The Institutional Present

In Chapter 2 we attempted to delineate the target for our critical interrogation and map the current intellectual terrain of ICCM. We identified a dominant discourse in ICCM in which particular modes of knowledge and the epistemologies and ontologies upon which they depend are valorized: a functionalist paradigm, positivist methods and Western interests. As with all discourses, there is an inclusionary/exclusionary power effect mirrored in the commitments and omissions we have explicated. The maintenance and sustenance of such a dominant discourse and intellectual orthodoxy is dependent, naturally, on a particular institutional frame. ICCM, as a discourse and as a domain of disciplinary and professional practice, has an elaborate institutional frame associated with it. This frame serves to manage and control the processes of knowledge production, dissemination and consumption for the field. It also constitutes mechanisms and practices that regulate the points and modes of entry, the nature and extent of participation, and the processes of evaluation, assessment, development and progression of persons, groups, other institutions and knowledges in the field. It is the nature and dynamics of that institutional frame, as it is presently constituted and enacted, that we examine in this chapter.