Walsh and Lehmann | PROBLEMATIC ELEMENTS IN THE SCHOLARSHIP OF ZYGMUNT BAUMAN 1 Problematic elements in the scholarship of Zygmunt Bauman Peter W. Walsh 1 University of Cambridge David Lehmann 2 University of Cambridge Abstract This paper presents evidence of the inappropriate reproduction of text in the work of Zygmunt Bauman. The enquiry focuses on his book, Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All? (2013), of which around five thousand words appear to have been copied from Bauman’s earlier published work and from other authors’ websites, including Wikipedia, without appropriate attribution. Extending the investigation to a sample of Bauman’s other books, we reveal that twelve contain substantial quantities of text – over 15,000 words per book in the most serious cases – which appear to have been reproduced verbatim or near- verbatim from previous Bauman publications without acknowledgement. We then provide examples of Bauman having copied his own earlier published writing without indication from a book into a journal article, a journal article into a book, and from one journal article into another – bringing the total of inappropriately reproduced text in the works examined to at least 90,000 words. On the basis of these findings, we challenge Bauman’s claim that proper referencing is irrelevant to the quality of an author's scholarship, and argue for the continued importance of careful academic citation. Introduction Few sociologists command more respect than Zygmunt Bauman. The author of more than seventy books, which have been translated into over thirty languages and been reprinted multiple times, Bauman is today one of the most productive, most read, and most discussed sociologists in the world. His thought is the subject of at least fifteen books and a hundred journal articles, and an international research institute stands in his name at the University of Leeds 3 . Further, Bauman is described by his intellectual peers as the “world’s great est living sociologist” (Beilharz, cited in Blackshaw, 2005: 14): an intellectual “superstar” whose