Process and Bureaucracy: Scientific Reform as Civilisation

The reform movement in science is seemingly constructing a new moral economy of science around process and bureaucracy, in which a new scientific etiquette is emerging that prescribes the performance of reformed science as civilised, efficient and objective. Bureaucratic innovations were borne out of the reform movement that seek to prescribe specific research processes, including but not limited to preregistration and registered reports. This moral economy emerges in the form of a bureaucracy and its epistemic uniformity actively suppresses scientific plurality. This paper argues that Eliasian drivers such as distinction, shame and disgust, act to pressure scientists into adopting this new etiquette. Even though the etiquette's appearance is quite new, it can be traced back to existing moral economies of science and their pursuit of efficiency and objectivity.


Introduction
Science is a moving target, and the procedures, structures and methods, as well as the informal layers of governance that populate science are subject to change, innovation and adaptation continuously. Accordingly, our ideas about good, responsible, or proper science, change and shift in parallel. This goes for the ways in which scientists demonstrate that they are committed to, or adhere to those ideas of good, responsible, and proper science (Lewis Jr., 2021;Penders et al., 2009). Current reform movements in science are aspiring to change (and in many places already changing) the ways researchers do science, the infrastructures available to facilitate those changed processes and practices, and they are also shifting how scientists convince themselves and others that their science is good, credible and trustworthy (Chiarelli et al., 2021;Randall & Welser, 2018).
Scientific reform consists of multiple parallel social movements, intersecting and interacting, and carrying various labels: metascience, replication and reproducibility drives, open science movements, recognition and reward reforms and more. Through these, reform foregrounds values that never were strangers to science such as honesty, transparency and accountability (Davies, 2019;Shaw & Satalkar, 2018), yet seeks to embed them into changed or improved scientific processes and instruments. Reform asks scientist to do things differently. To distinguish their science from other science, good science from bad science (or at least, less good science), and to elevate their approach above previous and other approaches, setting themselves apart as more advanced. This paper specifically looks at preregistration and registered reports as two ingredients of reform. They are paper submission formats which entail the registration and disclosure of study plans and details before data collection.
Here, I describe them as bureaucratic tools and instruments that serve to distinguish 'reformed' scientific processes from outdated or antiquated scientific processes. I will ask how researchers who promote and use these bureaucratic instruments articulate their potential to elevate the integrity and credibility of the scientific process, distinguish 'reformed' science accordingly. This paper visits a largely recent set of published works, in which proponents and opponents discuss in detail the ideological and practical issues that surround preregistration and registered reports and their role in the construction of a reformed scientific process. Given the size of this body of work, incompleteness is inevitable, but I strive for a first overview of articulations of what I end up calling the civilising power of bureaucratic reforms in science. Although deeply rooted in literature on the topic, what follows is primarily a conceptual analysis. No data was produced or collected for this analysis. I will first introduce preregistration and registered reports and their ambitions with respect to the process of scientific inquiry. Subsequently, I conceptualise both tools as bureaucratic instruments and very briefly situate them within the history of bureaucracy in science. Then, drawing from the work of Elias and Skvirsky, I will articulate preregistration and registered reports as elements of a civilisation process in science that creates distinction through a focus on strict sequential ordering of elements and events.

Preregistration and Registered Reports
As innovations and interventions in the process of science, preregistration and registered reports are well-known and wide-spread in some (sub)fields of research and largely unknown in others. They are products of the scientific reform movement, which, as Peterson and Panofsky (2020) describe, has managed to "scandalise" (p. 26) scientific practices that were not unknown prior to the development of the reform social movement. Instead, they have actively been positioned as something scientists ought to be, at the very least, very concerned about. 1 More in line with the agenda of repair, scientists should perhaps be not only concerned, but ashamed about the ways in which they and their peers deviate from the ideal process of science. The reform movement, Derksen (2019) argues, draws its expectations about that ideal process from the philosophy of science, specifically from the works of Popper and Meehl and their ideas about what science is and should be. The messiness of science, and its apparent inability or unwillingness to follow the rules laid down by philosophers of science, has been chronicled in great detail by sociologists, anthropologists and historians of science, often grouped under the heading of science and technology studies (Knorr, 1979). The reform movement at times acknowledges these claims, yet positions them as a weakness to overcome, a hurdle in shaping and improving practice, rather than a characteristic of practice. 2 Instead, so the argument goes, focus should lie on hypothesis testing, direct replication, collaboration and openness of methods, data sharing infrastructures and protocols, theory development and formalisation, and critical debate that focuses on all constitutive elements of the scientific process. In the process, the reform movement seeks to innovate the process of science itself. Innovatively so, Derksen argues, not because the reformers deviate from traditional Popperian expectations of that process, but because of their strict adherence to methodological principles and bureaucratic tools meant to safeguard that process.
One of these bureaucratic tools is the act of preregistration. When preregistering a study, the researchers submit hypotheses, methods, protocols and analyses prior to performing them, to a registry. Preregistration has been an industry standard for clinical trials since 2005 when the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) decided they would no longer publish unregistered trials, but these registries tend to be less detailed and need not include analysis protocols. The main purpose of preregistration is to distinguish intended analyses from opportunistic post-hoc analyses and to prevent the latter posing as the former, in the words of Nosek et al. (2018), "Preregistration is a solution that helps researchers maintain clarity between prediction and postdiction and preserve accurate calibration of evidence" (p. 2601). In the same paper, they argue that this is necessary, since without such help impartiality and objectivity are out of reach for "human reasoning". Both preregistration and registered reports are supposed to be a "method to increase the credibility of published results" (Nosek & Lakens, 2014). More concretely, preregistration is argued to prevent a number of research practices that are considered undesirable, including but not limited to p-hacking, data dredging, post-hoc analysis and HARKing (Lakens, 2019;Rubin, 2020). Nosek et al. focus on the process of science, even suggesting that preregistration returns science to "the simplified model of research taught in elementary school" (p. 2602) and accordingly limits the researcher's ability to tweak procedures as they advance through the research process. Reducing researcher freedom is the explicit goal of preregistration (Bakker et al., 2020), but it does not set the procedure in stone: some deviations are allowed, but because they become visible in the form of a mismatch between preregistered and actual analysis, they need to be accounted for in detail (cf. "a plan, not a prison", see Nosek et al. (2019)).
The narrowly articulated purpose of preregistration is to ensure that research when it is submitted for publication, does not, and cannot present a partially fictional representation of its own history in order to optimise it for a given purpose. This should promote rigour and objectivity of the research process as a whole and the result, as argued by its proponents, would be more reliable, more reproducible and more credible science (Munafò et al., 2017). More broadly articulated, preregistration contributes to the protection of a very specific ideal of impartiality and objectivity. As a bureaucratic innovation, in order to work towards this goal, preregistration requires labour and infrastructure. At its minimum, preregistration is an extra step in, and during, the research process designed to improve transparency and opennessthe wider context of the reform agendasjust like open data can improve research transparency towards the end of the research process. Preregistration requires extra work even when all its elements are in place and prepared, since preregistration takes place through more or less standardised digital forms (Bakker et al., 2020). While the value of that additional work is up for debate, the additional work itself is not. In addition to labour, preregistration requires infrastructure: there needs to be a place where a study can be preregistered and where this preregistration is kept, curated and made accessible. Currently, the primary registry for studies that are not clinical trials, is the Center for Open Science (COS), a US based non-profit organisation that does not charge the users of its digital tools and platforms (that include also a series of pre-print servers). 3 The same expectation of how the sequential process of science should look like, generated a second bureaucratic innovation: registered reports. Where preregistration is an additional step in the research process, following the design phase but preceding experimentation, analysis and publication, registered reports draws a small part of the publication and review process forward. Registered reports are part of the same reform agenda as preregistration, but they seek to solve a different problem. Registered reports primarily target the problem of publication bias and focuses not on the execution of studies, but on their display in the scientific literature. It draws from the realisation that positive results are overrepresented in published work, and negative or null results are underrepresented. In 2013, the journal Cortex came up with a new scientific genre, called the registered report, to "provide authors with a publishing option that neutralises bad incentives, permitting the publication of null results and encouraging replication attempts" (Chambers, 2013). It rearranges the publication process: "The Registered Report format splits conventional peer review in half" (Chambers, 2019) in which the editors and reviewers first receive a so-called "Stage 1" manuscript that "includes an overview of the background literature, preliminary work, theory, hypotheses and proposed methods, including the study procedures and analysis plan" (Chambers, 2019) which they may review and ultimately accept for publication before the study is actually conducted. This in principle acceptance means commitment from the journal to publish the full (Stage 2) manuscript that include the results, regardless of whether these are positive, negative or inconclusive. Registered reports are connected to preregistration in the sense that journals that publish this genre tend to require that authors preregister their analyses after the Stage 1 one manuscript has been accepted, and the aforementioned in-principle acceptance of the Stage 2 manuscript only applies if there are no deviations from the research plan or when such deviations are well documented and approved. After the start of registered reports at Cortex in 2013, currently over 200 journals now participate in this novel process (Chambers, 2019).
Registered reports, like preregistration, require work and infrastructure. In the case of registered reports, both work and infrastructure are located at publishers and journals: a new review process that is designed to be agnostic about results does require handling manuscripts twice. Publishers and journals are nonetheless staffed with academics, provided remunerated or voluntary labour. Early adopters of registered reports report empirical success, with a significantly higher amount of manuscripts reporting negative or null results (Scheel et al., 2021;Soderberg et al., 2021) and the promotion of "reproducibility, transparency and selfcorrection across disciplines" (Chambers & Tzavella, 2022). Their claim is that registered reports advance the rigour and integrity of science (Probst & Hagger, 2015) and align incentives with the desirable values in the scientific and publication processes (Chambers et al., 2015), an act of repair of the moral economy of scientific reform (Penders et al., 2020).
These reforms, both preregistration and registered reports, are widely supported in a variety of fields, most notably in psychology and the life sciences, but they are not uncontested. Apart from early criticisms that preregistration could serve as a prison, or that registered reports would put science in chains (e.g. Scott, 2013), more nuanced evaluations of these bureaucratic innovation have been published, examining the claims of proponents, their underlying assumptions and potential undesirable effects. One set of critiques focuses on the role of theory in science and argues that preregistration and registered reports focus on procedures and tests but do little to advance theory (Burghardt & Bodansky, 2021;Szollosi et al., 2020) and suggests that one of the underlying claimsthe promotion of reproducibility and replicabilityis not just a procedural matter (Devezer et al., 2020;Leek & Peng, 2015). Another set of critiques questions whether these bureaucratic innovations in the scientific process are sufficient, or required, for good and credible science (Pham & Oh, 2021;Rubin, 2020). These critiques are situated within a larger set of scholars and scientists critically examining the reform agenda at large, spanning metascience, replication movements and open science (de Rijcke & Penders, 2018;Flis, 2019;Mirowski, 2018;Peterson & Panofsky, 2021a). Combined, they challenge the assumptions about which parts of the scientific process are most valuable and deserve most of our efforts qua maintenance, support, or possibly repair.

Bureaucracies and Process
Despite such critiques, preregistration and registered reports are tools on the rise across epistemic cultures, including for instance, qualitative research methods (Haven & Van Grootel, 2019). Furthermore, in addition to e.g. registered reports, new innovations are emerging such as exploratory reports, which documents explorative research (McIntosh, 2017), and postregistration (Lee et al. 2019), which involves keeping a log of all choices made in any given study. Slowly, but steadily, more and more elements of the scientific processes are caught in bureaucratic instruments and tools.
The bureaucratisation of science is well-documented and can be traced back to Weber's 'Science as a vocation', where the emergent character of science as a bureaucratic organisation, in which workers lived in "quasi-proletarian existences" (Weber, 1918, p. 131), was first described. More recently, Lee and Walsh examined a century's worth of bureaucratisation in science since Weber's famous lecture and they identify a continuously increasing routinisation of tasks, "division of labor, hierarchy, and standardization, undermining science as a vocation" (Lee & Walsh, 2021, p. 20). Lee and Walsh warn of alienisation and disenchantment with science as such processes advance, true to Marxist traditions. However, bureaucracies do not solely exist to alienate the workers they contain, rob them of joy (Collins et al., 2021), or to trap them in Kafkaesque vicious circles (Clegg et al., 2016). The contrasting perspective is that bureaucracies can be tools through which vast amounts of power can be wielded. Bureaucracies can serve as displays of civilisation, and professionalisation, as ways to manage cultures, societies and processes on unprecedented scales (Crooks & Parsons, 2016).
On those processes, Skvirsky (2020) writes: "The process genre is a genre of modernity. While examples of the genre may seem to be innocent depictions of techniques of production or techniques of the body, they often have been implicitly understood to be plotting the societies they represent along a developmental trajectory from "primitive" to "advanced." Thus, in the process genre a method of production is not just a way of doing something or making something; it functions simultaneously as an index of a mode of production-and, by extension, of the status and character of a people or civilization" (p.52).
Through adherence to and displays of processes, Skvirsky argues, communities demonstrate how advanced they are as a civilisation. Scientific bureaucracies are no different: strict adherence to methodological principles and bureaucratic tools shows how committed communities are to safeguard the process of science, to pursue or protect objectivity. Through bureaucratic innovations, such as preregistration and registered reports, this commitment becomes visible and tangible. Both leave paper trails, allow structures of accountability to be built and serve as public displays of civilisation, distinguishing advanced science from primitive science. If we apply Skvisky's argument onto the organisation of science, scientific bureaucracies serve as technologies of distinction, powerful and modern distinctions between old and new, primitive and advanced, civilised and uncivilised, good and bad, though not always as strict dichotomies, but as ranges and gradients that seek to be evidence of civilisation building. Additionally, new scientific bureaucratic infrastructures around, in this ase, preregistration and registered reports, introduce new actors that hold power over scientific processes or reshuffle power. Mirowski (2018) discusses the platform economics and politics of open science, where platformsthe digital hosts or owners of the toolsincreasingly wield power over the conduct and shape of the scientific process. Taubert (2012) already demonstrated how existing editorial systems contribute to an organisation of editorial work, including surveillance infrastructures, typical for highly bureaucratised organisations. To Taubert, this showed how the publisher's power extended into the offices and minds of editors and authors. Next to commercial platforms, Lash et al. (2018) draw attention to philanthropic organisations co-shaping the processes of science.

Process and Distinction
Casting scientific reform into terms of civilisation invokes an Eliasian perspective in which manners and moralsetiquette are intricately connected to the construction of larger developments in the formation of policy and organisation (Elias, 1978). 4 For example, in the case of scientific reform, Melanie Imming's and the late Jon Tennant's motto was 'open science is just science done right' (Imming & Tennant, 2018), a statement through which they intricately connected morality and the scientific processes and policies prescribing certain versions of that process.
Elias is, when it comes to views of society, on the side of Freud in the sense that he firmly argues that society is about control, rather than rationality (Bauman, 1979). When it comes to science, control of the process, is increasingly manifest in accountability through bureaucracy. This control is, currently, a hybrid of Fremdzwang (pressure imposed from the outside), in which rules and regulations push and promote, for instance, the preregistration of experiments and studies, or requires publication through registered report routes, and Selbstzwang (pressure imposed by oneself), in cases in which such rules and regulations do not apply, or places to which they do not extend, yet where they are followed or promoted nonetheless. How the scientific process is shaped and controlled, how strict one adheres to its ideal type and which tools one uses to do so, is a strategy though which one group can distinguish itself from another. Brian Nosek, the director of the Center for Open Science, repeatedly discussed his plans for changing scientific etiquette, in which for instance preregistration would become an obligatory passage point in the scientific process. He did and does so through the mantra "make it possible, make it easy, make it normative, make it rewarding, make it required" (Nosek, 2019). This projects a progressively strong required adherence to a more advanced, in Skvirsky's words, scientific process. Here, the key driving force is not (yet) Fremdzwang, since pregistration is rarely compulsory. 5 Instead, the ability to create distinction for oneself and one's community by already adhering to 'advanced process' expectations can create a Selbstzwang: the pursuit of membership of the scientific process elite or methodological elite. 6 Membership of that group can be made visible and put on display: open science practices, including preregistration, need promotion and advertising. They can also be rewarded with so-called badges. These badges, that accompany publications, signal whether data is openly available, materials are publicly available, and whether a preregistered design and analysis plan is available and form a further expansion of the new bureaucracies of the scientific process (Grahe, 2014). This expansion coincides with the rejection of other 'outdated' bureaucratic instruments, such and individual or journal-level research metrics such as the h-index and the impact factor (Tiokhin et al. 2021).
Where the scientific reform movement is modelling the ideal scientific process on Popper's and Merton's reference frames, desirable and civilised scientific behaviour -"getting it right instead of getting it published"are increasingly heralded, and in the public eye (Aubert Bonn & Pinxten, 2021;Moher et al., 2018). Undesirable scientific processes are cast out of public view and those who continue to participate in them are actively ridiculed and shamed. Researchers publishing too much are subject to vocal criticism on social media, but also in published sources (Price, 2018). Those who resist process innovations such as preregistration are cast out as primitive or outdated and in need of education. 7 The pursuit of undesirable counternorms (Mitroff, 1974) is limited to the private domain, covered up by public displays that do conform to 'advanced' etiquette (Buck, 2021;Derksen & Field, 2021). Alternatively, it is recast into more appropriate dimensions in which reformed practices also yield credit and status, can draw in additional citations, may produce unexpected new publications (Allen & Mehler, 2019) all while celebrating the appropriate processes and values (Corker, 2017).
Underlying this process of distinction are the equally Eliasian drivers of shame, embarrassment and disgust. Rarely seen and discussed in the context of scientific organisation, they feature in the reform movement quite prominently and include editors embarrassed about the quality of the work their journals were publishing (Enserink, 2018), peers shaming each other for the pursuit of fame and recognition (Aubert Bonn, 2020, p. 200), and shaming researchers for publishing too many papers . Beyond these rather obvious examples of Fremdzwang, potentially more powerful examples of Selbstzwang feature among researchers. Consider, for instance, psychologist Inzlicht, who writes in a blog post about his past scientific practices, being far from proud about his commitment to the proper process: "Have I contributed to our current crisis? It is painful to wonder if my research is part of the problem, but such introspection is vital to recognizing our troubles and, critically, rectifying our field […]. Looking more closely at my first ten papers reveals that the state of my (initial) science leaves much to desire. […] The most common design in my first ten papers was a 2 × 2 between-subject design, which means that on average I had a measly 13 to 14 participants per cell. I'm embarrassed to admit it, but in one study I collected only 28 participants in a two-cell between-subject design…but get this: it also included an individual difference variable as a moderator. Ouff! […] I can do better. And it is clear from my most recent papers that once I stopped denying our problems, I have in fact done better" (Inzlicht, 2015).
Inzlicht is displaying failure and shame as a lesson that motivated him to do more civilised science, better science. Similar displays of experienced failure, shame and disgust for past performance are visible elsewhere online, on blogs and on social media. 8 Ecologist Chipperfield writes on Twitter: "I should point out that I am also entirely guilty of this too. Talking as something who (to my shame) has never pre-registered a hypothesis". 9 The scientific literature, however, leaves little room for these reflections, despite their value. 10 A few notable exceptions exist. First is the 'Loss of Confidence' project. This research effort collected a series of statements from researchers who, looking back upon their past research no longer were confident of their results. Whether this was because of post-hoc hypothesis formation, questionable research practices or methodological flaws, they sought re-commitment to the civilised scientific process. For instance, Chabris writes: "[W]e tried different rules for removing outlier trials and picked one that was uncommon but led to results consistent with our hypothesis. Nowadays, I would analyze these types of data using more justifiable rules and preregister the rules I was planning to use (among other things) to avoid this problem" (Chabris, in: Rohrer et al., 2021).
Reflecting on all statements, Rohrer et al. (2021) write that "given the potential (or perceived) costs of individual selfcorrections, public admission of error could be taken as a credible signal that the issuer values the correctness of the scientific record" (p. 1265), signifying desirable morals and manners among the researchers who participated in the project. Second are retraction notices, errata or corrigenda in which researchers admit to weaknesses in their own past work and offer corrections of that work, or seek understanding or forgiveness for their past mistakes. Here too, confession is a common theme. Vuong (2020) even calls authors who seek retraction of their own work "heroic souls" and the self-retractions they seek as "heroic acts", signifying the moral character to pursue self-correction even at the expense of one-self. Ronald (quoted in Gewin (2014), and presented as a 'best practice') makes an explicit appeal to process: "You just have to set aside emotions and let the scientific process pull you through" (p. 389), in which she bundles both Selbstzwang and Fremdzwang.
In an alternative vocabulary, those experts who resist or critique preregistration, registered reports or other metascientific bureaucratic innovations, are rhetorically cast in the position of the 'bad expert' (Sweet & Giffort, 2021), a cultural category that is actively made and maintained by actors who seek to redesign or reshuffle expertise structures and networks. Through bad experts, distinction and gatekeeping, both social technologies of difference, epistemic spaces are created and exploited by careful performances of new morals and manners (Hilgartner, 2000).

Discussion
Scientific reform is a social movement that draws its status from the successful promotion of reformed scientific processes and bureaucracies over primitive and outdated ones a continuous process of displaying distinction. The constant rhetoric about the scientific paper being an outdated form of scientific communications, a relic from the 17 th century scientific revolution, and the subsequent promotion of new forms of publicationdigital, flexible, curated, etceteraserves exactly this purpose. The argument is often extended to journals and scientific publication as a whole (Stern & O'Shea, 2019), drawing away scarce resources from science proper, contributing to the wrong types of incentives and thereby making science as a whole inefficient: "Science needs science to avoid wasted effort and optimize resources" (Ioannidis, 2018). The solution is coproduced alongside the diagnosis: "improving transparency and sharing can make it easier to assess rigor and replicability and, therefore, to increase research efficiency" .
Next to commitments to objectivity, the pursuit of efficiency is one of the claims of the reform movement (Munafò et al., 2017), where efficiency would not translate into the maximisation of citations or publications, but the optimisation of quality and the minimisation of waste, thereby contributing to scientific progress. The continued advancement of the scientific process, the civilisation of science to some, includes pressures and surveillance of adherence to that process. Skvisky even speaks of a potential shift to the "how-to" or manual genre as part of that advancement. If and when increased a continuous need for distinction further reinforces strict adherence to scientific processes populated with bureaucratic innovations, the (human) researcher herself inevitably becomes a weakness.
The way the reform movement casts epistemology in moral termsa pursuit of what is right when it comes to knowledge-making, enacted through the Eliasian moral pressures of Fremdzwang and Selbstzwang, continues "an ethos of self-annihilation as the price of knowledge" (Daston, 2002), described in great detail by Levine (2002). Levine described how removing the body and the self as a requirement to know stands at the core of modern science. He understands this self-suppression as "something like death". Peterson and Panovsky signal a similar movement when they write about metascience as "It is a post-human theory of science in which the limitations of human bias can only be overcome with total transparency and machine intervention" (Peterson & Panofsky, 2020, p.20). Commitment to process over people offers ample opportunity for moral distinction. The extreme continuation of this direction of distinction is that the researcher has to be taken out of the research process.
The process itself and not those engaged in it, is a civilisation ideal. In the words of Field and Derksen (2020): push towards maximal and mechanical objectivity in quantitative research. This stance is reinforced by major journals and academic institutions that subtly yet certainly link objectivity with integrity and rigor". This view on the advanced process places the researcher in the role of an "automaton", stripped of their humanity, in the pursuit of objectivity and efficiency (Field & Derksen, 2020). Efficiency is, however, a poor norm to guide the governance of science. Peterson and Panovsky argue quite explicitly that "We cannot equate efficiency with progress because we do not know what progress is" (Peterson & Panofsky, 2021b, p. 352). If we cannot know the latter, we cannot design the former to target that latter.
Objectivity, and the road towards it described by Levine as a form of death, suppressing human life for the benefit of ethereal knowledge, is similarly contested. Daston and Galison call it "a fighting word", a term or concept invoked to win battles or establish superiority in epistemic struggles (Daston, 2002;Daston & Galison, 1992). The mechanical objectivity the reform movement seeks to encode not in devices, but in its new procedural bureaucracies is described by critics as an unattainable "voice from nowhere" (Nagel, 1986) or "the God trick" (Haraway, 1988). It is the form of objectivity that seeks to get rid of all human flaws in interpretation of 'givens' by outsourcing it to non-humans (Daston, 1995, p. 19). It also comes accompanied with a healthy dose of hypocrisy, as Daston writes, by using machines, or "in so burying their individual identities in the impersonal collectivity, scientists actually aggrandize rather than surrender their social and intellectual authority" (Daston, 1992, p. 614). The moral economies of reform push these repertoires of distinction further, beyond de-individualisation and disembodiment and graft epistemology onto process. Moral economies are integral to science, as Daston has shown, and centre on self-discipline (or Selbstzwang, in the vocabularies of this paper) primarily.
In contrast, other directions for distinction are imaginable and are in fact practiced. They include preregistration scepticism as a movement (Flis, 2022) and investing in more and explicit reflection on science, rigor and integrity (Field & Derksen, 2020). Each of these forms of distinction are accompanied by their own bureaucratic tools, differing from preregistration, registered reports, exploratory reports, post-publication review infrastructures and more, to include positionality statements and discussions, reflection diaries and many more.
All of these forms of distinction draw from different repertoires, but that does not mean that all fare equally well in the current socio-political landscapes. For instance, Peterson and Panovsky write "while reformers can draw on popular rhetoric of how science should operate, critics must wade into the murky waters of real scientific practice" (Peterson & Panofsky, 2021b), suggesting that the reformer's focus on distinction through process aligns a lot better with critics' focus on distinction through lived experiences of scientists and their nuanced reflections. However, procedural solutions to the reform crisis have not yet delivered on their promises. In contrast, in a recent contribution, Nelson argues that ethnographic approach can reveal that what may appear as a failure of scientific rigour, can actually be solving problems of science in real life practice. Process is no God-Emperorin line with Field and Derksen's critique. Additionally, Nelson questions whether all bureaucratic innovations are worth it: "it's worth considering that, in some situations, the net benefit of making practices more rigorous might be minimal" (Nelson, 2021, p. 191).
The potential and direction of movements fuelled by distinction are difficult to predict. However, multiple coexisting forms of distinction representing multidirectional civilising processes in science allows for the maintenance of epistemic and methodological plurality. Reform movements have been and continue to be suspect of epistemic imperialism (Guttinger, 2020;Leonelli, 2018;Penders et al., 2019Penders et al., , 2020Strübing, 2019), imposing one epistemic and bureaucratic ideal onto the entire plurality of scientific practices or perhaps even withdrawing the label 'science' or 'scholarship' from those who do not comply. The shifting etiquette associated with the scientific process, where various social groups and movements envision the ideal form of that process and which powers impose that etiquette is far from uniform. The scientific process does not generate a voice from nowhere, morally superior to voices bound to practices because it disposed of the self. A process exists somewhere, tied together with servers that host protocols and preregistrations, with an etiquette that prescribes their use and shames those that don't, with institutional pressures (at journals, universities, funders or elsewhere) that bureaucratise the etiquette to hide its morality. Guttinger (2020) described this as a "new localism", the refound realisation that processes themselves are situated and messy practices too 11 , and Derksen and Morawski (2022) take this point even further and reveal the epistemic plurality created when these messy practices actively and inevitably play a role in the performativity of reality.
In the context of economics research, Christensen and Miguel write that "The study of how social norms […] have shifted, and continue to evolve, in this area is an exciting social science research topic in its own right, and one that we hope is also the object of greater scholarly inquiry in the coming years" (Christensen & Miguel, 2018, p. 970), a research agenda to which I would like to add the continued empirical documentation of distinction, through manners and morals, shame and disgust directed at the processes of science. Epistemic cultures are, after all, matters of taste as well.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Bart Penders
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2661-9181 Notes 1. The tendency to refer to issues with replicability and reproducibility as 'repligate' further strengthens this rhetorical move, and its use in e.g. philosophy of science may help legitimise it further, see e.g. Machery (2020). 2. Paraphrased from Derksen (2019), who includes a lengthy discussion of multiple sources (p. 451-452). 3. Other registries exist, for instance aspredicted.org, and some at quite popular too. The COS is supported primarily by the Templeton Foundation and the Arnold Foundation, that also supports Ioannidis' Metascience research institute at Stanford, see Lash et al. (2018). 4. This in contrast to Andreoletti, who asks which scientific institution "has the power/right/responsibility to enforce a scientific reform" (Andreoletti, 2020, p. 144). 5. Although increasing number of publication outlets are experimenting with compulsory preregistration of empirical studies and statements such as "prereg or it didn't happen" are on the rise. 6. Next to Elias, the seminal work by Bourdieu on distinction clearly establishes the social mechanisms tying together social status and distinction, see Bourdieu (1984). 7. Nosek tweeted on July 30, 2021: "Carrots had their day. Time for the sticks!", actually prompted by a mentioning of Elias. See also Washburn et al. (2018). 8. For a framing of these issues as humility, see Derksen and Field (2022). 9. https://twitter.com/joechip90/status/1157371349591105537? s=20 (accessed 9 Aug 2021). 10. A notable exception, although somewhat outside the line of enquiry here, are empirical studies into questionable research practices, who sometimes voice respondents' disgust with the expectations and pressures in their respective fields, e.g. "My lab does this a lot and it drives me up the wall.
[…] it feels very soul sucking to HARK up a shitty theory for the sake of a publication. It's one of the reasons I'm leaving it" (p.55). Anonymous respondent, quoted in Moran (2021).

11.
[…] as if they were produced by people with bodies, situated in time, space, culture and struggling for credibility and authority (Shapin, 2010).