such a monumental task, as there is an existing array of excellent sources of statistics on academia which can be used.

Again following Bourdieu's example, the most important group to study demographically is the faculty. There are a wide variety of trends observed in North American faculty in recent years: a slight aging of the group, increasing percentages of females and minority groups represented, and (the most significant trend in terms of the reproduction of the corps) the increasing percentage of part-time and non-tenure track faculty. [Zimbler,1997] [Rosenblum,1997] As competition increases for the most desirable positions (full-time, tenure track), there is greater anxiety and conservative pressure surrounding the activity of producing the core items, dissertations and tenure review items. There is consequently less incentive to experiment with electronic or other non-traditional forms which may have less credibility in the eyes of senior faculty members. [Guernsey,1997] Does this rule out an network transformation of scholarly communication as proposed here?

No. What it means is something more complex. It means that the traditional reproduction of the corps is not going to be the arena in which experiments in scholarly hypermedia take place. Experiments will be conducted in the peripheral areas, in all the other types of academic communication. Dissertations and tenure review items will likely be some of the last items which transition to electronic formats, precisely because they have such a conservative functional role in academia.

This pattern is exactly what we have seen for the last few years. Innovation in formats has taken place in the peripheral item types, in instructional technologies, in library finding aids, in the myriad new hybrid forms of electronic research/knowledge processing tools. This will continue to be the case for at least another generation, because the determining issue is a generational one. Since the core items are the litmus by which senior faculty mold and authenticate their successors, acceptance of electronic core items will not and cannot occur until the current generation of students (that cohort which grew up with computers as an everyday feature of life, the Nintendo generation, in short) advances to occupy senior faculty positions. Accepting that personal computers did not become a commonly available commodity until the latter half of the 1980s, we can establish an approximate timeframe for this transition (working through the details of the electronic cohort and their progression through the academic ranks) as beginning to happen in the second decade of the 21st century:

Event                                          Year     Cohort Age
------------------------------------------     ----     ----------
Cohort Birth Date                              1975
Computers become commodified                   1985        10
Cohort completes undergraduate education       1997        22
Cohort completes graduate education            2003        28
Cohort become junior faculty                   2005        30
Cohort begin to become tenured faculty         2011        36

My cohort age analysis can of course be challenged, but something like this progression will inevitably occur. Roughly fifteen years from now, when the electronic cohort are assuming tenured faculty positions, the capacity and sophistication of networks will also have progressed a great deal if anything remotely like the expected continued advance of computational technology occurs. At that point, senior faculty will have experienced hypermedia systems as familiar features of their entire adult lives. Hypermedia will at that point be traditional medium, and consequently an expected format for core items.

Fifteen years is a long time, however, especially in this period of rapidly changing events. Many other features of academia will have changed by that time. According to long term demographic trend analysis [Pascarella,1998] we can expect to see a landscape of higher education even less "traditional" than the one we see today. Students and faculty will be on average older, more diverse ethnically, and participating in education in increasingly non-traditional roles. Students and faculty will predominately be part-time academics, in a much more varied set of academic settings, especially two-year colleges and distance learning environments.

The number of tenured faculty positions has remained constant for a long period. The long term result of this trend is a decline in percentage terms for tenured positions as other aspects of academia follow the geral upward trend of demographic growth. The odd feature of this demographic trend for academia is that it gradually changes the ground rules. The core items are eventually no longer core. When the process of the reproduction of the corps transitions predominately to a non-tenure track system, changed priorities in scholalry communication begin to determine the central pattern of academic renewal. This is exactly what happened in a more acute, smaller setting during the May 1968 crisis which Bourdieu studied. As more lecturer and non-traditional discipline positions were created, the ground rules of getting a faculty job changed. The benefit of the new opportunities in the 21st century will go (as they did in 1968) to academics who are mentally oriented toward the new emphasis in scholarly communication. In 1968 this meant getting a degree in a new field like sociology and finishing a dissertation as fast as possible to take advantage of the boom. In 2015 this will most likely mean studying a new field that we currently focus on (cybernetic sociology?) and creating one of Lyotard's performative electronic data systems as a thesis project. This is not to say that the traditional academic generation will not retain a central power base. As Bourdieu pointed out in the case of 1968, there was never any question of the traditional elite academic center being itself transformed. What happened was that the old guard were forced by the circumstance of the crisis to accomodate the rushed reform of a new layer of academic entities. The pattern is therefore less one of wholesale transformation than an accretion of a new layer that gradually swells while the old core diminishes.

How will the other stakeholders in the scholarly communication system change? Bourdieu of course does not extend his analysis in Homo Academicus to groups other than faculty and students, such as librarians or publishers, but his concepts of cultural capital can relevantly be applied. The basis of the cultural capital of both publishers and librarians is objectified cultural capital, mainly in the form of control over production and access to academic print materials, respectively.

Publishers

Commercial Interests utilizing the Internet, including publishers. The business presence on the Internet, along with explicitly commercial activities has exploded in recent years. Business people are currently exerting tremendous leverage to shape the Internet into a distribution and marketing medium. In the case of businesses whose product is information (such as publishers) these opportunities are problematic, as the Internet presents unprecedented intellectual property dangers by way of information piracy. The capital of this group is product related, but has subtle features such as "brand-name" prestige (a monograph published by a prestigous house is more valuable than one published by a low-quality house). Publishers can trade on this brand-name prestige to attempt to sell products in new markets, such as electronic journals delivered via the Internet.

Facilitators

Academics developing local university infrastructure elements of the Internet. Decision making officials of these groups include campus computing center managers, librarians, and university administrators. They oversee the development of elements of the academic infrastructure, including access to the Internet on their campuses. They support and structure research and instruction rather than carrying out the activities. As a result, they have some similarities with the administrative academics that Bourdieu studies. Their capital is various, however, in some cases being associated with administrative prestige, sometimes in technical or scholarly knowledge.