The Scholars Progress

THE SCHOLARS PROGRESS
ESSAYS ON ACADEMIC LIFE AND SURVIVAL
Alf Rehn
iUniverse, Inc.
New York Lincoln Shanghai

ESSAYS ON ACADEMIC LIFE AND SURVIVAL
Copyright 2006 by Alf Rehn All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting: iUniverse 2021 Pine Lake Road, Suite 100 Lincoln, NE 68512 www.iuniverse.com 1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677) ISBN-13: 978-0-595-39158-5 (pbk) ISBN-13: 978-0-595-83545-4 (ebk) ISBN-10: 0-595-39158-3 (pbk) ISBN-10: 0-595-83545-7 (ebk) Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Ch a p t e r 1 Ch a p t e r 2 Ch a p t e r 3 Ch a p t e r 4 Ch a p t e r 5 Ch a p t e r 6 Ch a p t e r 7 Ch a p t e r 8 Ten Commandments for Scholars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 The Importance of Journals. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 On Alternatives and Heresies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Quick and DirtyScholarship as Manual Labor and Impure Activity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Six Dispassionate Remarks Directed at Doctoral Students . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 A Short Manifesto for E-visible Scholars . . . . . . . . . . 56 Essay: On the Research Economy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Essay: The Moral Economy of Method . . . . . . . . . . . 76
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
Introduction
The following text is a collection of my thoughts, ideas, and advice regarding a career in academia. No, I do not see myself as an expert in careers, nor do I think I have all the answers. These are simply my own personal observations and include everything from my thoughts regarding academic ethics to some advice regarding publishing. Clearly, I have written this text because I think I have something to say, but I do not think that my views should be understood as even an attempt at a dogmatic viewpoint. I should also point out that even though I believe there is much wrong with the old notion of the two worlds argument, where the humanities and the social sciences belong to a different way of thinking compared to the world of technology and the natural sciences, I still believe that there are important differences. Particularly there are important differences career-wise, and I realize I can say very little about making your way in academia on the natural sciences-side of the reservation. In other words, Im talking about the academia I know. My personal road through the wilds of academia has been a bit odd. I earned a masters of science degree from a small Finnish university, and my grades werent that great. I had, however, befriended a mentor, Professor Claes Gustafsson, who took me on as a doctoral researcher and later as a researcher at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. I got my PhD of Industrial Management at this institution, having written a dissertation on gift economies and software piracy. Later, I earned the title of Docent (similar to the German Habilitation) from the same institution. I then applied for the chair in organization and management at my old alma mater, and got it. I was appointed as a full, tenured professor at age 31. I was then the youngest full professor in Finland, and may still be the youngest full professor in the eld of business and management in Scandinavia. Even in a European context, I was seen as frightfully young to be a full professor. Note: I know my experience with academia is mostly European, and that there are differences when compared to the system in the United States. I do, however, think that there are things that exist on a level of generality that trump these differences.
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So, Ive led something of a charmed academic life. Ive had a few bumps in the road, but mostly its been smooth sailing. One could argue that I am fundamentally unsuitable to write a book such as this since I havent come across enough hardship. On the other hand, Ive seen some things during these years, and Ive had more than my share of friends in dire academic straits, so I believe I may still have something to say. It should be noted that the following essays cover different kinds of issues in different kinds of ways, and I make no claims to cover everything there is to be said about the academic career. Far from it. Instead, I want to present a series of essays regarding things I feel strongly about. I hope I have succeeded. Alf Rehn, tenured professor-at-large
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Ten Commandments for Scholars
I always wanted to make my own statement as to what being a scholar means, and I believe that this is important for any academic. Our statement, our ethical stance, is the foundation of our research, and as in so many endeavors, we have to ask if a life unexamined is worth living. So, in this chapter I will try to outline what I believe are the most important points for a scholar (or an academic, terms I use interchangeably) to follow. I have not attempted to create an orthodox set of rules for the academic life, but rather wanted to note some of the things I believe to be important in academia. One could call this an attempt at outlining ethics for researchers; a way to look for meaning in a profession that frequently seems devoid of meaning. Simply put, these commandments constitute what I believe are necessary for having a meaningful life, rather than a torpid existence, in academia. These are my own commandments, not truths or necessities for others, but I will stake a claim as to their importance, even ght for them. Certainly, many people in academia live by other rules and heed other principles, but then, many people in academia are miserable and do not really want to be there except to pick up a paycheck. This, therefore, is a declaration of how to live the good life in academia, a life all too few actually enjoy. 1. Love what you do. The most important commandment for any academic is also the most ignored. As odd as it seems, most people working in academia are not there for any love of knowledge or sense of intellectual adventure. They are there because they just happened to get stuck in an academic environment and do not know what else to do. These people can often be some of the saddest individuals youll come across. They act like ghosts who haunt the corridors or the classrooms. Anything is preferable to this. There are two ways to handle it. One, stop caring, and just shufe through eight hours a day like a zombie. Two, love the
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research and truly be passionate about academia. There are no courses that teach you this. What you must do is nd the reasons you still want to do this strange thing, the rage to ght that which kills the soul and the passion that will drive you onward. The most important thing, in scholarship as in life, is love. Loving the work, the writing, and the thinking is critical to having a good life within academia. And just as in life, there is no manual. Before you enter academia, think about your reasons for choosing this path. Do you think it will advance your career? Do you think it will help you gain acceptance among your peers? Do you think it will bring you lucrative consulting gigs? Then stop. Those are horrible reasons to get into the grind, because soon youll realize its not really worth it. By then, however, you will have invested too much time, and getting out will be hard. So love what you do, not because it sounds cool or makes your mother proud, but because you feel sure it is what you want to do. If you have the passion for it, academia can be a fun place, a good place, and an enjoyable place. And if you dont love it, the inevitable crush of academia will eventually destroy you. I am blessed because I am doing what I truly want to do, in a world I want to be a part of. Obviously, there are times I dislike it, and times when I feel I want out, and times when the work contains infuriating and boring elements. But so does every job, and I know that the passion I have for academia and scholarship is the thing that will keep me aoat. Were it not for that, I would have gotten out a long time ago. Happiness can be found in so many places, and this business will kill you if you let it. I am not saying that you have to love academia. Most people cannot and should not. I am saying that if you want to be in this eld, you have to nd your own passion, your own reason to love it. For your own sake, love it or leave it. 2. Be original. Most people do alarmingly well by never doing anything original and by generally just agreeing with other people; consequently, most of what is published in the social sciences is completely unoriginal. Sadly, the easiest way to get published is to be carefully unoriginal, never really challenging anything, never trying out anything even remotely adventurous. This, however, does not mean that one should follow this path of least resistance. To be proud of ones academic work, I believe it is critical to nd a way to be original, to have something of substance to bring to the discussion. Science builds on original insight and thrives on conict. In order to be a true academic, you must be able to go, at least in part, against the grain. Being original, however, is both strenuous and difcult. In order to be original, you have to
understand your eld, read tons of bad studies and hackneyed papers, go to boring conferences and generally do a lot of foundation work. You cannot start out as an original thinker; you become one through hard work and the paying of dues. This step often bothers people, for it often seems that truly original thinkers just turn up fully formed. But scratch a little and you will nd a lot of hard work underneath the ease and elegance of originality. Originality is not the same as formalistic criticism. Often, one comes across the mistaken idea that, in order to be original, one must start by trashing everything that came before. This is, of course, a good way to get an audience but has precious little to do with actual original thinking. It may bring down some rightful spite on unoriginal thinking, but thats about it. To be original is a question of having a serious intellectual project and to be able to say something engaging based on this. What is important here is to realize that originality doesnt necessarily mean saying something brand new but saying something that you believe in and that engages you. The most unoriginal thing in the world is saying something just because you think this is what youre supposed to be saying and that you believe people want to hear. Originality is not a case of singular activities. Being original is a process, and your original statements should spring from an original project rather than from individual insights. Original thinking is born out of someone trying to be a serious thinker, out of a larger project rather than out of the relentless striving to be different. 3. Be generous. Too many people in academia are greedy, and too few realize that this is a bad idea. The fact that greed exists in every sphere dominated by humans is almost assumed, and, thus, we are not as wary as we maybe should be. But it is my conviction that greed is one of the greatest dangers in academic life, and its nefarious inuence can be seen all over academia. Generosity, on the other hand, for all the benets it can bring, is often looked upon with bewilderment by academics. Personally, I think this may be due to people mistakenly inferring from the often-lonely work of scholarship that academia is an individual endeavor rather than a social one. Some people also mistakenly think that generosity is a social behavior that doesnt have a place in the individualist publish or perish ethos one often ascribes to academics. This is a big mistake, and one that will make one a lesser scholar. In fact, academia can best be understood as a peculiar kind of social economy where gifts and commodities intermingle and where competition and generosity can productively co-exist between people (cf. my essay on the research economy). It is also a
mistake because it limits our understanding of what science, in fact, is. To me, as to Koestler, science is a long-term ongoing discussion, where the individual academic has but a brief walk-in part. We are part of a long debate, make our statements as parts of a complex interwoven series of commentaries, and have to show some humility. Generosity, in this context, is a question of paying homage, being able to say who has affected your thinkingand also whom you are thinking with, as the notion of thinking as an individual activity should be abandoned. We always do our thinking as a relation and an engagement with others, and a generous acknowledgment of this is a way to show how your thinking actually works. It is also a way to invite others to think with you, rather than showing off something like an internal (and uninteresting) monologue. Academic generosity can come in many forms. It can be something small, like referencing a doctoral student in an article, even though you could easily ignore it, or it can be bringing people into a workshop or a publication, or it can be a case of simply remembering to mention good work in a random conversation. It is always, however, a case of having respect for academia as a social sphere. It is also a question of having respect for yourself. 4. See the world. Academics often get accused of being recluses, cooped up in their ivory towers. And often, the accusers are right, all too right. Many scholars are myopic, and although many of them travel quite extensively, they normally just go from one corridor to another or from one lecture hall to the next. For an academic, seeing the world should be something more than merely experiencing sightseeing tours and lecturing to other students. My exhortation to see the world is not necessarily an issue of travel and globalization. The contemporary academic already travels, sometimes too much. The issue is more of how you observe the world, the way in which you position yourself in relation to it. Far too many academics look upon the world as a resource for their working purposes rather than as something to exist in as an academic. This leads to a strange disassociation, with people writing about the world as if it were something alien to them, rather than the context within which all text exists in. Seeing the world is a question of realizing the place one has in it as well as being able to be fascinated by the world as a world. Too often academics separate their world as it exists in their researchoften making this a very limited oneand the world as it exists in the rest of their lives. It makes for a perverted view of the world in academic writing, and it makes academics unnecessarily lim-
ited as people. To me, the good academic life extends beyond the corridors of the university. Seeing the world is also an epistemological question. All too often academics will see the world only through their own lenses. It is important not to let your discipline limit the way in which you view the world. Instead, allow yourself to be amazed by the complexity and multifaceted nature of reality. A good academic will always be prepared to nd something completely new and surprising in the worldpreferably something contradicting everything one has thought and claimed beforeregardless of which part of it one travels in. 5. Make friends. Academia is social, regardless of what it looks like from the outside. Still, people underestimate the importance of things such as friendship and having good people around you. But as thinking never happens in a vacuum, and is never a completely solitary activity, it is critical to surround yourself with a group of peers with whom you feel comfortable and with whom you enjoy working, and, not to be forgotten, a group who can challenge you and force you to sharpen your thinking. Still, people often see that making friends is something separate from academic life. In order to be a well-rounded academic, making friends is something you have to work on. Im not talking about viewing your friends as instrumental parts of your career, nor do I believe that friends should be chosen and evaluated based on whether they can assist your academic endeavors. Instead Im talking about not viewing academia as a neutral and sterile sphere and trying to nd the social and pleasurable aspects of this business. Friends are not necessarily something that exist separately from the work but can be an important source of input, critique, and inspiration. Scholarship is difcult enough as it is, so why go at it all alone? 6. Dont cheat. It isnt difcult to cheat in science. In the social sciences, it is exceptionally easy. If you want to, you can make up all your data, create a bogus organization, make up your informants, and invent all of your interviews and eld notes. You can tell stories and fantasize. It can be done. Still, it is important, and critical, not to do it. And this is not only a question of lying. Cheating in the academic sphere comes in many forms. Sometimes we are talking about clearly illegal or immoral activities, such as falsifying data, stealing material from others, misrepresentation of the facts, or other such malfeasance. At other times, cheating is more a question of not behaving honorably or simply fooling oneself. My warning about not cheating might, in fact, be less about the
problem of unethical behavior than the ease by which one can fall into such behavior. The problem is that cutting corners and overstating your case is endemic in academia. People reference without having read sources, exaggerate the originality of their statements, and borrow thinking quite often, and some of these quick xes are even slyly celebrated in the eld. Such dirty tricks can at times be helpful and are not in and of themselves unethical. The problem is, however, that an indiscriminate use of shortcuts can lead to an academic thinking that academia is a case of anything goes, and that all tricks you can get away with should be used. Heres the problem: After a while, you will no longer see the difference between a trick and unethical behavior and may well start deluding yourself into thinking that things such as plagiarism and making up data really arent so bad. And, sooner or later, you will get caught. Not cheating is itself not a question of pretending to be perfectly righteous and morally superior to others; rather, it is a case of looking at your own behaviors and reecting upon them. There will always be times when youll feel the temptation to cut corners. The important thing is to be aware of what youre doing and not to let the lure of the quick-x take over. Cheaters do sometimes prosper, but all too often they come out losing in the end. 7. Stay true. In order to become an academic, a real one, you need to develop not only ethics, but also a solid identity. It is too easy to become just another gady, an intellectual gun-for-hire, and thus lose all sight of what being a scholar should be about. Think about it: Why in the world are you an academic? What is it that made you love it? What made you think it would be worthy as an endeavor? You can easily lose yourself in the academic game and start believing that it is the tting-in rather than the standing-out that is important. In fact, quite a few academics look like they no longer have an idea what their original identity was, and are condemned to play a part for the rest of their lives. This is also why so many academics seem to be depressed. It is easier to adopt a role, and it is often rewarded. Research nancing often depends on being able to fabricate a suitable identity, and it can sometimes be easier to publish if you live up to certain expectations. At the same time, a short-term obsession with such matters will hurt you in the long run, as youll be doing things for the wrong reasons and often reasons you do not understand. In order to develop a serious intellectual project, it is important that this is grounded in who you are and what you want to accom-
plish, rather than in some outside idea of propriety. Real intellectual work is always a reection of your identity, and others can distinguish the real from the phony. Being a scholar is a long-term project, and you shouldnt spoil it for short-term benets. 8. Dont take yourself too seriously. The most dangerous thing in the world is to believe your own hype. Do so, and you will not only become a bore but a lesser scholar. Research, science, and scholarship depend not on sticking to dogma, but on progress, critical thinking, and a continuously ironical attitude toward yourself and established notions of propriety. When you start taking yourself seriously, your thinking suffers. You start assuming that youre always right, you lose sight of the big picture, and you lose the ability to look critically at your work, making any real development a lot more difcult in the future. None of this is a good or benecial thing for a scholar. Academia needs constant questioning, for without it we become dogmatic and lose the very heart of our common project. The easiest way to stop questioning is to believe yourself to be above it. Once youve started to think your project is beyond reproach, youll also start thinking that others are beyond reproach, and in this way cliques are born. In fact, many of the ills of the academic worldthe xenophobia, the cult of the academic superstar, the egomaniaare the direct result of this kind of erroneous belief in the completeness of a project. An ironical attitude about yourself and your project shouldnt be confused with selling yourself short or in not having pride in your work. I see it as a kind of humility and a desire to continue and a warning against becoming complacent and lazy. You can survive in academia for a long time on your old work, and many are happy to milk their old projects for as long as humanly possible. But this habit makes you a lesser scholar and hurts academia as a whole. Have pride in your work, but be humble. Forget becoming too serious minded, forget playing intellectual dress-up. While a mediocre thinker may need the accouterments, a serious scholar knows its the journey thats important. And wouldnt you rather have some fun than play the po-faced adult? 9. Take responsibility. This is not merely a question of adhering to a research ethic but one of your place in a larger context. Quite often, academics seem to think that they are granted the considerable freedom they enjoy by way of their special standing in the universe and that they, consequently, are responsible only to themselves and their personal career paths. It is rather sad to see how few aca-
demics try to enact some form of change and try to use the possibilities they are given to make a positive difference in the world. If youve decided to be an academic, take some time to think about what responsibilities might come with this. As an academic you have the freedom to try new things and speak your mind. How will you use this opportunity? Although the individual academic will probably feel pretty powerless, you do have a certain power, both as individuals and as a group. As an academic, you will have a far better chance to speak to the media, comment on policy, and to actually be taken seriously. The important thing, therefore, is to think about the ways in which you will affect (or not affect) the world. In my view, it is important to reect on this, regardless of whether you utilize your potential or not. What such a reection can do is to awaken a sense of responsibility. Taking responsibility does not have to mean affecting politics or taking a stand in the media; it can be something as simple as treating doctoral students with some kindness or trying to do your part in defeating sexism in the academic workplace. Regardless of the way you choose to use your potential in the world, being a scholar should be about something more than just your own, individual project. 10. Make a difference. Academia can be a horrible place, and it might not be mere coincidence that it was an academic, Jean-Paul Sartre, who said hell is other people. Also, the world is far from perfect, and we should all do our part. Taking responsibility, although important, might be only part of the solution. So I say: If youre going to be a scholar, make sure that youll make a difference. Think through what kind of difference you want to make, think about how it ties to your project, and how you can make it part of your academic life. The world doesnt need any more bad scholars, not does it need more listless, unengaged ones. It needs active, engaged, passionate scholars, and it needs them now. Academics could be a productive, politically important, socially engaged, generally important force in society, but all too few actively work toward such a goal. Even though most academics will privately talk about the potential of scholars, very few feel like they can actually make a difference. Thats why it would be important for us, as a group, to support the notion of scholars as active and productive agents in the world. An academic can, and should, make a difference. Academia should, and could, be a structure that would support this. If we could all remember this, the university might be a better place for all. And if more scholars would live in accordance with this, the very world might actually be a little bit better.
Note that Im not saying that these commandments would be the only ones, or that this would be anything even remotely like a complete list. Theyre not, and it isnt. But this isnt even the point of a list like this. What is important, and this is the reason Ive tried to create a list, is that you reect on your life as an academic, and try to make this into a version of the good life. You may have other commandments you adhere to, and other priorities, and this is OK. The important thing is to realize that you have to have a point with your academic life, some form of sense that it is more than a salaried job. If you do, in your heart of hearts, commandments are unnecessary.
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The Importance of Journals
For the modern scholar, the importance of the academic journal cannot be exaggerated. Getting published in a major, or even a minor, journal is always a happy event in the life of an academic. A well-received article in a top journal can start a career, and not getting into a journal can be a career-breaker. Regardless what we think of journals, they do make a difference in an academics career, and we have to relate to them. An understanding of a particular journal requires a serious engagement with it and takes time and effort. Each journal has its own language, quirks, and idiosyncrasies. There are rituals to follow and unwritten rules to abide by. It can, in some cases, take years of intense study to truly understand the publishing logic of some journals. Some venerable journals (such as Theory, Culture & Society) seem to lack a logic altogether; therefore, journals take time, in more ways than one, and a lot of things about publishing in them cannot be learned except through a long process of reading, writing, submitting, being rejected, rewriting, resubmitting, and so on. Still, there are aspects of the general process of being published in a journal that can be taught. In part, there are certain technical facts that may seem trivial but that are often unknown to a young scholar just starting in academia. Further, there are some peculiarities that at rst make little sense, but still have to be kept in mind. Lastly, there are things to be learned from observing the process in its entirety, and doing so by proxy may help a beginning scholar. It should also be noted that the author isnt a great believer in the journals, nor is he widely published therein. I was actually raised in a culture that didnt rate journals highly, and instead emphasized the monograph as what scholarship was all about. Consequently, nobody taught me how to write for the journals. The little I now know, I learned the hard way, and what is written here should be interpreted as my understandings of the game, not eternal truths or natural law. Also, I will here refer to the kind of journals I know, that is, journals in the social
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sciences. I have been mainly published in organization studies, but most of what I know seems to hold across the social sciences (journals in the natural sciences is another world, one I can say very little about).
Contents of a Typical Journal

The rst thing to realize is that a journal isnt just a wrapper around a series of articles. A typical journal is structured in a specic way, designed to be read in a certain way, and usually contains several parts. The main content of a journal is the scholarly article, generally regarded as the meat of the journal. Articles fall into three main categories: empirical papers presenting ndings, theoretical papers putting forth an argument, and review articles that condense a wider discussion and/or literature. The latter are normally written by senior professors. Of these three categories, empirical papers are normally the easiest ones to get published, although original theoretical works can be wellreceived, too. Empirical papers are judged on the stringency of the analysis and whether the study highlights something interesting. Obviously, with the richness of the outside world, this is often a lot easier than conceptual development. Review articles are often seen as slightly less important than empirical or theoretical papers. A theoretical, sometimes known as a conceptual, paper normally will be judged on originality and whether it brings something new to the debate. Still, a lot of these papers tend to be fairly monotonous reviews of what someone else (such as a philosopher) has been saying. Thus, there is a ritualistic quality to a certain kind of theoretical papers and in reality they are not viewed as particularly original. In addition to the articles, most journals include a section of less rigorous texts, such as notes, essays, and case studies. From a career perspective, these texts are not ranked as highly as scholarly articles, but they shouldnt be frowned upon. As these sections put less emphasis on form, they can be a good place to publish conceptual ideas, fun stuff, if you will. Different journals put different emphasis on this section, and some lack it altogether, so it is important to check the journal beforehand. The third part of the typical journal is dedicated to book reviews. These are basically not ranked at all and carry no real weight as research, but they are important for the scholars general visibilityand if you expect to be published, you are expected to do this kind of work, too. Book reviews can be added to your list of publications, which is a good thing. Usually, an editor commissions these reviews although you can contact the editor and suggest one.
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Journals normally have two kinds of issues, normal and special. The normal issue can have material from a wide range of perspectives and approaches, and when one talks generally of a journal, one talks of a normal issue. In addition, almost all journals publish special issues, which are issues where one specic theme forms the framework for the issue (such as Foucault and female prisons or Consumption and trust). These issues have guest editors and often spring out of a conference or a workshop. Getting published in a special issue can be easier than getting into a normal issue due to the thematic nature of the special issue and due to the fact that guest editors are often more exible as to what they want to publish. Subsequently, being published in a special issue is seen as slightly less meritorious than being published in a normal issue. This, however, is true only by the slightest imaginable margin and should not be a factor when one is thinking about submitting articles to special issues. Regardless of the many ways of rating the importance of a specic contribution, always remember that any kind of text that publishes your name in a journal is far, far better than not getting the visibility at all.
The Basics
Here are some basic pointers for creating and submitting an article to a journal. First, limit the word-count to 5,000 to 8,000 words although this may vary depending on the journal. Submit your article double-spaced with wide margins. Since the article is supposed to be double-blind reviewed, include a loose cover page with your name and contact information on it and another title page that does not contain your name (i.e., an anonymous title page). Very few journals like footnotes because they make page layout difcult, so dont use footnotes unless you absolutely have to. Most journals are printed in a way that does not really support photographs, so use photographs sparingly if at all. Minimize the amount of graphics and tables overall, and do not try to be creative with layouts; most journals will not indulge you. Be sure to check and double-check your list of references and make sure they are complete because every reference in the text must be in the list of references and vice versa. Be sure also to spell-check and proofread your text before submitting it. This point seems like such an obvious thing, but, surprisingly, it is often ignored. Be sure to check the preferred method of formatting and referencing your article before you submit it. All journals have some form of Instructions for Authors that details submission guidelines. Read these guidelines and follow them to the letter. Not doing so makes you seem sloppy, unprofessional, and
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uninterested in the journal. A good editor will accept a good paper for review regardless (i.e., he or she may send out even a badly structured paper to reviewers), but often you will get your paper back with a curt note about re-editing according to journals guidelines. In a worst-case scenario, you will alienate the editor. This is really unnecessary. In submitting an article to the editor, the traditional way is to submit it by mail with three to ve good quality paper copies, a data CD (if your article is typed on a computer), and a cover letter to the editor. The cover letter should be very polite and very brief, no more than one page. The rst page of the article should contain your contact details and the title of the paper; the second page should contain the title of the paper without your name. With the advances in technology, many journals now accept digital submissions. Sometimes this means that you can e-mail your article, and sometimes this means that the journal (or even the publisher) has a Web-based submission system. In the latter case, submission is pretty easy; there is no way to mess up. In the former, it is considered proper to submit the article as a Word document or a rich text format (RTF) le, possibly with a portable document format (PDF) copy to boot. You can never go wrong with submitting in several formats at the same time. If the editor cannot open your document for some reason, an RTF or a PDF copy will be greatly appreciated. You need to check, however, whether your preferred journal will accept digital submissions, because if they dont, and you send it anyway, the editor will not be happy with you. Do not everrepeat, eversubmit the same article to more than one journal at a time. To do so is considered bad form, almost criminal. If you get caught doing so (its called multiple submissions), a journal may blacklist you. At the very least, your reputation will suffer a severe blow, and you do not want to take that risk. Once you have submitted your article, be patient and be prepared to wait. Receiving a response will take much longer than you think. Three months is quite normal, and it may take six. In fact, there are corroborated stories about reviews taking a year. And there is a good chance you will wait in vain; your article may well be rejected. Learn to expect this possibility and accept it. To stay positive, start working on another article. It is important to understand that journals are, in a way, cultures unto themselves. Each journal will have its own requirements, its own style, its own vernacular, and its own idiosyncrasies. It can take a long time to become familiar with the specics of a certain journal. In order to write for a journal, you have to at least try to read the journal. You also have to understand how the editors and
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contributors of the journal think and the way in which the journal exists as a discussion. Think of it as going to a party and talking with people. You dont enter into a discussion at a party without having at least some idea about who people are and what they are talking about. If you hope to be published in a certain journal, you also have to have some concept of the general discourse of that journal. Consequently, I believe every scholar should be intimately familiar with at least one journal, one which you have read and studied thoroughly, including several years of back-issues, and which you follow closely. Since a journal is much like a protracted conversation that takes place over a long period of time, it is important to have some form of mental map of how this conversation has evolved and what has been said. This practice will also give you a picture of what kind of papers more generally get published in the journal. Just as nding your way in a city involves learning something about the transportation system, and a general feel of the rules for moving about (Saigon requires a different approach than Stockholm), learning a journal involves similar tacit understandings. Succinctly put, the journal thing is pretty easy: do the background work, know at least something about your audience, and try to behave.
Different Kinds of Journals

All journals are not alike, and there are great differences both in standing and in style. One of the most important aspects of journals is their ranking. We often talk about there being at least four different levels to this ranking (some would say three, others would say ve). The top tier of the journals is sometimes referred to as A-journals or, sometimes, as ve-star journals. This group of journals consists of the three to ve best journals in a given eld, the ones everyone reads and where the most-cited papers appear. Publication in one of these journals is a major career event and can, in some cases, make an entire career. Below this top tier is another group of journals, usually more specialized, that constitutes the B-list. To be published in these journals is desirable even to senior, well-published professors, and calling it the B-list is, thus, a bit misleading. These are great journals; its just that there are even greater ones. Below this level are the bread-and-butter journals, journals that have to work to get good papers. They have a standing, they are read, and they are a good avenue to publish in, particularly for a junior scholar. Below these journals is a wide range of weak journals, a group that contains titles so strictly in a niche that they basically exist for just a small group of scholars.
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A young scholar should, of course, attempt to be published in the A-journals, but often this will prove difcult, if not impossible. In fact, most young scholars would be happy to be published anywhere, but it is important to think about the level one wants to go for. Still, there are a number of possibilities we should think through when working with these issues. For instance, normally, a top journal will use very good reviewers, so the likelihood of getting a detailed and constructive review increases with the level of the journal. This does not mean that you should send everything to the A-journals rst but, rather, that you should aim reasonably high. Aiming too high is just silly, and the time that a review will often take is not in your best interest. Aiming too low is a good way to get published but not a good way to maximize the impact of your research. The issue, therefore, is one of balance. You should always try to nd the best possible journal in which you think you have a ghting chance to be published. Seasoned veterans of the publishing wars know how to pick their battles. They will have weaker papers theyll send to low-ranking journals and pick up a quick publication. Theyll have strong papers they try to get into top journals and take the time to develop them and work the system. They will normally also have a strategyan implicit or even subconscious oneabout how to handle this mix of publications. Junior researchers, however, often feel that they are devoid of choice. I believe this is a mistake. Although I know that it can be very difcult indeed to get into the pages of top journals, I also know that less experienced researchers often feel so unsure of themselves that they dont even submit articles, feeling that theyll have no chance. A more experienced scholar will, without hesitation, submit an article far worse than the one the junior researcher doesnt even dare to show to colleagues and more often than not get it published somewhere. This is the way of the world today. Another way to separate journals is their level of generality. A rule of thumb, with a few exceptions, is that the more general a journal is, the higher it is ranked. The publication Theory, Culture & Society is universally seen as a top journal. It is general to the extreme. Journals such as Sociology or Journal of Management Studies tend to rank very highly. Getting published in such a journal is often very difcult, but success can really make the career for a young scholar. The general journals often look for broad theoretical arguments and are very aware of the need to be perceived as top quality. They will strive to keep their rejection rate (i.e., the number of manuscripts they reject) high and will, therefore, reject a great many submissions. They are also more prone to demand several rounds of rewrites after which they may still reject the paper. The difculty in writing for such journals is that there are a limited number of general topics and many schol-
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ars who perceive themselves competent to write on them, so the competition is often erce. These journals also have a much wider reading public, which increases the amount of potential authors, potential critics, and so on. You should, at some point in your career, try to publish in such journals. Whether you should go for it while still a junior researcher (some have tried and prospered) or wait until you feel a bit more assured is a question for the individual scholar. But you should remember that a good paper deserves a good journal, and the general journals, at least, tend to give very incisive reviews. In contrast to the general journals, specialized journals are often seen as less prestigious, but even in this category, top journals exist. Clearly, specialized is a question of contextsince most researchers work in specialized elds, a journal that covers all of a specialized eld may be viewed as a general journal. Still, some journals are more focused than others, and some are so narrow they seem meant for only a very small set of research groups. Others are intimately tied to a conference or a network. We can, therefore, separate between those who have a specialized area and those who have a specialized group in mind as authors. Whereas the former may well be highly ranked, the latter rarely is. If a journal seems parochial and will publish only what is accepted in the narrow connes of specialized groups, it generally will not be very highly considered outside this group. Sometimes a journal like this will attempt to break with tradition and become more open and accepting, but it seems more likely that a specialized journal will become even more dogmatic. Again, understanding the reasoning and logic behind a journal is an important step in developing your publishing strategy. As of late, a new kind of journal has emergedthe online-only journal. These journals were originally seen as merely experiments but now seem to have become accepted alternatives, partly because most, if not all, serious journals now have an online presence. Online journals are, of course, cheaper and simpler to maintain than their paper equivalents, which prompts many scholars to consider them as somehow less valid. Most online journals do, however, pay a lot of attention to their reviews and editorial processes, sometimes more so than the more traditional journals, so even though it doesnt carry quite the same prestige as its traditional counterpart, the online journal is a valid avenue for publication and should not be overlooked by young academics. Having said that, I do think it will be some time before we see the rst highly ranked online journal and far longer before we see a change in the perception toward this format. One always has to remember that publishers have a vested interest in keeping the paper journals alive, as they are making quite a lot of money off them. In connection to this, we can also mention the new phenome-
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non of open access journals. These journals abide by the principle that no one should have to pay to get access to scientic ndings. This practice turns the earnings-logic of the traditional journal upside down. Some of these journals are online journals, but others are actually a free paper journal that is funded by authors who pay to get their articles published (not be confused with vanity publishing). In the same way as online journals, open access journals adhere to stringent double-blind review, and only after youve passed the review are you allowed to be published. In order to make publication feasible, the published authors pay a fee. This is a fairly new development and one I am sure will change the world of journals quite extensively. Right now, however, it is too early to say how this development will play out in the coming years. To this I also have to add a word about the journals I have sometimes referred to as the International Review of Social Theory, Knowledge and Change journals. This cumbersome name has been my way of talking about journals that occupy a place somewhere between out-and-out academic fraud and serious attempts at scholarly publication. These journals are not really even C-level publications and can be anything from gloried working papers to attempts from a new publishing company to establish itself. It isnt always simple to know what constitutes a proper journal, particularly not for an academic starting out, but one should be wary of journals that seem to come out of nowhere, that are afliated with no one, and that make claims they simply cannot live up to. Here are some things you should check before submitting to a journal you havent heard of before: 1. Do you recognize the publisher? 2. Is there an editorial board, and do you recognize the names on the board? 3. Does the journal have a professional Web site with online access to articles? 4. Does the journal list things like associations, abstracting, indexing, and so forth? An answer of no to one of these questions doesnt necessarily mean anything, but a no to all of them should be seen as a warning sign. Also, remember the old rule that something calling itself international, professional, or academic probably isnt. The reason a checklist like the one described above is important is because the journal youre considering may be a case of vanity printing or a fake journal. In an age when all manners of printing have become much cheaper and easier, and
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where there are a lot of desperate academics out there, a market for what fraudulently attempts to establish academic credentials will emerge. Although submitting an article to a journal you later realize churns out almost anything sent to it isnt necessarily a career breaker, it is a waste of time and paper to submit it somewhere that can only hurt your reputation. Somebody, somewhere, will start questioning whether one, or more than one, of your articles might be shady, and this is not something you want to invite. So try to stay away from journals that have difculty keeping up an academic front. Be aware also, however, that there are many perfectly proper journals that, due to the vagaries of academic fashion, may seem a bit out-of-the-way and bleak. This does not necessarily mean they should be avoided. On the contrary, they may be efcient ways to achieve publication.
The Question of Articles and Scholarly Merit

Any published article is a merit for an academic. Still, there are differences. I can start by saying that a published article gains merit points in at least three ways: (1) The scholarly level of the article itself, (2) The level of the journal it is published in, and (3) The discussion that the article raises. I will assume that the rst of these points requires no additional explanation because the quality of an article should speak for itself. This leaves the two last points. Although the contribution of the article really should be what counts, the fact is that the academic world still thinks that an article gains merit by being published in a top journal, a merit that is detached from the article itself. Sometimes, people will just look at whether youve managed to get an article into a top journal and ignore the contents thereofas unscientic and bizarre as this is. Obviously, this perception is, in part, due to people assuming that the level of the journal guarantees the scholarly level, but this is a very dangerous assumption. Still, merit accrues both through the quality of the content and the perceived quality of the medium. The third aspect of an articles merit is the way in which it furthers discussion on a topicI call this network effects. Some measure this aspect by looking at things such as frequency of quotation or impact factors, quantiable measurements that some see as the sine qua non of journals. Others, myself included, would rather look to the more general reactions, such as whether it is seen as furthering the eld and getting people engaged in an issue. This is not as easy to measure, but active academics will still have a pretty good feel for what constitutes an important article. For the edgling academic, it is good to note all three
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of these, for even when one cannot guarantee impact it should serve as a model for what articles are supposed to do. This said, most junior researchers simply want to get a publication, regardless of the ner points. The question of whether articles in special issues are less meritorious than ones in general issues is difcult to answer. Although usually it is easier to get published in a special issue, the difference seems small, and since most academics have, at one point or another, been published in special issues, making this a divisive issue seems petty. So, at least for the academic starting out, special issues are just as meritorious as general issuesfor now. When looking at the three kinds of articles usually published (review, empirical, and theoretical), this much can be said: Review articles, even though they are important and tend to appear in the major, general journals, are not seen as bringing great additional merit to the author. Sometimes they can be more important, such as when a previously overlooked eld by way of a review article is brought into the spotlight, but generally they tend to be overviews with little to no original scholarship. These articles also are normally written by established gures in the eld and can perhaps best be understood as political delineations. Empirical articles may be slightly easier to get published than purely theoretical ones, but, at the same time, they are viewed as slightly less important than theory-type pieces. Obviously, the best articles carry a combination of both, but as there often is a greater emphasis on one or the other, I will here treat them as separate entities. We can perhaps separate empirical papers into two categories according to the way in which they target the prevailing logic/theory in the eld, that being either afrming or critical. Afrming empirical papers try to show that a hypothesis derived from earlier works can be shown to be correct, therefore bolstering it with evidence. This is clearly a good thing but, at the same time, not very original. It stands in the shadow of some earlier statement and merely acts as an afrmation thereof. Such articles tend to have a lesser standing, quite reasonably, and are seen as carrying slightly less merit. Critical empirical papers can perhaps best be understood by way of Karl Poppers thesis of falsication. They try to look at the consensus in the eld (or some fair approximation thereof) and bring in evidence against this. By showing that reality works in ways not covered by theory, such empirical papers can further theorization and the eld. Such a paper is often seen as meritorious, as it clearly brings in an original viewpoint, but it may strike the casual observer as odd since it isnt very difcult to nd such empirical data. Theoretical articles are notoriously difcult to write. These types of articles usually condense a complex theoretical issue into the limited space of a journal
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and to do so in a fashion that does not truncate the previous debate too much. The sheer difculty of this makes the theoretical paper meritorious in the eyes of academia. As always, issues such as originality, stringency, and rigor are taken into account. A perennial issue to consider is whether a single-authored article is better than one with several authors. Both have advantages. The single-authored article stands out as a single body of work, wholly the contribution of you and no one else. The multi-authored article shows that you can cooperate and collaborate, and this should not be discounted. My personal view on this issue is that you should be able to show the capacity for both. You need single-authored articles to show that your work can stand on its own, but you also need coauthored pieces to demonstrate that you can work with others. To me, a good balance is to try to have about equal amounts of both. This issue brings with it the question of rst author. In some contexts, it is assumed that the rst author deserves more merit than the othersa tradition we have inherited from the natural sciences and papers with up to ten authors. In the social sciences, far less emphasis is placed on this division although remnants of this thinking still exist. Normally, if there is no compelling reason to put one of the authors rst (such as, youve written several pieces together and want to alternate; one of you needs recognition a lot more and every little bit counts; or one of you has actually written far more than the other), using the old system of alphabetical order seems to work just ne. In all these matters, the important thing is to stay true to your work. Dont get too obsessed with the issue of minor afrmations. In the long run, true merit will win out.
The Review Process

The rst thing you should realize about the review process is that it takes timean inordinate amount of time. Waiting six months for a review is quite normal. Some people wait a year or more for their rst reviews. Later rounds, after resubmission, tend to go a little quicker, but it always takes more time than youd like. Patience is denitely a virtue when it comes to the reviewing process. When you submit a manuscript to a journal, you will probably think its pretty darn good. You will have worked hard on it, and, in all likelihood, you will nurture the dream that the reviewers comments will be, Publish this work of genius immediately! Unfortunately, they rarely say that. When a manuscript arrives at the editorial ofce, the editors of the journal are faced with the difcult decision of who to forward it to for review. Normally, edi-
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tors will quickly review the paper themselves, at least enough to get a feel for whether there is any point to have it reviewed further. Different journals are more fastidious than others (some seem to send everything out for review even if it is gibberish) while others may reject a great number of manuscripts on arrival. Most such rejections are based on the editors feeling that the proposed article simply does not suit the journal or that there are grave and glaring aws in the work. Still, it seems that most manuscripts do get reviewed. After a quick, initial review, most editors send the manuscript out to two or three reviewers, although the tendency seems to be that more and more editors limit themselves to two, for reasons Ill explain later. Finding good reviewers is one of the most onerous jobs of a journal editor. The task of reviewing manuscripts is hard work, unpaid, and carries very little reward for the reviewer. To add to the problem, the pool of potential reviewers is small, leading to the fact that good people in a eld will nd themselves swamped with requests to review manuscripts in addition to all the other things theyre supposed to be doing. While most academics will take on such work, they cannot do an unlimited amount of reviewing, leading to a situation where an editor may have to struggle to secure a review. If they can nd three reviewers, thats great. If they can only nd two, thats ne, too. Reviewers are not necessarily picked because they are experts in the specic eld of the proposed article. In a highly specialized eld, usually only three or four top people exist, and all of these people will probably be very busy. So editors often have to nd people they believe can give good general comments, regardless of their specialty. Sadly, as is often the case, editors sometimes secure just about any warm body that might have something to say. Good reviewers are worth their weight in gold, and often editors have to settle for second best (or worse). After youve submitted your paper and the editor has decided its worth sending out for review, it will go to at least two reviewers. All respectable journals use a system known as the double-blind review process, which means that the author will not know who his reviewers are, nor will the reviewers know the name of the author. The logic behind this process is that it should minimize the risk of personal feelings impeding the objective evaluation of the paper and that reviewers shouldnt have to fear retribution from authors. When neither party knows the identity of the other, the reviewing is supposed to be more fair and more honest. In reality, things may deviate from this ideal. Since most academic circles arent that large, it is fairly likely that reviewers will either know who they are reviewing or will be able to gure it outparticularly if the author isnt a beginner. Also, it is often possible to read a reviewers comments and gure out who
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wrote them. Still, the double-blind process is adhered to and seems to be working fairly well. When the blind reviewer gets a manuscript, he or she gets the paper with the name of the author(s), as well as additional review documents, removed. These additional documents normally include a short evaluation form as well as some general guidelines regarding the journals preferences when it comes to reviews. Normally, the guidelines tell a reviewer to submit two sets of statements, one that goes directly to the editor and a detailed review that is meant for the author. In the former, the reviewer is often asked to grade the manuscript on things such as originality and technical quality as well as give a recommendation on whether to accept or reject the manuscript. These recommendations, which the editor then weighs and bases the nal decision on, are what makes or breaks a paper. Both recommendations and nal decisions normally come in four avors: A recommendation of reject is self-explanatory. A manuscript can get rejected for a number of reasons, but normally it is simply a question of reviewers not nding enough of publishable value in the article. Somewhat better is a recommendation of revise and resubmit, which is a broad category. This can be both a more polite way to reject a paper or a request for major revisions. Basically it means that the journal would be happy to see the manuscript in a more developed form but that, it at the moment, has problems that are grave enough to make the editor unsure as to whether it can be published. Often this recommendation can mean there is something of value in the paper but that it has been sloppily put together. A far better decision to get is accept with revisions. This recommendation comes in two avors, either major revisions needed or minor revisions needed. You can go an entire career without ever seeing the mythical accept as is applied to something youve submitted. It is very rare to get something accepted directly and mostly this applies to the bigwigs in the game. The editor will, thus, receive two recommendations and base the journals decision on these recommendations. It is important to realize that the editor is not bound by the recommendations. If one reviewer suggests rejection and the other acceptance, it is up to the editor to make the nal decision. Interestingly, both reviewers could, in theory, suggest rejection, and the editor may still decide to publish the paper (a very rare occurrence, but possible). Most of the time, the editor will simply collate the reviewers decision and transmit it to the author. The author will then receive a letter from the editor complete with the journals deci-
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sion (one of the above) and will receive at least two sets of comments. It is important to understand that reading these comments takes some adjustment. Reading reviewers comments can be both painful and traumatic. These comments can also be immensely helpful. Most reviewers want to be helpful, and there is no point in railing against the fact that they may have misunderstood you. Read, revise, and learn from them. Reading the editors letter is, of course, where it all begins. If the letter states that your manuscript has been rejected, thats it. Theres nothing you can do about it. Just read the comments and decide if they help in any way. If the letter says the manuscript has been accepted, rejoice and see how much work they want you to put into it. Then rejoice some more. The tricky bit is to correctly read a revise and resubmit letter. Remember, this can mean they really disliked the manuscript or that they actually want to publish it. There may be subtle signs as to one or the other of these interpretations and nding these subtleties takes some skill. One thing to look out for is whether the letter mentions a date by which theyd like to see a revised manuscript. This basically means theyre thinking about accepting it and means you really should try to meet the stated deadline. If the kindest thing the letter says is that the general topic of the manuscript was interesting, they might as well have rejected it (as most topics are, by denition, interesting). Reading a reviewers comments is easier as these tend to be straightforward and to the point. Good comments are like roadmaps to a published paper, with point-by-point ideas about how to develop the paper. Bad comments, on the other hand, may just be a rant against a specic method or an insistence that you should have referenced different people. One could say that comments are generally a gamble, and you just have to play the cards youre dealt.
Revise and Resubmit

Assuming your manuscript has been neither accepted nor rejected straight off, the next step is the revision process. In a way, this is the easy part. Youve just received instructions on what you have to do to get the paper published and two sets of comments that are intended to help you achieve this goal. In another way, it is a difcult part, for neither the instructions nor the comments tend to be very clear. Regardless, the only thing to do is to battle on and attempt to revise your work in a way that hopefully pleases both you and the reviewers. No one can actually teach you how to do a revision since this is always an individual project. A revision is, in part, an improvement and, in part, a rework, and
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youll soon realize that the paper may change considerably during the process. Sometimes the end-result looks nothing like the original idea, and this may be both a good thing and a sad thing. There are, however, some things to keep in mind. First among these is realizing that it is still your paper. Most scholars seem to think that in order to get the article accepted they have to do exactly what the reviewers tell them to do. This is not true. Obviously you have to pay heed to what the reviewers say, and if they have identied mistakes or logical inconsistencies, you have to x these, but reviewers are not infallible and not everything they say is brilliant. The trick is to use the reviews as guidelines, not merely follow them. Sometimes you will nd that reviewers misunderstood the point you tried to make. In that case, your job is to explain the point and make the paper communicate better. Other times you will nd that reviewers were confused by the amount or type of information within the paper. Your job is then not to revise the paper but to completely rework it. There are times when a reviewers comments may be completely superuous to the rewrite. Then again, there are times when you get a reviewers comments that are so perfect and so detailed you can just follow them step by step and literally see the manuscript develop before your eyes. You never know what kind of comments you will receive. A common question is what you should do if the two (or three) reviewers have diverging or even contradictory views and suggestions. Some scholars try their best to do everything the reviewers say, no matter how entangled or illogical the suggestion is. Others pick sides and simply ignore those comments that contradict what they want to do. Personally, I feel that the latter strategy is better. Remember, you are still in charge. It is your paper, and it is seldom a good idea to pervert what you are trying to say by forcing it into paradox. The reviewers arent there to write the paper, but to try to improve it, and your prime task is to let them. If one of the reviewers cannot help in this, then it is permissible to ignore the comment. It is considered good manners to include three documents in your resubmission. One, you should write a new letter to the editor, explaining how youve reworked and improved the paper. This doesnt need to go into exacting detail but should give a broad outline of your revision. Two, you should write a letter to the reviewers, explaining how youve dealt with their recommendations. Here, it is also permissible to explain why youve not done something, even explaining why youve ignored some comments. Although you should be courteous, you shouldnt grovel. Three, you should, of course, send your revised manuscript. Normally, the latter two documents are then sent to the reviewers again, who are
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then supposed to say whether they believe that the article now meets the standards of a publishable article. Be aware, however, that editors do have the right to acceptor rejectthe article at this stage, also. Sometimes, this process can go on for two or three turns. In exceptional cases, up to ve rewrites can precede an acceptance or, indeed, a rejection. Again, have patience.
Getting Rejected and Doing it All Over Again

In journals, as in love, you will be rejected from time to time. Its a fact of life. Most of the time, a rejection will come with at least some explanation as to why your paper didnt make it, and this can always be used to improve the next paper. At times, the explanation will make no sense to you, but such is life. The important lesson is to learn from the experience and try to move forward. The rst line of defense is to be prepared for rejection. Most papers do, in fact, get rejected. Some scholars even see submitting to journals as a kind of lottery, working from the premise that every paper needs to get rejected a set number of times before it gets accepted. Others take each rejection as a personal slight, but these people tend to have a lot of problems. The trick, of course, is not to make this a one-time affair. To be successful in academia you need to make the process of publication a continuous and normal part of your working life. So the second line of defense is to have several papers processed at the same time. If you just wait for a reviewers comments each time you submit something, youll be published three times in a decade, if youre lucky. Instead, work on several papers at the same time so that youre working on one when waiting for comments on the other, constantly juggling at least two or three papers. The good news is that this all becomes easier and more normal the more you do it. After a while, youll even start telling others how to do it.
Dirty Tricks
Here are ten more tricks of the trade: 1. It is usually easier to get an article published if you can point to someone or something you disagree with. Find a statement that you feel you can criticize either theoretically or empirically and make this your starting point. Preferably, nd such a statement/article in the journal youre writing for. An article can very well start with, It has sometimes been argued that the ontological position of
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widgets must be understood as relational (see e.g., Leek 2001, Johnson et. al 2005). This article will show that this cannot be seen as a universal rule and instead will argue that a more correct understanding can be found by applying a theory of widgets as phenomenological. 2. Editors are sometimes lazy. When choosing reviewers, editors will look through the title, the abstract, and the references of your manuscript and try to think of someone whos interested in similar things. This practice can sometimes be strategically useful. Referencing a couple of people you trust and including a phrase in your abstract that sounds a lot like that article in the same journal you admired will, of course, not get you exactly the reviewers you want, but it can tweak the probabilities ever so slightly. 3. Editors like to see their own articles referenced in a manuscript. Theyre human, too. 4. Remember that journals have their problems, too. For instance, a new journal will not necessarily have as many quality papers they need, so they are a soft target. Similarly, a journal that has just gone from four issues a year to six will need an extra inux of papers to keep their system in gear. A journal that has a reputation for publishing empirical articles may well be up for a theoretical synthesis or review. This is by no means a sure thing, but you can still keep the interests of the journal in mind when planning your article. 5. A catchy title that carries the promise of dialogue or controversy is always a good thing. 6. Controversy can be your best friend. Journals are not in the consensusbuilding business; they are in the idea business. An editor may well look kindly on a piece that will raise a lot of debate, even bad blood, as this guarantees replies, rejoinders, energized theoretical engagement, and so on. Making a statement is, therefore, a good thing and is in the best interest of the journal. 7. Sometimes, playing it close to the deadline (when it comes to rewrites, for example) can be benecial. An editor will sometimes be pressed to ll out and nish an issue and may not have a suitable nished piece available. A manuscript that comes in through the proverbial door at the last minute will seem like a godsend, and the editor may well be more lax about triple-checking your arguments. Im not saying you should always send in manuscripts late, but sometimes timing can be your friend. 8. It is a lot easier to get something published on the back of a conference track or workshop that later is turned into a special issue, than by way of submitting to an open issue. This is due to the fact that youve already written a treatment on the subject, you know the editor, the pool of potential authors has been
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radically limited, the reviewers will know the subject more intimately, and so on. Often (but not always) guest editors for special issues will also consciously try to include more junior researchers. 9. Learning at least the basics of layout cant hurt you. Dont send in manuscripts written in all sans serif (Arial, Verdana, or Helvetica). Keep away from Times New Roman as well. Think about your use of space. Look at it before you send it; does it looks typographically inviting? Under no circumstances should you make it look like youre practicing with new fonts, neither should you use decorative fonts. Think about how different it feels to read pleasantly laid out text versus muddled and badly thought through text. There is no point in making your manuscript difcult to read. 10. Your manuscript doesnt have to be perfect when you send it off. Although it should be free of obvious mistakes and you should have spell-checked it beforehand, the reviewers are there to help you make it better. Some scholars swear by sending in material they feel is only 80 percent there so that the reviewers will feel they have input. Call it psychological warfare or call it an intelligent use of the review process, it is done and it can be efcient. Since 50 percent of the work for an article is in the polishing, and this 50 percent can be extended indefinitely, learn to submit a manuscript when you feel it communicates, not when you feel every single letter is perfect. For some reason, men seem to take this advice easier than women. Specically, women seem more reticent to send in stuff that is less than perfect. This, unfortunately, leads to a situation where women publish less than men, who send in sub-par stuff and get it published regardless
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On Alternatives and Heresies
[P]erhaps, this allows us to propose a more general denition of what heresy is: in order for an ideological edice to occupy the hegemonic place and legitimize the existing power relations, it HAS to compromise its founding radical messageand the ultimate heretics are simply those who reject this compromise, sticking to the original message. (]i\ek 2001, 8) Some time ago, I published a small, experimental lm in an online journal (ephemera: theory & politics in organization, 5(3), 448450 & 12m. 46s.). To accompany the lm, I wrote the following text: The following is a short movie, occupying a space somewhere between the experiment and the documentary. It is born out of a long-term research project Im conducting regarding alternative forms of academic publication and expression, a project that has resulted in the publishing house Dvalin (http://www.dvalin.org/) and various other mutations, and thus clearly an idea looking for a home. My interest here has been to adopt new technologies and see how these can be deployed to play around with our notions of academic propriety, but also to mess around in the borderlands of both thinking and seeing. Particularly this interest is due to a certain frustration I have regarding what I feel is a dangerous aversion towards technology among many organizational researchers. Most scholars still seem stymied by technologies beyond copiers and email, and the eld feels poorer due to this. For all our access to computers and digital technology, we still feel most content when we keep to the hard-to-fuck-up word processing program. So I have started to play around with digital video, nally, and have started to think about the possibilities of documentary lm in the eld of organization studies. With our stated love of the ethnography, it is odd to note that most academics still seem to nd even photography threateningly arty and odd (cf. Sam Warrens article on
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photography in ephemera, 2(3): 224245). So perhaps this is a methodological comment. But this piece is also born out of a feeling I have, a sense that we pay far too much interest to the hustle-bustle of modern life, to the extreme activity of contemporary capitalism. Ive long been interested in the less obvious stasis of modern life, the continuous mundaneity of it all. Whereas most social science seems occupied with documenting the extremesor even creating it through sensationalism or ideologythe everyday, that which exists in the spaces we do not immediately recognize as interesting, has often not been studied at all. Studies of violent oppression and extraordinary strategies abound, but the mundane, which after all is the most common form of life (or non-life) is seen as uninteresting. Why is this? So I walked through an abandoned ofce, with my digital videocam, thinking about the traces and the absences of organizational behavior. I realized I was inspired by Marc Augs Non-places. Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (New York: Verso Books, 1995), in that I wanted to look to the ways in which we try to imbue places with meaning that may not be there. The lounge in Stockholm looks like the lounge in New York, which looks like the one in Sydney. But so do the ofces of the academics, jetting from conference to conference. Somewhere behind the mad activity of the contemporary world, behind our cramped attempts to write in meaning into everything we see around us, there is a stillness, a hiss, and a mundaneity that we fail to acknowledge and engage with. I do not know how this should be inquired into, if we can even reach it, but I do think we should attempt to. So I wanted to see if the image of an empty corridor would jolt something in me. Im still pondering this. It should be noted that the lm plays around with this, and that it is intentionally constructed in a way that at times may feel boring or uncomfortable. Just as an organization, the lm at times jolts from the mind-numbingly slow to the hectic pace of the supermodern. Note that this is not art, nor do I make any claims to be an artist. That would be foolish. This is a documentation, a case study, a question. It tries to provoke some form of reaction, but it is not a provocation. It may be urging organizational scholars to explore the medium of digital lm and the documentary, and can thus be viewed as a methodological note, but I want to leave a space for the viewer to make her own sense of it.
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This text can perhaps serve as an introduction to my thoughts on alternatives to prevailing academic praxis and the issue of being an academic heretic. My belief is that for a practicing academic, it is important to question and probe the prevailing order of the eld. Consequently, I believe heresy is an important aspect of keeping academia healthy. But how does one achieve the position of the heretic? There are, of course, many ways, but I do believe two specic things deserve extra mention: publishing and media. One of these is a hallowed eld and questioning it (in a way that deviated from the normal criticism) is a form of heresy. The other is a eld that is seen as deeply problematic and one that an academic is not supposed to engage in too deeply. Together, these form a kind of test case for academic tolerance, something through which we can inquire into what deviation in scholarly practice would mean. The lm that the text above was an introduction to spanned both these. Obviously, it is a bit silly to publish an experimental short lm when you are supposed to be a serious scholar in organization theory, particularly so when we acknowledge that digital video seems a particularly unacademic form of media (unless youre in media studies). Both the lm itself and my successful attempt to position it as a publication broke with a lot of ideas about what should count as real academic work. To state that academia is an inherently conservative and uncreative atmosphere is, of course, nothing new. There has always been an oppressive side to science, one that tries to keep to the status quo and enable those in power to remain in control. Many young academics also feel that the only way to get ahead is to accept the hegemonic structure and do as youre told. Many a young scholar rarely has the nancial or institutional security that would enable him or her to go on ghting; therefore, most simply give in. And as those who are most likely to introduce alternatives tend to be those who are most susceptible to the pressure to conform, the structure of academia effectively hinders change. This is far more dangerous than heresy. What denes many a department is not a healthy debate but a crushing and mind-numbing orthodoxy, and far too many scholars are merely agents of this. Whereas the original message of academia was the relentless pursuit of knowledge, regardless of whether it t with earlier ways of looking at things, today a contrarian position will be looked on with suspicion. Still, such heresies are important, critical even, if academia is to be a living, meaningful activity.
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Alternative Forms of Publishing

When academics talk about publishing, they almost always talk of one of two things: articles in double-blind reviewed international journals on one hand and chapters or monographs published by a publishing house on the other. Alternatives to these two approaches are astonishingly difcult to nd. Yes, there is the tradition of publishing conference papers in proceedings, as well as the existence of working papers and series of such, but these are normally seen as intermediate steps toward real publishingwhich always means one of the two aforementioned things. Alternatives seem few and hard to come by, but, at the same time, alternatives seem necessary if we are to keep academia alive and relevant in the contemporary age. Locking ourselves into such rigid institutional forms cannot be healthy for the development to the eld, and a lot of people acknowledge this. All the while, it is difcult to say what a good alternative would be. An important issue here is technology. Most academics are afraid of technology or otherwise shy away from it. In part this may be a question of culture (i.e., that technophobia is seen as something academics simply should adopt). In part, it may be an issue of people simply feeling that they do not have the time to engage with technology and no time to learn how to use new software. In order to break with this thinking, Ive worked on a project on alternative methods of publishing, trying to engage with technology. In part, this was due to my interest in software. Playing with new programs made me want to try out new things, and this aligned with my interest in publishing. Originally, I was just fascinated with the potential of using the Internet and the versatility of Adobes PDF (portable document format, a technology that hasnt gotten the recognition it deserves, as it truly has changed scientic communication in remarkable ways) les to distribute texts. The possibility of setting up a site with your own texts for the world to download was, in its day, a huge thing for me. So I played around with Web design and taught myself Adobe Acrobat, playing around with settings and thinking about different ways of thinking about academic distribution. Academically, I was brought up in an environment where working papers were held in some esteem, and my advisor actively promoted writing short essays and putting them out as working papers, not as steps to something greater, mind you, but as a worthy undertaking in itself. So I wrote my little pieces, and put them out. A research group I helped organize started its own series, publishing everything over the Internet, and suddenly we found that the stuff we wrote for our own amusement was actually being read all over the world. Some pieces even
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got referenced, quoted, and built upon. My own Web site grew with a bit of this and a bit of that. I even blogged (short for Web logged), long before everyone did it, and stopped once I realized how limited it was (but man, I loved the technology behind it). Obviously, these methods are not alternative methods. Quite a few academics do similar things. But I was always most fascinated by the new avenues this opened and the fact that one could distribute things so quickly and elegantly. And it got me thinking: How far could one take all this? Clearly, digital technologies were ushering in a new era for scholarly communication, but most people were looking at this merely as making the old systems more efcient rather than looking to the ways in which this might, in fact, disrupt the system itself. Whereas the old working paper series were cumbersome and expensive (prohibitively so if you wanted to distribute them), the new technologies meant that a series from a bunch of guys having a laugh could look just as good as a series from a top university, and that when it came to distribution, it actually depended on whether you were interesting or not. And I started wondering how one could learn from this. I had the run of a working paper series, I had been published in online journals (and quite a few ofine ones), and I had learned a little bit about the publishing industry from the books I had done. In my fascination for everything connected to text and computers, I had also learned some layout. Having always loved books and typography, I had taught myself book design, something Id also practiced by designing books for some friends. During this process I was amazed by the craft behind it, but also by the fact that publishers seemed to do fairly little when it came to the trip from manuscript to published text. Now, this is not meant as a disparaging comment on publishers, for they can do wonderful things when it comes to organizing the process, editing, and developing manuscripts, and they are crucial in the commercialization process. Still, I realized that the trip from manuscript to printed book actually could involve as little as my getting a le, working it on my computer, sending off another le to a printing shop, and getting a box of nice books by return mail. I thought a lot about this, how my laptop was, in fact, a self-contained book-production facilitywith the actual printing outsourced as and when needed. What I am getting to is that I started a publishing house. Well, a house might be overstating it; a registered company that published books might be a better term. I named it Dvalin, after the dwarf who, according to Norse mythology, invented the runes. The point of starting a publishing company, I decided, was not to pretend to overthrow the traditional publishers, nor to create a vanity
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project, but to show that it could be done. So I registered it, created a logo, a Web site, and a story line around it. I also decided that Dvalin would always distribute the books it did for free, mostly as downloadable PDF les. I knew enough about books to design them myself, I knew how to work with printers, and a lot of the small things I decided I would just deal with when and if needed. My rst problem was having something to publish. What people rarely understand about publishing is that it is the dearth of publishable material that plagues the industry. Fortunately, I like writing. I wrote a short book called The Serious Unreal and got to work. Doing the layout was relatively easy, as were things such as getting an ISBN number. Printers today are used to short print runs and delivery by mail or FTP (le transfer protocol), so arranging for printing was actually simple. The same goes for setting up the Web site, and thus the distribution. In fact, although the writing took some time, and the layout a couple of days, everything went so smoothly that I could hardly believe it myself. One day I just drove to the printers, picked up the forty-two copies I had had printed (each one numbered and signed), sent some of them out, and informed some friends of the Web site. Pretty soon, after checking the blogs, I realized that more than a thousand copies had been downloaded. Clearly, some of these were just downloads by the idle and the curious, but still, they had been seen. The book got referenced some and got a bit of fame in the circles I work in as a cool project. People mailed me and congratulated me for doing such an off-the-wall stunt. Some asked me for advice and obviously started thinking about their own alternatives. A little later two of my friends, Campbell Jones and Damian ODoherty came to me with an idea: Would I help them do a collection of manifestos? They gathered an international gathering of academics, many of whom were big names in the eld, to write manifestos about the business school of tomorrow (Jones & ODoherty 2005). They also got funding for printing 800 copies, which were then distributed for free at some of the central conferencesto some consternation of the big publishers. Obviously, this was seen both as an alternative and as a political statement. Suddenly, a micro-publisher was tenable again, which was exactly what I wanted to accomplish with the project. Others have then taken the idea and have tried to accomplish it on a somewhat grander scale. Having done the Web-thing, the publisher-thing and, at the same time, the traditional thing of journal publishing and the like, I started to think about media. Having worked in text all of my professional life, but also having a dedicated interest in popular culture, I started wondering about alternatives to text. Since I had played around with design already, the thought of doing things with
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images and video came pretty naturally. For a long time I had thought about the possibility of using documentary lms in the social sciences, so in connection with this, I bought a relatively inexpensive digital video camera. Now, I want to emphasize that I am wary of people making claims about the natural afnity between science and art. Often this has been a way for researchers to engage in self-indulgent projects, producing things that are neither particularly good art nor particularly interesting research. Some, but not many, manage to combine the two forms. I never wanted to create video art. I was just interested in making an epistemological point. So I lmed empty corridors, juxtaposed this with quotes from social theory, and tried to see whether this could produce a reaction. I had to learn to edit video, something Im still pretty lousy at, but the video did get made and it did get published. It got some attention, which pleased me (although I dont think it turned out to be that great), and, generally, it t into my project of studying the alternatives to business as usual in the academic world. At the moment, I am pondering a book of photography and possibly an extension of my video project. So I believe in the importance of exploring alternative avenues. This book is an important example in itself. If things go the way Ive planned, this book will be published by a self-publishing print-on-demand company. For a small fee, it will have been transformed into a le from which anyone can print copies and also placed in the logistics chain of modern book-selling, that is, it will turn up as an item on Amazon.com. This form of publishing used to be called vanity publishing and was not favorably looked upon by academia. It still isnt. Publishing this book through such a system is, in itself, a heretical act, and, thus, my attempt at another minor insurrection. Obviously, I could have pushed this book through a serious publishing house (I even had an offer to do so), but that would have been far less fun. This way, the heretical way, makes the very endeavor of academic work feel more worthwhile, as it does not tie itself to the way things are normally done nor to dogmatic ideas about propriety and scholarly praxis. It is, if you excuse the hyperbole, more of an adventure. What was important about academia early on was that it tried new things, but these days, this is not accepted in the way it should be. Alternatives should not be done indulgently nor be seen as ends unto themselves. But they can be engaged in as a way of keeping the founding radical message of academia alive and as ways to keep academia a little more interesting. In the end, academic life without alternatives is just another form of intellectual death.
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Media and the Modern Academic

To all this we can add the issue of media, particularly popular media. I can quite assuredly state that most academics look down on media, and when it comes to academics in media, this becomes even more pronounced. Academics that regularly appear on talk shows tend to be seen as gadies or pundits, and there is an implicit assumption that being in the media makes you less of a scholar. Assumedly, being a public intellectual means one is compromised as a researcherunless you happen to be Michel Foucault or Slavoj ]i\ek (and so few of us are). And for every case of a successful cross-over, we have a plethora of less than wholesome ones. The amboyant Bernard-Henri Lvy, better known as BHL (oh, to be an acronym!), is a case in point. At the same time, for a contemporary academic, the media should be a natural and even normal milieu. Since we no longer live in an era when scholars hide away in a monastery and remain there in solitude until their magnum opus is nished, academics need to think about their relation to the outside world, and the way in which they want to portray themselves in the media. For regardless of whether you like it or not, each academic has a media presence, either a managed one or just the caricature conveyed by media about academics in general. Some are contented with the latter and are comfortable to play into the image of the scholar as a recluse whod rather not be in media. Others, such as myself, nd this a limited and damaging view. Personally, Ive happily worked with medianewspapers, radio, and TVand feel no less of an academic for this. I have been accused, often by close friends, of becoming something of a talking head, prepared to comment on any and everything and gladly pouncing on every chance to get into the spotlight. Ive always found this a bit unfair, and instead stated my personal feeling on the subject: Academics are paid to ponder, to research, and to teach. In all these cases, however, they are basically hired by the state to be a class of people who are less fettered to the grind of corporate life and, thus, in a good position to comment on the social world. Academics are a kind of free agents of thinking, given space precisely to be able to serve the public, not as hermetic high priests or civil servants, but as public intellectuals. Public here, however, does not mean popularizer or pleaser of crowds. Instead it is a question of engaging with society, thinking the intellectual project beyond the circles of academic culture. The media is not the enemy of research, and, particularly, it is not the enemy of social science. Instead it represents a possibility for a more entrenched engagement with society, a way to make academia meaningful, and a communication
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with those whom academia is supposed to serve. Most importantly, media can be a powerful reminder for the scholar that the insular world of the university is not all there is. Instead, a healthy relationship with media can be both an arena for developing new ideas and a test bed for old ones. It can also be an excellent space to train yourself to communicate your research. Media is a form of heresy, as it breaks with the notion that only academia can truly understand academia. But it is also a perfect case of how academia has gone wrong. When the sciences were developing, communication with the outside world was not only normal, it was crucial, and the later sectarian attitudes would be very strange to our intellectual forefathers. In much the same way as alternative forms of publishing may, in fact, be a return to an earlier, more original academic ethic, an engagement with media can be understood as part of the original academic eventfree thinking in engagement with the world.
Heresy
should be a natural part of academic life. As heresy is simply shorthand for not accepting dogma and dogma is the enemy of any critical engagement with the world, it follows quite logically that heresy is actually at the heart of true scholarly engagement. Yet far too few scholars are prepared to take on the role of the Cathars, and instead persist in their version of deep Catholicism, accusing anyone who breaks with this of vulgar apostasy. But academia is not the one true religion. Rather, it is a continuous questioning, a discussion of the ages, and its very lifeblood should be the alternative interpretation and the heretics outlook on the world. Obviously, each academic has to develop her own version of heresy, as formulaic questioning is no questioning at all. Still, the important part is actively nding ones own heresies. Remember, ecclesia non sitit sanguinem
4
Quick and DirtyScholarship as Manual Labor and Impure Activity
The biggest mistake people make when they talk about research and academic work is that they portray it as an ethereal endeavor. The image of the scholar as a person ensconced in a utopian world, engaged in thinking, and detached from the mundane reality of manual labor is persistent but also dangerous. To dispel this notion, let me point to some of my own experiences. One of the things Ive learned in academia is just to write, quick and dirtylike. It might sound like a little thing, but it really isnt. It took me years to learn just to sit down in front of my laptop computer, open up the document, and just write. It took me years to learn how to just let the text ow and to write down what I was pondering, what amazed me, and what I had seen. I had to learn to weave arguments together and to edit and rework. I now know that its unnecessary to count the pages of a document. The computers word count feature does it for me. Ive also learned that a standard book manuscript is about 80,000 words. I now know that it is my job to produce words. Simply put, Ive come to understand what Lawrence Block meant when he said, When I hear people talking about writers block I only get annoyed. You write, thats it. Do you think plumbers get plumbers block? At rst I thought this comment was funny, then I thought it was wise, and now it is kind of a koan for me. It sums up what I think about writing, both as an activity and a craft. There isnt anything mysterious or ethereal to it, just work and more work. It might not be the kind of work that makes you sweat (except for deadlines, perhaps), but in many ways it isnt that different from cleaning or building a house. Text doesnt write itself, and nothing happens unless you actually sit down and write.
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When I started writing seriously, I also started to realize that the more I wrote, the better my thinking became. Thoughts seemed to take on a life of their own as those words spilled onto the page; those words, in turn, then jostled new thoughts and created new connections. I found this absolutely fascinating. I realized, that when I had written ten pages, I suddenly saw fteen new pages that I could write. Thoughts I had treated as separate entities became combined when placed upon a page, and as time pressures forced me to abandon intense selfreection and self-criticism, I found I could write with something akin to condence. Simply put, I realized I had to take a stand in my text, rather than hide behind the potential text I had yet to write. I also discovered I simply couldnt capture everything in text. I started seeing the aws of my thinking, the gaps in my argument, and the paths not taken. What had once felt like nalized theory showed itself on the page as quite tentative and slipshod. Those errors had to be xed, to the extent that I knew how, and I was made aware of their constant niggling presence. When I mentioned this to my Doktorvater, he just smiled and said I had started to write like a scholarand not a moment too soon. As in any human activity, research is lled with clichs and shibboleths, and this goes particularly for the act of academic writing. Such writing, which academia has romanticized and even afforded an air of mysticism, seems to be one of those things scholars always have an opinion on. Some even have a motto. When it comes to writing, most actually know how to do it, and most are not shy to tell you. Well-meaning people say a lot of things: Dont get it right, get it written. Write for acceptance. Dont make it too difcult. First say what youre going to say, then say it, then say what youve said. The worst research is the kind that doesnt get written up. Just do it, quick and dirty. This last platitude is of particular interest to me in writing this book. The very act of writing, which is often portrayed as a bit of boring drudgery, is both undertheorized and underrated as a highly interesting form of manual labor. The impurity, the shoddiness, and the sheer viscerality of writing, to me this is far more interesting than the rather sterile world of ideas often idealized by scholars. I wrote my doctoral thesis in about six months. Now, obviously I do not mean that it took me six months to become a PhD. What I mean is that one day I decided that I was going to write the Book, and that I ve months later I had a manuscript that to a great extent looks like the published work on the basis of
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which I was awarded a PhD. The process in its entirety, from the realization that I had to write like a demon to my public defense (the process in Scandinavia differs slightly from the one in the U.S. and the UK), took about ten months. Matters were further complicated by the fact that this process prompted me to completely abandon my earlier thesis plans. I literally started from scratch. For reasons that are of no interest here, I started from a clean slate, with nothing written and nothing really prepared. I had a book I wanted to write, some data collected, some reading under my belt, and a story to tell. In less than a year, I didnt have a single page of written text, unless you count four pages of scribbles in longhand. Ten months later I had a book in my hand and a PhD. Quick and dirty. But what was it that I had done, what kind of activity did I engage in, quick and dirty-like? Was it research? That sounds very vague and far too abstract. Was it typing? That soundsmechanic. I remember sitting cross-legged on a bed, thumbing through a stapled bunch of papers, and suddenly realizing that this (by golly) was a thesis, or, at least, a pretty good draft of one. I also remember being surprised, for I couldnt for the life of me remember when Id gotten it all straightened out inside my head. Still, there it was, and I recognized the words I had written. But where did the book come from?
The Only Thing I Know about Research

Research does not take place inside your head. This is the sum total of my research experience. Ignoring this, a lot of people obviously think that thinking is something that takes place within the gated community of ones head and that intellectual work is an internal affair. Seemingly, people assume that the human brain is akin to a machine lodged in the head of the individual researcher and that the research process is mainly about tuning this machine and feeding it the right kind of material after which research outputs are formed within the cranium of the writer. These outputs are then transferred onto paper and later fed into other machines such as reviewers and thesis advisors. This is a fallacy, and a dangerous one. Someone who was particularly attuned to debunking such metaphysical fallacies was Ludwig Wittgenstein and much of his later philosophy was an engagement with them (Wittgenstein 1958/2001; Heaton and Groves 1996). For what is it they think within the skull, anyway? And on what do they base this belief? We seem to think, says Wittgenstein, that thinking is a special kind of activity, one that takes place within the head, and that we can talk about it in the same
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manner as we discuss eating dinner. That guy is eating, and that womans thinking hard, as she looks very troubled and/or constipated. The wrinkled brow and the somewhat forced breathing seemingly mean that you are thinking. And at the same time, this thinking is not only internal, its private, too and difcult to transfer out of the head. Now I know exactly what my book will look like, I got it all up here.Dont all those pages up there bother you? Does it hurt?Dont be silly, I mean I know what Im going to write.OK. What?What what?What are you writing?WellOK, Im starting with this chapter onHow does it start?Do you think I can recite it straight out of my head?Why not, if its in there? What does our imagined researcher carry around in his head? A manuscript written in a language only he can translate? Fragments of a text? A table of contents? What could it be, this thing that makes our friend believe it is done? And what makes the researcher think that the thought is analogous with a book? Wittgenstein (1958/2001) comments that we seem to make a fundamental mistake when we think that thought is a process that occurs in the head and is then translated into language and communicated. But what then when we think about something, and cant remember the word for it? Now if it were asked: Do you have the thought before nding the expression? what would one have to reply? And what, to the question: What did the thought consist in, as it existed before its expression? (Wittgenstein 1958/2001, sec. 335) What has any of this got to do with academic work? And what has is got to do with writing quick and dirty? Suppose we think while we talk or writeI mean, as we normally dowe shall not in general say that we think quicker than we talk; the thought seems not to be separate from the expression. On the other hand, however, one does speak of the speed of thought; of how a thought goes through ones head like lightning; how problems become clear to us in a ash, and so on. So it is natural to ask if the same thing happens in lightning-like thoughtonly extremely acceleratedas when we talk and think while we talk. So that in the rst case the clockwork runs down all at once, but in the second, bit by bit, braked by the words. (Wittgenstein 1958/2001, sec. 318)
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Even though there is a distinct pleasure to be had in rapid thinking, the lightning-fast snap-crackle-pop of biochemical madness in the brain, and even though many a scholar is hopelessly addicted to the high this can produce, this is not synonymous with research. We could compare with the way in which more than a few writers have been inspired by a developed addiction to alcohol, sex, or drugs without this meaning that their work would be a direct consequence of heroin or martinis. It shouldnt be surprising that a number of edgling writers and epigones havent come much further in their emulation of their idols than copying their addictions. Take Jack Kerouac as an example. His On the Road (1957/1998) has become mythologized as a kind of perfect writing, created in a single, three week, Benzedrine-fuel marathon session at the typewriter, writing on a single roll of paper so as not to have to break for changing sheets. Later research into Kerouac has shown that most, if not all, of the book can be found in draft form in a number of manuscripts and notebooks, produced over a period of ve years. This fact, however, has mostly been ignored. The mythological version simply makes for a better, more inspirational story. And, as a direct consequence, one can still nd lots of nearly unreadable garbage in the form of stream of consciousness writing, emulating the Beat authors. Similarly one can often nd researchers in various states of either ecstasy or despair, looking for the illumination they assume is the primus motor of scholarly work. They seek a thought, a theory, an idea, or whatever else they think lies at the base of research and seemingly think that writing would, in the words of Wittgenstein, become braked by the words this, hinder it. All this might seem contradictory. Kerouac wrote quickly, or thought long and wrote quickly. But what does it matter anyway? My point lies in the writing. Thinking, just like all other myths, is created right therein writing. However counterintuitive it may seem, I believe that thoughts are created in their capture, in the moment they are written down. This is also why I feel that research is primarily a case of manual labor rather than abstract and mental. Obviously this is particularly true when it comes to gathering data or empirical observations since eldwork can be both physically demanding and contain an element of risk (Ive been fortunate enough to know research assistants whove contracted exotic diseases, and others whove been threatened with physical violence), but I think that the same goes for the assumedly intellectual parts of research as well. My experience in writing has never been one of brilliant insights being transferred onto paper, rather the opposite. The trivial and often internally contradictory thoughts I tried to convey to increasingly skeptical audiences
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became something entirely different when I, often due to sheer lack of time was forced to write them down before Id had the pleasure of thinking them through. Succinctly put, if there is anything of value at all to my thinking, this value was added through the manual work of writing. See, Marx turns up in the most surprising contexts Jack Kerouac wasnt a good author due to his passion for literature, or because he drank a lot, or because he had some metaphysical it lodged in his brain. On the Road (1957/1998) was a great book because it had been worked on, manually. It was created through a thousand attempts, long passages that simply didnt work, and ditched drafts. Text, any text, is born in writing, nowhere else. Still we often think that academics, who work primarily by writing (or, in some cases, in labs), work with their brains rather than with their hands. Yeah, well, someone might interject, it aint the same kind of text! And partly they might be right (see Czarniawska 1999 on organizational research as genre). But the work entailed in producing the texts might not differ that much. The fact is that in the same way that a book becomes real in the process of writing, a thought becomes a living thing when it is created onto a page. The resistance Wittgenstein (1958/2001) describes as happening in writing is, to me, a description of what happens when thoughts work and when they, in a manner of speaking, are born. Quick, in the sense Im talking about it, is not a question of who writes the fastest or about the number of words per minute you can write. Rather, it is the speed to write I am referring to, the art of being able to put words on paper without thinking about it too muchwrite rst, think then, edit later. To be quick to subject your arguments to the friction of the paper means that youll discover the aws of your thinking faster, see where your reasoning doesnt work, and actually save those thoughts that deserves saving. The more you write, the quicker it goes. And I dont mean that youll just write faster, even though this might be another consequence, but that your actual argumentation will develop more quickly. Ive found that the less time I use to plan writing, the faster it goes. The only reason I actually managed to earn a PhD was due to the fact that I simply did not have time for anything except writing. Back then, if I didnt produce enough words, I would fail, and that was all I knew. So I didnt plan or draft or create outlines. Instead, I just wrote any and everything I could think of that might have something to do with the subject. I gathered literally hundreds of odd scraps that somehow congealed into bigger wholes. I wrote, I moved, I deleted, and I wrote even more. I wrote onward, always onward.
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Writing the Impure

One of the most dominant feelings in academic work seems to be fear. Fear can take many forms, such as the fear of data, the fear of presenting research (What if they laugh?), the fear of nishing (What should I do now?), and so on. One fear that is particularly important within the scope of this essay is, obviously, the fear of writing, which comes in at least two shapes. On one hand, it is fear of the unknown, a fear of what might happen once you start writing since actually writing stuff down can often lead to new avenues, unexpected results, and even contradictions. The other fear, which isnt completely detached from the rst, is the fear to write badly, the fear of producing crap. But what is crap? In her brilliant Purity and Danger (1966/2001), Mary Douglas presents her well-known and seminal theory of impurity and the role of it in human thinking, particularly when it comes to thinking the sacred and the strive towards clarity and certainty. Developing William Jamess classical denition of dirt as matter out of place, Douglas analyzes what it is in the category of lthy or impure that so offends our sense of order. Because isnt this what dirt/lth/crap is, the antithesis of order, and perhaps, therefore, the antithesis to knowledge itself? Thinking about it, a lot of what (social) scientists do starts looking like a form of cleaning upa hygiene function. Organization theory looks a lot like a form of meta-cleaning, as does philosophy. Sociology and political science often try to create highly ordered images of the world, as do many of the natural sciences. In fact, many scholars think that their job is reducing the inherent complexity of the world into something more easily handled. Cleaning, cleaning everywhere (a not a thing to think). Science seems to be all about matter in its place, and it would seem most proper that research and the products therein should be well-ordered and structured. The problem is that weve then created a dangerous blend of different kinds of activities, which is an illogical and very unscientic aw in thinking. Observing cleaning is not the same thing as cleaning up, which has been conclusively proven in an extensive study Ive made of my desk (Rehn, ongoing). No matter how much I think about order, it never becomes orderly. Despite this, a lot of people are condent in their belief that research is supposed to be a hygienic activity, one where their job is to clean up not only a dataset or similar gathering of material but also the mess within ones own head. This is connected to the notion of research as a mental activity. You input things in your brain (a little bit of data, some theory, and some spices for avor), arrange it in the lonely room of your head, and then output the now well-ordered, prop-
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erly hygienic result. I like to call it the the brain as a washer mode of thinking. If you fail in this, if you cant get the washer to run the right program, youll be writing crap. But should academic texts be puried? And puried from what? What interests Douglas most (1966/2001, 4258) are the hybrids, those odd things that are neither sh nor fowl, but something in-between. She looks to one of the oldest normative texts of our Western culture, Leviticus, and ponders why some things are declared impure, seemingly without an underlying logic: Why should the frog be clean and the mouse and the hippopotamus be unclean? What have chameleons, moles and crocodiles got in common that they should be listed together (Lev. xi, 27)? After debating the issue, she comes to the conclusion that it seems to be a principle stating that unity is synonymous with holiness that orders this thinking. Phenomena with characteristics from more than one thinkable unity are impure. For example, the mouse, the chameleon, the mole, and the crocodile all seem to have hands (i.e., their paws look like hands) but use these to walk with. The division of the world can take any number of forms, such as when Foucault in The Order of Things (1970/2002) quotes Borgess text on a Chinese lexicon and the way to divide animals into, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very ne camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher. And impurity is transcending this, or any, list of matter in its place. This would indicate that impurity in academic writing might be dened by a stepping outside of the boundaries of proper science, those demarcations that separate an academic text from, say, journalism, literature, consultants tomes, and dirty limericks. At the same time, you have to guard the border between truth and ction, alternatively the line between productive interpretations and foolish ones. But this is actually something different from the impurity Douglas nds and particularly so in the social sciences. The social might be best understood as a hybrid unto itself, and texts written on it might well contain snippets from and references to journalistic text, pragmatic statements, and ne literature (Czarniawska-Joerges and Guillet de Monthoux 1994), maybe even a poem or two. There is a marked difference between the natural sciences, where one has, since Linneaus, tried to create nalized taxonomies and categorizations of the natural world (Bowker and Star 1999), and the social sciences, which try to understand and interpret a world that is, by denition, unclear and in ux. Research into the social world simply cannot create meaningful general models, at least not without becoming so general and abstract that these models cease to have a meaningful relation to the world and become a kind of metaphysical language unto themselves.
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The fact is that social world is dened by impurity and paradox, and even without making trivial statements regarding the social construction of everything (cf. Hacking 1999), one can state that order in this world is, at best, a temporary state of affairs. So whereas theoretical physics may have cordoned off a relatively pure eld for itself, one that excludes poetry, the social sciences are interested in a eld that works differently and where truths take different forms. Taking economic phenomena, which are often assumed to be denite and easier to model than, say, social such, they quickly turn out to be impure indeed. Poetry isnt always relevant for an economic analysis, but it can be. It may be highly relevant when companies try to convey their messages, turn up in company narratives, or when a CEO has a thing for T.S. Eliot. And, not to be ignored, it is somewhat important to companies that publish poetry. Thus it is not always the case that you can exclude poetry from social science. Nor can you know beforehand exactly what should be included and excluded, as it all depends on context, the perspective you adopt, the ideas you want to convey, and most importantly of all, the absolute fact that you never can know. For what do social scientists study? We all have our favorite denitions, for our own favorite elds. But is this enough? To exemplify, in an essay on economic anthropology, Maurice Godelier (1978) has remarked that the separation of a specic eld, such as the economy, by necessity leads us into a paradox. If you reduce the eld to a set of functions such as production, distribution, and consumption, you will neglect phenomena that are actually needed to grasp the eld, such as, the role of poetry in publishing. But if you try to adopt a more holistic, systemic view, including everything that might play a role, you will lose sight of the eld of interest, and start studying everything. Research, in this sense, becomes a continuous balancing act between delimitation and inclusion and the task of research to analyse both this external and this internal aspect, and to penetrate to the depths of the domain, until the latter opens on to other social realities and nds there that part of its meaning that it does not nd in itself. (Godelier 1978, 55). It is a monster, this hybrid we social scientists study. Thus writing the impure is a part of the eld, a continuous engagement with our own Augean stables. Social scientists write about the impure, always already (with apologies to Judith Butler and G. W. F. Hegel). In much the same way as Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology (1976/1997) showed that no text can be completely free from alternative interpretations and thus potential contradictions (although he never claimed that knowledge would be impossible), no text in social science is ever complete and puried, and neither
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is the eld. The fear of producing crap is, in this sense, a mistake, particularly if you mean an insecurity as to what can t the discourse of the social sciences. Much of my writing has been dened by my not taking the time to worry about whether what I write will t within a predened eld and also by my assumption that part of my work, part of any scholars work, is to cross borders, to make a productive mess of things. In my own case, I crossed the borders between organization studies and economic anthropology as well as the borders between commodities and gifts (Rehn 2001). The social sciences are interesting precisely because they discuss phenomena in the social world with all the impurity this brings with it. Thus the ideal in these sciences shouldnt be an issue of creating perfect models, but, rather, one of creating interesting descriptions. A text about social phenomena can never be complete and can never be completely devoid of gaps and potential impurities. An academic can save a lot of unnecessary grief by not even attempting to write puried scholarship. Instead, one might come closer to the phenomenon one studies by deliberately going for impure forms of representationcreating collages of quotes, notes, overheard conversations, snippets of text captured at a printer, photographs, pencil sketches, sudden asides, or moments caught in a haze. Pierre Guillet de Monthoux once rhetorically asked me why so few researchers illustrate their own works, something hes done with some success. Well, why not? Obviously, this is an impure method to clarify ones message. But looking at the beautiful, teeming mass of images that exists in the social world and comparing these to the trivial illustrations that exist on the pages of research, one is struck by the fact that many a social scientist obviously believe that in order to be pure and scientic, texts have to be as unattractive as possible. So what should a text in social science look like? The very question is wrongly put. The elds we study are not simple or raried, and the processes we study are messy, so the notion that research should be a question of cleaning up in the complex world into a series of more or less trivial concepts is troubling indeed. Such a language game can so easily devolve into nothing more than a scholastic nitpicking and word-play, where one is more interested in looking the part than actually doing science. If one is interested in science, the important issue is not the arranging and ordering of the world, but the effort to understand it. But thats the same thing, I can imagine someone shouting. And I guess you might think that, particularly if you believe understanding is a setting on your internal washer. But I think it isnt as easy as that, and there are those who seem to agree with me. Wittgenstein is one. Stephen Toulmin, with his Return to Reason (2001), and Richard Rorty
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(1989, 1998) are two others. Despite the sudden sense of well-being it generates, understanding isnt a simple, straightforward phenomenon. It is rather something like an oscillation between states, a search where disparate bits of information are imperfectly woven together into a tentative whole you may have an engagement of understanding to. You understand enough to manage, and seldom more than that. This enough is what I believe is at the very heart of research, the unstable tuft on which we can precariously balance as long as we dont stand still, petried, for too long. However, this enough is not an argument for sloppy work or lazy analyses. Rather, it is an ethic, an acceptance of limitations and the impossibility of eternally stable knowledge. It is also a symbol for judgment as a critical skill in scholarship. In order to do good academic work, you are simply forced to be able to tell the difference between the relevant and the ornamental, the form and the content, the amount of impurity needed, and the level of purity desired. And this is something that cannot be learned except through the work itself, through the act of writing and thinking, and through the crafting of a text or an argument. Consequently, the notion that there would be a Platonic ideal for the academic text may be the most unscientic thought of all and the biggest hindrance to actually doing something worthwhile in social science.
Scholarship and Impurity

So what could all this mean for social science? And what kind of connection am I trying to make between the quick and the dirty? Some might think Im propagating a kind of sloppy pragmatism, one where only results count and where science and the search for truth become abstract and pointless concepts. I am actually talking, however, about the opposite, a position where humility and active engagement becomes an integral part of the search for truth. Accepting the impurity of reality does not mean cutting corners, it means you have to reect a lot more and think a lot harder. Churning out text does not mean one has exchanged thinking for production, but the opposite. It means working on your thinking, handling it head on, engaging with it rather than treating it as some sort of metaphysical illumination in the world. This is why Ive increasingly started to view research as a form of manual labor. Even though it lacks the sweat and lth of a factory oor, academic work is work, and shouldnt be romanticized more than absolutely necessary. This romanticized notion that research is the thinking of deep thoughts that are documented a posteriori, destroys people, wears them down. I was locked into this mode of think-
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ing for a long time, and it was a crisis. It was a depressed despair that nally made it possible for me to write academically. Learning to write taught me precisely how writing quick and dirty can, in fact, be girded by a scientic and academic attitude to the world. Writing quickly didnt mean that I compromised my science, nor were my impure techniques a way to avoid stringency. And I havent even touched upon my most extreme impurity, my worst break with the academic code. I never did write for publications. I tried to get what I wrote accepted and into publications, but I never did think that hard about the way a publication was supposed to look. Instead, I tried to do research. The difference might not seem that huge, but looking at most of the things published in the social sciences, it seems to be. The sad fact is that most publications are rarely read, if at all, and some actually constitute environmental crimes, as the ink and paper spent on them clearly arent warranted. Often this seems to hinge on academics in their anxiety not to step over some imagined boundary of propriety, writing in a style that is almost criminally stilted and uninteresting. If you read monographs written by more prominent researchers, you will often nd that they are written in an entirely different manner, an observation that might be far more interesting than it seems at rst. I admit that this has a political dimension. It seems like a lot of people simply work in environments where anything beyond the most stunted text is looked upon with suspicion, possibly due to personal insecurities among the senior researchers. But even taking all thisconservative seniors and the general lack of well-written social scienceinto account, there are still ways to enact change. Yes, it takes courage, but academia is no place for the fearful. A comment Ive often heard that enrages me is variations of but if youre unsure, its easier to write the way everyone else does. Easier? There is not much worth saving in science if easy has validity as a criterion. The thoughts Ive tried to handle in this essay deal with two issues: the nature of thinking and the form of science. We often seem to think that academic writing is a question of combining these two elements, pressing scientic thinking into an acceptable form. And since form is easier to replicate than thinking, the academic world often accentuates this, the notion that research is supposed to be done in a specic way and supposed to hold to a specic look. The forbidden and the impure have great difculties with tting into such a mode of thinking science. So the effort becomes to imitate some ideal form for the academic text and to follow the cut of this years model. The problem, obviously, is that this leads to an extreme form of hygiene, namely sterility, and a slowness like the ow of molasses, when every sentence is
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formed and tted to a clumsy and unforgiving formas if being an epigone was more acceptable when the copied original is mediocre. Research can take many forms, but one principle can never be ignored or forgottenit is supposed to be a case of independently scientic work. That there would be a criterion of form beyond the one that is given by the science itself is, therefore, highly illogical. It is part of the very nature of science to seek its own limits, to continuously question itself, to nd new ways to think and surprising ways to address problemsa mass of activities none of which are supported or helped by sticking dogmatically to form. Science is not a sterile concept, and contains transgressions and the breaking of taboos as a matter of course. We can, in connection to this, also note that Mary Douglas states that concepts of impurity are mostly religious. Form, in its guise as something to be dogmatically followed, isnt scientic. (Douglas 1966/ 2001) At the same time, science is something that has to be given form, formulated, and communicated. Thinking that that happens in splendid, sterile isolation, as a wholly internal happening, isnt scientic either. It can only become so when it meets the friction of the world, when it ghts against the material resistance of the audience and the world. And, of course, the rst and foremost material resistance, the braking Wittgenstein identies, the resistance of the page that can only be bridged by manual labor. Wittgenstein 1958/2001). Before this barrier is breached, youre not doing social science. You are merely performing synaptic gymnastics. Simply put, what we have here is a dynamic notion of writing, a dialectics between breaking with form as dogma and creating form as communication. Write, but do not purify.
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Six Dispassionate Remarks Directed at Doctoral Students
I recently had the pleasure to sit on a panel that was convened with the lofty aim of improving PhD programs in business studies by discussing the role of the thesis. In accepting to do so, I decided I would take the opportunity to play the role of the bad boy (Similar to the angry young man, but with less quotations and a penchant for one-liners.). Anger and confusion are wonderful things, as any input of energy into academia is something to cherish and rejoice over, but these may also take away from the issue at hand. Although I greatly enjoyed the discussion, particularly since the panel consisted of nice and knowledgeable people, it also made me think. Obviously there are some things that are not explained enough in the eld. So I decided to write my thoughts down. What follows, then, are some remarks for doctoral students. They are not meant as feel-good sentiments nor are they malicious ones. They are simply thoughts that I wanted to share regarding the funny business of writing a thesis in order to become a PhD and the problems one might encounter therein. They are in no particular order, except for the last one. 1. Your advisor doesnt have all the answers. A common question, posed by doctoral students all over, is a variation of how can I make sure it will be good enough? The answer is, no one knows. A senior researcher can look at unnished work and say whether it cuts the mustard or doesnt, but no one in the whole world can give you a surere model that will guarantee that the work will turn out right. This may seem strange since these same people will be able to tell in an instant once they see the nished work, but this is just the way things are. Senior researchers will know how they manage to write something they feel is scientic or scholarly; however, they will only have the slightest inkling about how other people manage this. Also, they are almost as scared as you are. Every
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researcher is scared about whether or not their stuff is up to scratch, but the accomplished ones get better at hiding it. What is good enough in research? I dont know, and no one else does either. The very notion is tainted by an idea of some metaphysical dividing line in the world, one that separates good research from bad. Unfortunately, such a line or such a point does not exist. Research is an ongoing discussion, a tangled web with confusing and twisted spheres of thought and inuence. There are no clear demarcations, just gray zones. What one needs to do is make the research good enough and to persuade the eld to accept it. This does not mean that it is all show and politics, merely that you have to make it clear what discussion you are a part of and what you are bringing in. There is no predened level of scienticness that you have to reach. There is, in the end, just you and your claim that this phenomenon exists, and this is why it is important. The research community will either accept it or not. Asking your advisor will not be of much help. Your advisor can guide you, but you need to nd your own answer. 2. Under-ambition and excessive focus is a ne recipe for stupid. Sometimes doctoral students get really, really bad advice. For instance, they may be told not to pick too ambitious a project. This is utterly idiotic. Every project in research should be ambitious, and thus be written with the integrity that only going for the jugular (of the eld, as it were) can give. The problem is that a lot of people have problems discerning between ambition and lack of thought. Consequently, ambition becomes the patsy when insufcient reading and lack of thought should be attacked (I want to acknowledge that it was my friend, Marcus Lindahl, who pointed out this discrepancy to me). There is nothing wrong with ambition. On the contrary, dont hide behind a tiny, un-ambitious question. There is no honor in making things ridiculously simple for yourself. This doesnt mean that ambitious projects arent difcult. They are. But then again, research should be. Another way in which people try to battle the problem of fear and confusion is to invoke the notion of focus or research question. Some will claim that this is the way to do research, to nd a denite focus and to then keep to that. I disagree with this claim. This is about as bright as driving blindfolded during rush hour in a major city and navigate according to a memorized map from 1973. One denite upside to a good frontal lobotomy is focus, and you should keep this in mind when an advisor talks about focus early on. To really hammer the point home, focus, in the social sciences, is a really bad idea. Once youve started noticing patterns in your material/data, then you can make choices and focus on cer-
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tain things. Once youve started to write things up, then you need to focus in order to keep the extraneous stuff out. Besides that, however, focus is just another way to turn into a bad researcher. So be ambitious, but dont be focused. Examine things in the world and think about them. Be original and try to say something important. You will be hindered enough in your thinking by the social demands of academia. Putting on the blinders of focus or the limitations of under-ambition is a surere recipe for failure. 3. You dont need any more bad advice. Advisors sometimes dont want to take any responsibility for you. A sure sign is that they will talk to you about getting an additional advisor. This discussion can mean two things. One, they may think that you are immature and easily led and thus likely to follow one person blindly. Two, they might think your work stinks and want somebody else along to share the blame. If they suggest an entire panel of advisors, this means they want enough people along so that no one can be blamed. In other words, when an advisor suggests extra advisors, they think you are a bad student. Count the number of people they want to bring in and you have a fair picture of just how stupid your advisor thinks you are. There is nothing wrong with working with one advisor, not even with following this advisor pretty closely. A lot of the greatest thinkers didnt have any real advisor (in the way we see them)names such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Norbert Elias come to mind. In the natural sciences, a number of important researchers worked hand in hand with their advisors, winning Nobel Prizes in the process. The anthropologist Ruth Benedict worked along the same path as her teacher Franz Boas, and she is still referenced, seventy years later. Everett Hughes and Herbert Blumer both advised a number of the nest sociologists of an era and, seemingly, cared not a whit about the fact that sometimes their students actually learned a lot from them, and used this in their own work. There is a notion bandied about that more advisors will bring about better work. Obviously, such a notion is built on the assumption that more comments and help will improve the thesis. This might very well be true if one imagines that writing a thesis is similar to painting a house, where extra help is always a good thing. The argument is less persuasive if we imagine that one aspect of doctoral studies is to develop into a thinker. If we perceive it thusly, one advisor is more than enough. Having a lot of people butting in just confuses the process. Talk to people, by all means, and get editorial help or a few good references from a number of friends, but dont get two advisors. There is very little to be
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gained from having two. An advisor isnt there to write your thesis; an advisor is there to help you develop into an independent thinker. Having two advisors is like having two priests or two psychiatrists. It is also reminiscent of having two mothers. If you see nothing wrong with that, get help. 4. In the end, it is your own fault. The harshest lesson for any doctoral student is this: When all is said and done, you are the one responsible for your thesis. You will only get some of the fame (your advisor wants a cut), but you will take all the blame. Learn to live with it. Writing a thesis is a question of growing as a researcher, and actually becoming an independent one. A part of this is taking full responsibility. If you feel like blaming someone else, youre not ready to be a doctor, period. A thesis is supposed to be an independent scientic work. It is not a group endeavor, and your advisor really shouldnt have too much to do with it. While it is natural to wish for different kinds of certainties and possibilities for blamesharing, these simply shouldnt exist. We are, of course, accustomed to explaining away our choices and predilections, and the fact that some things are set in stone goes against the whole ethos of our era. Nevertheless, you are the only one who can fail your thesis. There are many things in life that may hinder youa death in the family, children, or illness. But you will just have to face these obstacles like everyone else does and handle them as best you can. When it comes to the science-bit, the same thing goes. Yes, research is hard. Thats why you get the lofty title. No, no one can really do that part for you. Thats why you get the accolades. You are responsible for every single word of your thesis, and no one else is. The faster you get to terms with this, the happier you will be. If you can nd joy in the fact that you can (and will) be attacked for your work, you are, in fact, developing into a scholar. 5. There are two kinds of thesis: the bad and the lousy. It doesnt have to be brilliant; it only has to show that you were striving for brilliance. Regardless of what anyone will tell you, a thesis is not expected to be a masterwork. It is supposed to be good enough. One reliable test of good enough is that you tried for something but didnt get all the way there. An indicator of not good enough is that you either dont know what you went for, or believe youve done something you havent done. Remember, ambition and realism are not mutually exclusive. In fact, ambition and humility arent mutually exclusive. You are battling it out to be better than other PhD-students, not better than the nest works in the eld. Of course, you should try to write a seminal work, a classic, a piece of scholarship
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so astounding that your advisor isnt worth to comment on it. You will fail in this. Thats okay, so has everyone else. The point to nishing a thesis, as compared to writing it, lies in this realization. Some will never come to terms and, consequently, work for ten or fteen years trying to polish their thesis. This type of thesis rarely becomes a masterpiece. Now, you shouldnt cut corners or go for just good enough (because you will always fail and instead produce something that doesnt cut it). Still, the simple realization that a thesis is a serious work and, being one, is allowed to fail, can save you a lot of heartache. 6. If all else fails, give up. You dont have to nish your thesis. A lot of people suffer far too much during the process for it to be worthwhile. A thesis does not bring happiness, it doesnt bring fame, and it sure as hell doesnt bring fortune. It does not help you pick up strangers in bars; it may, in fact, keep you from getting a decent job, and most of your friends will not understand what the fuss is all about. Your parents will be proud, but theyre impressed by the fact that you learned to walk and managed to eat without getting food all over your face. There is no need to nish, and there should be far less of a stigma to giving up. Sometimes, giving up is the smart thing to do. You can do a lot of things with your life that are both more productive and bring more joy than writing a thesis. Get a great job, make a difference in the world, have a child, plant a tree. Dont think that a thesis is where its at. Its a book, nothing more, and although most people have a book in them, it isnt necessarily a thesis. Personally, I think a lot of people nish their thesis just because theyre afraid. They dont want to be the one about whom people say, He didnt nish. Actually, Ive never heard anyone say anything negative about someone who dropped out. Theyll say things like, He didnt feel he could do it. He seems a lot happier now, or, I think it was best for all. In some cases theyll say, What a damn shame, or, I miss having her around. Now, you probably think Im lying. Arent people saying things like, He wasnt up to it? Sure they do, but is that negative? Why do people think that everyone can write a thesis? Most people cant write poetry to save their lives, but no one thinks it is particularly negative to say, That Alf guy, he really cant write poetry. Obviously, we believe that research is something everyone should be able to do. On one level, this is true. Anyone can observe and think about things. Unfortunately, research is another country. Not only do you have to be able to observe and think, you have to learn the language, the vernacular, the grammar, the social rules, the laws, and the way the trafc ows. And then you have to learn how one
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behaves naturally within this tangle of tacit rules, how one breaks the rules, and how one curses in a natural and effortless way. For many, this hill is too steep to climb. Not because they arent smart enough but because they cant see the point or dont care enough. Sometimes, it is because they cannot comprehend just how much of a culture research is. A long time ago, I dropped out of a course in Japanese simply because I realized I didnt have the time or the patience to reorient my notions of how a new language works. I remember thinking that if I decided to learn without rethinking, I would just be parroting sentences. The same goes for academia. Although this may seem like the most mean-spirited comment in a series of fairly nasty remarks, you need to realize what Im actually saying. You dont have to nish your thesis. There is nothing wrong with not nishing. This is positive advice, feel-good advice. Sometimes a parent will say something like: If at rst you dont succeed, try, try again. This is good advice for learning how to ride a bike. But it is not so in academia. In this harsh world, saying, Fuck you! to your advisor might be the best decision youll ever make.
6
A Short Manifesto for E-visible Scholars
Let me state what should be obvious: The contemporary academic has an obligation to be visible to the outside community. Visibility, rather than obscurity, should be a question of honor for a scholar, and the notion that visibility is synonymous with shallowness should be abandoned. A serious scholar does not need to constantly appear on talk shows or try to get media attention, but the academic does, I feel, have a certain responsibility to enable the outside world to learn of the work the scholar has accomplished. This is not a general manifesto for the relationship between the scholar and society seen as audience. It is, instead, remarks on a special aspect, an aspect that today is so common that there should be no need for critical comments of this kind. What I am talking about is a Web site. Although the personal Web site has been around for more than a decade and its importance is generally and universally accepted, the online situation in academia borders on the tragicomic. A lot of active academics have no Web presence apart from a short and often out-ofdate piece on the department page. Some scholars have pages that are tacky with cringe-worthy graphics and zero accessibility. Others have pages that say Under Construction and were last updated in 2000. Some simply have a monstrously long page containing their curriculum vitae (from here on referred to as CV) and little else. In fact, the really useful scholars Web site is a very rare beast. And this is a problem. This chapter will not be a design guide or a coding guide, but I will offer some ideas about the underlying logic of the personal academic Web site. Today an increasing amount of people see the Internet as the rst place they look for information. This is true for almost all people under the age of thirtyve, almost every academic, every journalist, and so on. We no longer think
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about where one might get information for some specic thing; we just Google it. Consequently, the fact that most academics do not have a professional Web site is part of the marginalizing of academia. By hampering the way in which single academics could become approachable for those interested in engaging in wider discussions, we are, in fact, making academia more insular and less important. In fact, the qualities that make for good science are the same qualities that make for a good Web site, so what I am proposing here should in no way be particularly radical. Terms such as central argument, clarity, transparency, usability and internal logic should not be scary to a scholar even to one engaged with, say, post-structuralist thought. A Web site that isnt capable of communicating ideas actually questions the academic veracity of the academic. The personal Web site should be seen not as an optional extra for the professional academic; it should be viewed as just as important as the CV and the updated list of publications. Although the statement smacks of 1990s puffery, I want to contend that the way in which one handles ones visibility on the Internet is an integral part of being a contemporary scholar.
Toward the Visible Academic

First: You must have a personal, professional Web site. The site that the department has of youthe one with the bad photo, your classroom number, and some extraneous informationis not enough. You need a Web site that you control, that you can update, and that you can turn into a way of communicating what it is you do. Actually, you should have one already, but if you dont, get one. Second: There must be some point to your Web site. You must have some idea about why you have one, who might read it, and what you want to gain from it. You may be looking for speaking gigs, the respect of your peers, or a date, but you must have some idea in your head what visibility means to you. Its quite okay to communicate just to other academics (although I think youre doing academia a disfavor), but you must have a conscious idea about what the goal of your Web site is. Third: Visibility, even in the limited form of constructing a Web presence, is actually part of your job. At least, it should be. Im in favor of appending it to your contract with the university. This shouldnt be something you do when you have a spare moment but something you set aside time for, like writing a paper. It is, and Im getting radical here, more important than publishing yet another paper.
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Fourth: The way you make yourself visible, or invisible for that matter, communicates something about you. You dont have to turn into a huckster salesman, and you can keep to your preferred self-image, but in every case, this image can and should be communicated. If you see yourself as serious, somber, and traditional, this does not mean that you cannot make this image visible. The point is that regardless of what you do, you can and should be visible, in the way you prefer to be seen.
Minimum Requirements
Obviously, the minimum requirement is actually having a personal Web site. But there is more to this than merely having some HTML (hypertext markup language) thrown up on a server. In fact, as paradoxical as this sounds, if you cant be bothered to make the pages within your site look decent, youre better off having no site at all. A Web site that communicates nothing more than the fact that you have no clue about layout or aesthetics is really not worth the effort. So a rst rule of thumb could be: Make sure that your visibility doesnt make you look bad. When you have a Web site, make sure that you have some kind of consistent design for the site. If you know little or nothing about layout and design, ask for help. Most departments have someone who knows enough to create a design that wont make you look foolish. The important thing is not to have a perfect, award-winning design, but to avoid bad design. A simple, black-on-white Web site that is pleasant to look at and that is easy to navigate is all you need. Here are some simple rules to follow: Keep each page small enough to be viewed on a screen without scrolling. Keep to a single typeface until you learn enough about typography. Keep to simple color-schemes (white and black probably sufce). Dont try to use technologies you cant handle. Dont use images until youve thought them through. Dont get cute or try to be funny. What information should be on your Web site? Basically, just the important stuff, until you can handle more. Your name, your afliation, your contact information, and your general area of research are good for starters. It is okay to have a site that is just a calling card, that contains no usability, but this is, of course, just the absolute minimum. Such a page will make it possible for people to nd you and get in touch with you. It is still important to plan even these minimal features. There is no point in stating that your area of research is economics or English literature or theoretical physics. Someone who is checking up will be interested in specics, so you should include at least detailed keywords (labor,
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poverty, econometrics, Hungary) and the full titles of those publications that describe you best. Tell people what it is you do, where you do it, and how you do it.
Preferable Features of a Web Site

If you actually want some visibility, minimalism will not be enough. You will need to think through what it is you want to do with your Web presence and how this can best be achieved. Still, there are several important things I believe should go into the Web site of a professional academic. First, include a list of publications. The academic is a writing animal, and such a list will communicate what it is you do. I do not believe such a list has to be a complete listing; in many cases (particularly if you have a lot of publications) a selected list of your best works will be preferable. Think of your Web site as a showcase, a way to present yourself. It does not have to be a perfect and complete list of everything youve achieved but a snapshot of who you are as an academic. For this reason, I usually think that you dont have to have a complete CV on your Web site, and that, if you do, it should be as an optionally downloadable PDF (portable document format) le. When it comes to the list of publications, a good idea is to have at least some of these accessible. The PDF le is a godsend to the academic, and I do not think that it can be emphasized enough. Having a selected list of publications, with a few of your favorite pieces linked as PDF les, should be part of anyones professional site. Because a lot of text on a Web site creates clutter, having long pieces, even books, downloadable creates usability and an actual point to the site. This practice also creates transparency in research, which is a good thing. To a certain extent, the minimal features of an actual page, combined with a selected list of works and a few downloadable papers, might be the bare-bones of your site. To this you could add some general descriptions of research projects and their aims as well as links to groups you are afliated with. I believe you should have a photo of yourself on your Web site, and I dont mean one of those tiny, low-quality snapshots. Instead, in this age of ubiquitous digital cameras, your university probably has a photographer that can take a print-quality (300 dpi) photo of you for downloading purposes. This is not a question of vanity but one of making it easier for magazines, newspapers, and publishers to run your photo in case they interview you. Having a nice photo is also a way of communicating who you are so that people can recognize you. I feel that the old notion of scholars as disembodied minds belongs to the trash-heap of
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history and that even scholars are allowed to have an identity. A photo is a good way to convey your identity. A full-body shot with you in trunks or a bikini might be overdoing it, though. If youve been interviewed for a magazine, in such a way that you convey something about your research, a sample of the interview belongs on your Web site. This might be seen as boasting, but I do believe that the skill of a good journalist is to make complex issues a little less intimidating, and a good interview may help laypeople (and colleagues) get a better understanding of what it is that you do. I do not think that you should make the site a collection of press clippings, but one or two good media representations of your work ts well with a professional site for an academic. Also on your Web site, you should list important professional news. The people that visit your site want to get information, and things such as a new book or having changed universities are things that you should communicate, preferably on your home page (i.e., the rst screen of your site). This gives the Web site some topicality, and increases clarity by having the important stuff up front. As to the domain name that you select, I do believe that you should put some effort into this. A long, confusing name is cumbersome, but a short name is easy to remember and increases the chance of somebody actually nding it. An internet service provider (ISP) enables anyone to get a domain name (such as mine, www.alfrehn.com) and forward this to their http://www.universityoutthere.edu/ fak/hf/depecan/staff/hhrnoss/index.html for as little as ten dollars a year. Hosting your Web site yourself isnt that expensive, either. You should update your Web site, a lot. You should also make it clear when the page has been updated. If a visitor cares enough to check your site, you should care enough to update it every few months. Show me how fresh it is, also. If you havent updated your site in a year, or if it is impossible to tell when the site has been updated, a visitor may assume that you havent achieved anything noteworthy in the last year. It is a simple thing, really. Even if you have no news, update the date on your Web site (for instance, you should have an inconspicuous line of text somewhere on the home page that states: Last updated: May 14, 2006 and keep this date fairly recent). I dont mean that you have to update your site weekly, or even monthly, but once every three or four months seems fair, just out of courtesy to your visitors.
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Above and Beyond

How much information beyond the bare necessities should you put on your Web site? This question does not necessarily have a generic answer because it depends on the design of the site, the way you want to use your site and the amount of work you want to put into it. Obviously, there are few limits to what could be put into one. Personally, however, I feel that you shouldnt put personal things like photos of the family on the same set of pages where you keep the professional stuff. But thats just me. One possible development path would naturally be to make it as complete a record as possible of your research life. A completist would want to have an allinclusive list of publications with PDF les of all texts, a complete CV with lots of links, quite a few photos and press clippings, and so on. This path would be challenging to maintain and would require some skill so as not to end up in massive clutter. One thing that can spruce up a page considerably is including PDF les of works-in-progress and excerpts from works that, for some reason (such as copyright), cannot be included in their entirety. Both serve as a form of transparency and might actually increase interest in your work. This very text was originally written as a Web special on my own Web site. I did not send it away to be published and, instead, put it on my site under a Creative Commons-license as a way to enhance the value of my site. I do it because I like it, and because I think it is a fun idea. Placing things on your Web site that are difcult or impossible to get elsewhere obviously realizes the potential of the Internet in a very specic way. Look through your les and drawers. Get acquainted with creativecommons.org, and do something a bit different. Of course, only your personal creativity is the limit. One can imagine a number of fanciful extensions, but I wont go into these for I still contend that since the simple and usable academic personal Web site is such a rare thing, going into cute tricks is a problem. Start simply and build something that is both simple to use and useful. Dont show off your skills at animation and graphics until you have good content and enviable design skills. A note on blogs: Even among scholars, blogs (short for Web logs) seem to be all the rage. Like many other people, Ive had a blog, one connected to my Web site. My blog was named Nasty Scholar, and I tried to write in it pretty regularly. I did however decide to end it, as it became a bit stale, and I couldnt keep it updated enough. However, I think that the technology underlying blogs, such as
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the system of direct publishing itself and the related technology of RSS (rich site summary), is fabulous. I am torn, however, about whether to recommend blogs for everyone. I feel that blogs can be a good way to uphold a Web page, particularly if one updates often, but on the whole it seems more a complement to a site (as understood here) than a platform. Again, you have to have a good idea why you would take up a blog instead of just jumping on the bandwagon. If your idea about your own Web presence is in line with the logic of blogs, go ahead. Otherwise, get your basic Web site up to scratch before you attempt to improve it with an extra layer of technology.
Good and Bad Examples

Obviously, I feel that my own Web site, at http://www.alfrehn.com/ is a good site. I do not feel that it is perfect, far from it, but it sufces and Im pleased enough with it. On the whole, it is somewhat beyond the basics Ive described but not crammed with stuff. My former colleague Peter Dobers has a good academic page at http:// www.dobers.se/, which has a lot of updated items and works-in-progress. Sociologist Howard Becker has a site that combines the best and the worst of academic Web sites at http://home.earthlink.net/hsbecker/, which is a treasure trove of contents and, in my opinion, a showcase of bad Web design. Learn from the content and stay away from the layout. Richard Rorty has a sparse Web site at http://www.stanford.edu/rrorty/, which is not beautiful or communicative, but very efcient. Management professor Henry Mintzberg has a pretty good site at www. mintzberg.org. It could be aesthetically enhanced, but is pretty good contentwise. His site demonstrates how a simple design keeps clutter away. Richard Dawkins (http://users.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/) should be ashamed of himself. Bruno Latours Web site is remarkably good (although the slightly chaotic design and the bilingual confusion is a bit disconcerting). His site can be found at http://www.ensmp.fr/latour/
7
Essay: On the Research Economy
Almost ve thousand years agone, there were pilgrims walking to the Celestial City, as these two honest persons are: and Beelzebub, Apollyon, and Legion, with their companions, perceiving by the path that the pilgrims made, that their way to the city lay through this town of Vanity, they contrived here to set up a fair; a fair wherein, should be sold all sorts of vanity, and that it should last all the year long: therefore at this fair are all such merchandise sold, as houses, lands, trades, places, honours, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures, and delights of all sorts, as whores, bawds, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not. And, moreover, at this fair there is at all times to be seen juggling cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, and rogues, and that of every kind. (Bunyan 1678) What is reected in reection? In the gaze of vanity, which is the gaze of the one reecting, what is seen? Reection in social studies, as it is usually discussed, has, peculiarly enough, always meant one of two things: methodology or autobiography. In the former case, reection has become something of a meta-methodology, an invocation of doubt that has often taken on an almost ritualistic aira whirlpool of continuous exhortations to think everything through just one more time, closely attending to the possibility that someone, somewhere, has not yet had their subjectivity properly mulled. In the latter, reection has become a byword for evermore excessive exhibitions of academics wallowing in their own self-importance in which people in the name of reection can engage in seemingly endless diatribes regarding their own livessomething youd think interests only themselves, if that. Not surprisingly, when academics brandish the word reection, many shudder and shy away.
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In this chapter, I will attempt to do something slightly different while still keeping to the notion of reection. Often, this very word is taken altogether too literally, so that the reection of which we speak is understood as that of a mirror. Such a device of, yes, reecting surfaces, obviously does something that pleases the average researcher, namely portrays him or her anew, and, thus, gives the researcher the possibility to bask in his or her own glory once more. Reection is closely related to vanity, and we can here see a connection to the way in which Slavoj ]i\ek (1993, 2000) has discussed the ideological, since the performative aspects of ideology will always be, in part, an identity project (see also the discussion on interpassivity (]i\ek 1998)). Consequently, much of what is written in the name of reection is written to glorify the writer. See my faults, my manifold of ways, my whole delightful being! Such blatant exhibitionism, sometimes elevated to works of an oddly shameless art (where the willing suspension of disbelief is abused inasmuch as we are expected to think that the personal life, not to mention the personal feelings of the academic would in any way be interesting to the reading public), does however distract us from the more important and thought-provoking aspect of it all. To reect, that is, to re-engage with some mode of thinking or expression, is, at the same time, an act of reframing. Just as a mirror uses available light to throw back an image of whats in front of it, reection casts new light on something and illuminates it from another angle. This, then, is the other aspect of reectionthe less vain oneand it depends more on nding new ways to talk about a subject than merely repeating the formulaic innite regress of reective science as an identity project. Basically, this kind of reection depends on our ability to talk about a phenomenon within a novel framework, making the familiar unfamiliar, and thus stimulate a new way to talk of the phenomenon. Such a perspective is close to the thinking of Richard Rorty, who has argued for the necessity of keeping an ironical attitude toward the vocabularies we use to make sense of the world and strives to break with both the metaphysical notion that activities have simplistic and essential natures and the egoistical idea that the spirit of research is somehow to be found within the mental states of the researcher (Rorty 1989). A recasting of this kind would, of course, best be achieved if we could totally break with the accustomed principles of sense-making and create a sort of vertiginous aporia that would force us to rethink the very foundation of the thing we are reecting on, or the very possibility of such a foundation. However, this is seldom possible. Not only is the creation of such fractures endishly difcult, but
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the nature of this process is such that the better one crafts such a recasting, the less likely it is that it will be understood and comprehended. We are thus caught in a double blindtruly important reections will not be seen as reections; whereas, comprehensible reections will always, to a degree, be plagued by their triviality. Consequently, any attempt at reexivity needs to reect on the issues of vanity (Vanitas vanitatum, et omnia vanitas) and triviality, realizing that these will always play a part in the act thereof. This said, the following will be an attempt to reect on (social science) research by recasting it. I will here discuss the economic nature of research, arguing that this admittedly simple recasting can still shed some light on the complexities of the research life. Now, by discussing research as an economical activity I do not wish to reduce it, even though there is an aspect of the self-evident to this. Rather, I want to point out some of the processes that exist in the background of even the most reective research. Whereas most analyses of research look to the social and personal aspects thereof, it is quite astonishing to realize that little attention has been paid to the economic nature of research, particularly if by economic we mean something more complex than simple analyses of transaction costs or similar hackneyed models from economics. Thus, the following analysis of the academic draws primarily on economic anthropology and attempts to place research activity into a more social framework of exchanges. Starting from a discussion of research as a hybrid economy, the paper will cover issues such as the commodity-nature of contributions as well as gifts and sociality in research. The chapter will conclude with some remarks regarding the economic nature of reection in the social sciences, and the aporia created by the notion of academic life as dened by hybridity.
Research as Hybrid Economy

What I wish to argue here is that a central fact of research as a human activity is that it is driven by both a generosity and a brazen calculative rationality; in other words, it represents a hybrid economy where gift-giving and post-industrial capitalism are merged and intermingled. The idea that research has an economic side is not new, and there exists a large literature of economic analysis of the research process. The putative eld of the economy of research can be said to have been instantiated by Charles Sanders Peirce, who saw notions such as limited resources and efciency in inquiry as paramount for the development of science. In this vein, we have, throughout the
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20th and 21st centuries, had a constant production of cost/benet-analyses and calculations regarding the economic benets of research. Looking to the life of individual academics, this can, for example, be seen in the process of writing grant applications where statements regarding the benets of the proposed research are often given a prominent place, and a rhetorical analysis of such statements could probably generate highly interesting ndings. However, none of this is pertinent to the argument that I attempt here. This hinges instead on the fact that the economic behavior of the individual academic engaging with the science community cannot be reduced to one single economic system, but that we instead must conceptualize a hybrid economy to make sense of this. Hybridity in the sphere of the economic is a concept that has been suggested by a number of authors. The most developed notion may be that suggested by J.K. Gibson-Graham (1996, see also Yang 2000), where hybridity is presented as an analytical alternative to the common assumption that capitalism represents a completely penetrative and all-encompassing imperialistic function. Rather, they argue that in order to understand economic systems, we have to relinquish the idea of stable and total such and, instead, study the uid intermingling of various systems. For instance, in her study of economic behavior in Wenzhou, Mayfair Yang (2000) shows people from a predominantly rural society engaging in capitalist production with a gusto only to use their accumulated wealth in a ritualistic economy where one, for instance, burns money at burials and in other ways squander and waste this surplus (cf. Bataille 1967/1991). Here, two economies with fundamentally different structures do not simply co-exist, but intermingle and reinforce each othercapitalist production enables and aids the function of the ritual economy, and this again drives people to greater engagement with capitalism. To state that this economy in reality is one or the other would be to miss the very point of how it has been established and how it is performed. Instead, Yang argues that this is an example of a hybrid economy, one that has to be understood not through reduction to one form or by claiming that it exhibits some set fraction of a specic form. Rather, it is the very intermingling of different logics that denes this economic nexus, a kind of a third space (Bhabha 1994) for the economic where the limited models thereof are shown as untenable. Further, a hybrid is always already an impure monster (cf. Douglas 1966/2001), since its internal logic is that of inherent contradiction and performing a paradox. This does not, however, invalidate it as an analytical category, as it is this very aporia that can be used to explain specic logical ows not reducible to efciency or other mono-logical concepts.
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The central claim of my argument, then, is that academic work can be understood as a hybrid economy. Whereas there is much discussion about the social and socio-psychological aspects of life within the ivory tower, there is little similar reection on the economic aspects thereof. These aspects are, however, integral and central to academia although we often, out of ideological reasons, seem to marginalize these. To refer to economic aspects seems to be to debase the research life, and although one would think that organizational scholars would be the last people to assume that a reference to economic life by necessity means a reduction, this still seems to be the case. The reason for this is easily deduced. Although it is well known that the notion of the economic cannot be reduced to merely a caricature of bourgeois capitalism, there still exists an assumption that we, by a reference to the economy, are talking about one of its facets, namely, that of the idealized market. At the same time, economic anthropology, among several other disciplines, has for the last thirty years or more (cf. Sahlins 1972, 1976) operated with the assumptions that the economic is a complex manifold where several potentially conicting logics worked in concert to structure exchange. Thus the claim that recasting a phenomenon as an economy would, at least taking this latter denition as a starting point, not refer to a reduction but rather to a contextually constituted system of exchanges that can be structured in a number of different and complexly aggregate ways. Looking at academic life as an economy, we can state that this, at the very least, consists of three interlocking economic spheres: a gift economy, a social economy, and a market economy. Taken together, the irreducible complexity of these spheres intermingling constitutes academia as a hybrid economy. While it is not possible to delimit behaviors therein as purely being part of one or another, the three spheres do, however, help us to create at least a tentative order of economic behaviors. I shall, therefore, treat them in parts, even though this should be understood as merely a simplication and an epistemological shortcut of sorts. After considering these three constitutive parts, Ill return to the issue of hybridity. Claims that academia is a gift economy are not unheard of, and, in fact, seem fairly prevalent (cf. Hyde 1979), particularly if more polemical statements are taken into account. The way in which scholars are prepared to engage with this concept could be understood in a number of wayssuch as an effort to portray oneself as a moral being and as a political move used to position academic work outside of the demands of the market economybut it also shows a critical aspect of how exchanges work within academia generally. The traditional denition of a gift economy (cf. Mauss 1924/1990; Berking 1999; Godelier 1999)
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describes this as an economic structure where gift-giving is seen as the most characteristic form of exchange, that is, one where the gift rather than the priced commodity is seen as the default unit of economic action. In such a structure, we normally assume that economic behavior is chiey ordered around three functions or requirements: the necessity of giving, the requirement to receive, and the need to reciprocate (cf. Mauss 1924/1990; Rehn 2001). In classic gift economies, such as the potlatch (or to use Chinook jargon, patshatl) and the kula, a gift economy meant that in order to be a member of society, one had to give specic ritual gifts. Likewise, a person had to accept a gift given to them. All gifts had to be reciprocated in some way (Derrida 1992 offers a critique). This culture created a circulation of gifts and counter-gifts that dened the economic nexus for the societies engaged herein. When we refer to academia as a gift economy, we are invoking something similar. Much of what is produced in a university is given away. Important research ndings, for example, are distributed through the academic journals without the scholar receiving any monetary compensation. In fact, we are so happy to give away our ndings and/or opinions that we celebrate when weve managed to efciently give away some by publishing it. Of course, when we do so we acknowledge (receive) similar gifts given before by referencing important contributions and the like, and our new publication can, thus, be seen as a form of reciprocity. Keeping just to the process of academic publishing, we can read this as a kind of ongoing spiral of gift-giving where every member of the community continuously gives, receives, and reciprocates. The element of gifting in academia can be manifested through a number of channels, with publication being just one, but this is an illustrative example. Much of what goes under the label of academic work is arranged as a process of gifting (advice, results, references, ndings, and so on), and this means that we, at least in part, can talk about academia as a gift economy. This structure can be contrasted with another structure that I like to call the social economy. Whereas some form of symbolic entities structures the gift economy, a social economy is organized through relations. This distinction, which is very tenuous, should be understood merely as an orienting device, but it may enable us to discuss some of the more intangible aspects of organized economic behavior in academia. We can start by exemplifying. All active academics will, at some point, undertake some reviewing, and active senior researchers will often be inundated with such engagements. This will entail everything from the relatively simple job of refereeing articles or books, to the more arduous processes of assessing thesis manuscripts, or, in a worst-case scenario of sorts, to assessing the work
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of several prominent scholars who have applied for the same chair. This is, of course, hard work, and normally it is done either pro bono or for a nominal fee not in line with the work entailed. What is interesting here is that the smooth functioning of academia requires and presupposes that people will commit themselves to such work even though it is clearly not in the immediate best interest of the individual. Clearly, there is an element of quid pro quo here; I will take on work due to the fact that I know I will need similar favors in the future (e.g., securing people to appraise doctoral students), but this does not fully describe this operative logic of favors. We could, instead, say that our continuing existence within the eld of academia requires and builds on certain social processes that will form our behavior within it. The requirement to devote oneself to the craft and take part in certain jobs regardless of their pay off is an integral part of academia, and thus, in part, constitutes what could be called its economy. The difference to the gift economy may seem tenuous, as favors of the kind discussed here could be understood as a form of gifts (cf. Ledeneva 1998), but I contend that, within the structure we are discussing, there is a difference. Whereas gifting is tied to a productive logic, wanting to gain in standing, reputation, and honor, the social economy is built on more of a reactive mode where we will be prepared to take on irksome and arduous tasks because not to do so would seem callous or shameful. The social economy, therefore, refers to the ways in which social forces such as peer pressure or tacit demands can order activities in ways that cannot be reduced to the restricted understanding of the economic. This point is somewhat trivial, perhaps, but important when re-considered in the context of hybridity. Referring to gifts and the social can, however, also work in a way that masks the existing market structures of universities. Whereas it is clear that there is an aspect of gift-giving and social relationships to scholarly work, we cannot be blind to the fact that there is also a very tangible market structure to academia. In a situation where an increasing amount of particularly junior academics and postdoctoral researchers get by on short-term nancing, and where competition for grants, positions, and tenure are erce, it would be nave to discount such a fact. Still, we often fail to acknowledge how publications and academic activities constitute a form of currency and something that can conceptually be treated as a scarce resource. As getting an article published in a prominent international journal can have a tangible and measurable effect on things such as career possibilities and even salary, the market economy of academic work cannot be discounted. In fact, it
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would be fairly easy to describe the activities of a scholar as direct utility maximization, if one was so inclined. Articles form commodities, traded on one market (the journals) for publication points, which can then be used in negotiations on another market (work opportunities). But as this seems a very harsh way to view scholarly publishing, we usually ignore these aspects. I will not here detail the market properties of university life, as I assume these are mostly well known, merely point to this third economic sphere and move onto the issue of hybridity. My argument, as previously stated, is that economic activities within academia must be considered but that they cannot be reduced to one single conceptualization of the economic. Instead, in order to form a reective understanding of academic economy, we must deploy a complex set of understandings, which, in their turn, could build on the notion of academia as a hybrid economy. Within the structure that has developed over the ages, a number of logics co-exist that cannot be understood in isolation, and these logics can thus be interrogated only in part as solitary phenomena. Rather, they must be understood as fundamentally intertwined into each other so that the gift-nature of an academic publication must be understood both through this specic nature and also, at the same time, through their place in the social structure and the market economy of the university system. This is the logic of the hybrid, that we can only understand phenomena in parts, and that we at all times must pay heed to the dialectical ow within which our understandings are constituted. By saying that academia is a hybrid economy, I am stating that my understanding of its economic nature is one of irreducible complexity and that we must be able to deploy several, inherently paradoxical logics to make sense of it. On one level, we are, of course, making sense of it simply by living it, and our embodied sense of academic life is well equipped to take care of these matters. But when we start to talk about reecting on our academic practices, we cannot simply refer to such embodied understandings but must instead deploy more overt explanations. Here hybridity can help, and I will in the following section use the logics Ive tried to outline in order to make sense of two things: the status of contributions and the economic logic of reection.
Contributions and Reection as Commodities

An issue often raised among social scientists is that of the contribution. Sometimes this refers merely to a ritualistically repeated question in seminars, where words such as contribution or epistemology are bandied about simply to divert attention from the fact that no one is actually talking about anything
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remotely sensible, but the issue does, despite this, have more of interest to it. When we contribute, we clearly do something more than simply write a text or suggest something. Etymologically, the word comes from the Latin contribuere, which means to pay tribute together. A tribute, again, is an offering. Originally this meant something paid to a ruler or a gure of power for protection (often from the power itself), but has later begun to be understood as any offering, even a most symbolic one of praise, so that we can pay tribute to a beloved colleague or to a rock band. Observing the communal nature of many such tributes, the social cohesion implied in the notion of con-tribution thus strengthens the aspect of sacrice and the common good. A contribution is not merely something brought to the party; it is a question of partaking in a shared activity, a public function, if you will. It would be easy to psychoanalyze the obsession with contributions in organization studies, as this clearly is a symptom of lack of cohesion, lack of community, and the ever-present desire for completion (cf. ]i\ek 2000). At the same time, as the preoccupation with this phenomenon is so clearly an aspect of the social order of academia, it seems that ascribing it merely to such a psychopathology would be too simple. Instead, we have to note how contributions are something beyond gifts and how they stand as over-determined signiers of the academic condition. Whereas we in the iterative process of ongoing publication of research can nd traces of a gift economy, the moral category of contribution can be said to represent a more deep-rooted sense of academia as a community and the economic structure this imposes. The publication, read as a gift, carries the name of the author and, thus, brings honor to the author. The contribution, however, is, in part, an offering, a necessary show of sacrice that has to be understood as a form of ritual relinquishing of identity and immersion into the greater community. When we give, we stand as individuals taking part in a structural exchange, but when we exist as contributors, we appear as parts of a dening wholetruly social. The social nature of contributions determines their standing in the economy of academia, and they represent the fact that the social life-world of research is one which can never be complete. There can never be closure and never an end to the activities. This requires of the participants to abandon their own standing and accept that the greater project supersedes the individual ones. In part, we can even state that the academic economy by necessity is socialistic, as the individual works gain their standing by the way in which they further the aims of the community at large. Thus, references to the contribution of a specic text or spe-
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cic researcher is a way to state that in order to gain exchange-value on the academic market (merit counted towards career advancement, for example), one must rst establish that it has use-value within the social economy. Obviously this can be perverted insofar as such a use-value may well be gained merely by bolstering the social standing of others (epigonic works, toadying, and reinforcement of egos), but from a structural viewpoint this makes no difference. Using the concept of hybridity, we can, therefore, say that the contribution may start out as a gift, but in order to realize its economic potential, it must also be accepted within the sphere of the social economy as something more (or, in a manner of speaking, less) than a gift. If this succeeds, the contribution can then be turned into something that can be treated as a commodity on a market. Obviously, this description suffers from the fact that it treats these processes as serialized, so that one leads to another in something akin to a chain reaction, when we should be saying that these three processes are simultaneous and enmeshed, but it will sufce for now. The hybrid nature of contributions further shows us something about reection. Whereas reection is often viewed as an intrapersonal process, the social nature of reection as a contribution signies the way in which reection must, in fact, be socially accepted in order to be viewed as reection. This again problematizes the nature of academic reection by casting (i.e., reecting) this as partly an economic process. We will now turn to this last part, the commodication of reection. If we turn our reective gaze not on research or researchers, but rather on reection as a function in the aforementioned, we can note some things about it that might otherwise be obscured. Specically I want to note some things regarding the moral economy of the concept. Normally, the discourses of social studies posit reection as an upstanding and honest activity, characterizing a good researcher. We could even say that there exists a form of moral coinage in research, so that the invocation of specic modes (reection, critique, and dialogue, for example) is seen as the mark of a morally aware and upstanding researcher, prima facie. Reection, in and of itself, is seen as a good thing. Speaking from a perspective of logic, this is, of course, highly irrational. On its own, reection is meaningless; it is an empty ritual. It can only gain meaning by being contextualized, by existing in a relationship with something. Still, this does not mean that reection cannot be engaged with as an object (indeed, I am increasingly thinking about academic reection as a Lacanian objet petit a), i.e., as a commodity. Such a view would emphasize not reection as a relation but as a signier deployed for economic reasons.
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Referring back to my previous point about the market economy of the university, the use of reection in the social sciences could succinctly put be understood as a restricted economic action, as, say, an utterly logical move for homo academicus conomica. In a situation where the deployment of reection is seen as having the function of improving ones chances to get publishedand, therefore, secure a job, get promoted and get a raiseit ceases to be a mode of thinking and turns into a commodity that can be peddled on the academic market. The moral coinage of reection is, thus, not unrelated to more mundane forms of coinage, and the seemingly humble confessional could be studied as the peddling of vanities (or in the case of editors, peddling indulgences). When we see to the increasing interest thereof, or more to the point, the increasing popularity of publishing texts on it, we may, in fact, be viewing a reaction to market demandor a case of supply-side economics. Such a perspective does not invalidate reection in the social sciences, but it does raise a problem as to the moral stance we often take. By noting how reection, or, more to the point publishing texts ostensibly about reection, does, in fact, have clear economic consequences, we might, in fact, keep a more reective stance on reection. As it is apparent that there are scholars who have made their entire career by extolling reection, publishing on reection, and fostering whole cadres of similarly reection-touting acolytes, to deny the market function at play here seems to be the fundamentally unreective thing to do. In this way, a perspective on academic work which draws from economic understandings and a sensitivity toward the composite and hybrid nature of social being can be used to show otherwise ignored aspects of assumedly pure activities such as reection. Thus I feel we can state that reection today is not only an upstanding process of re-consideration of epistemological bias but also contains things such as brazen careerism, avaricious motives, and even purely automatic and dogmatic calls towards a ritually constituted concept that may be incomprehensible outside of the social locality in which it is gloried. Such an understanding will, of course, be viewed as callous cynicism (cf. Sloterdijk 1983), but I would insist that it is also a case of realism. Even if we can agree on the ethical impetus for reection, to ignore these less wholesome but still existing aspects of it, we are, in fact, engaging in a dogmatism unworthy of a considered academic life. In order to think through the process, we must also pay heed to those frameworks that may make such considerations paradoxical and contradictory and accept the conict of thinking.
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In the End, Aporia

One of the important aspects of hybridity is that it by necessity constitutes conclusions as an aporia. There can be no clear conclusions in a state of hybridity, as the very nature of the monster is one of irreducible conict. We cannot present a nal word, as hybrids never can reach a nal, total state. But this is true of all kinds of existence, and this is why an engagement with hybridity is necessary. Life can well be understood as a continuous, internal contradiction, and the marvel of social life lies not in the few moments of consensus, but in the fact that this aporia does not condemn us to eternal doubt (cf. Sloterdijk 1983; ]i\ek 1993). Rather, we seem more than happy to live our lives with logical disjunction and even revel in the paradox of social existence. Reection is a case of specically such a contradiction. When we engage in reection, we seemingly turn inward to understand the world, but this turning inward can only be comprehensible in the context of a social group of researchers who comprise the consumers of such an experiment in solipsism. We could further state that although the eld of organization studies has been interested in reection in organizing, it is oddly unaware of the organization of reection. Even more peculiar is that the economic nature of academic work seems to be a blind spot, a lacuna, or a case of the ]i\ekian Real. Whereas we social scientists are quick to analyze economic agency in others, we often fail to acknowledge the same processes in our own behavior (Redde Caesari quae sunt Caesaris). And this blinds us to many of the complexities of the academic life. Rather than viewing our own behavior as fundamentally economic, we are more than happy to engage in the fantasy of pure reection. But the alternative to pure reection (which is always a one-way affair)reected reectioninstead creates something more akin to a prismatic effect, one where the certainties of moral goods (sic) are cast in doubt. Such an approach does not work by casting light, but by paying heed to the numerous light-effects, the shadows, the changing patterns and interlaced effects. It delights in the moir-patterns and odd optic effects of the non-continuous reections created by natural light in unnatural circumstances. In the same way, a study of the economic that builds upon the notion of hybridity will not go looking for casual explanations or reducible models, but, instead, will explore the jouissance of economic miscegenation and mutation and the marvels of mixes and uid dynamics. By doing so, we can not only explore the intricacies of social life in a less reductionistic way but also nd a path toward a post-moralizing social science, one where the easy agreements have to give way to greater awareness of the ideo-
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logical underpinnings of our actions and the politicized nature of even that which on the surface seems morally uncomplicated. And then, possibly, reection might be able to break with reection, escape its current ethos of guarded self-control and truly become emancipatory.
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Essay: The Moral Economy of Method
Marcel Mauss (1924/1990), whose contribution to the development of organizations studies is rarely acknowledged, famously described the tradition of the potlatch as the monster child of an indigenous economy perverted by the introduction of the Western concept of the market. It is described as the natural meeting the articial, the intellect meeting the body, and the classic Cartesian dichotomy. Weve learned to avoid that, right? Were smarter now, arent we? Still, sitting pretty in the eld of organization and management, things do get weird sometimes. Its supposed to be an empirical eld, but much of what one reads sounds like scholastic philosophy (How many alternate-reality organizations can you t on the tip of Nikes rhetorical swoosh?). And the methodology? This is supposed to be a chapter on methodology, but I dont really know. You see, methodology frightens me. The mere idea of methodology frightens me. Conferences are the worst. People you hardly trust enough to watch your coat seem perfectly at ease with asking personal questions such as, Whats your methodological standpoint, then? without feeling the least bit intrusive. And when I answer, I dont really have one. I dont like methodology, they laugh nervously and say something about the coffee. Strangely enough, it is true. I really dont like methodology. The fact that Ive been forced to teach it for the last few years has heightened this aversion into something close to a pathological state. This chapter, then, discusses it from a somewhat different standpoint. In part, it will be an attempt for me to nd a way to think about method that does not scare me witless. In a more general sense, it will try to address some issues regarding how methodology is viewed. Simply put, by provisionally introducing aesthetics into a discussion on methodology, I would like to nd other ways of thinking about method and thus, research. Why?
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Well, because a lot of the time it seems like methodology stands in the way of research, as a roadblock [o]n the [w]ay to [l]anguage. (Heidegger 1959) As Ive said, when reading what is normally written on the question of method, Im struck by an immense sense of dread. A never-ending list of problems, faults, inaccuracies, and mistakes are presented as a condemnation of the readers impudence in thinking that he or she is capable of conducting research (Alvesson and Skldberg 2000; Bryman 1992; Silverman 1985, 1993). A series of mutually exclusive recipes are laid out and argued for and against, scolding the reader for an inability to choose. After a careful reading of any standard textbook on methodology, one comes away feeling as if one were to try to lose ones virginity immediately after reading Henry Miller. Lets face it, methodology is scary, scary not only because it is presented as a hermetic mystery, as the winding path of the epistemological sage, but because of it being fundamentally anti-inquiry. The physics envy that led the social sciences, in general, into operations analysis, functionalism, and an absurd dependence on quantitative methods, has led qualitative studies into a cul-de-sac of condemnation and confusion. Searching for coherence, completeness, and rigor, writers on qualitative methodology have habitually propagated a view on method that resembles (one might even say is) a moral discourse on the conduct of research and researchers. Although most reective scholars share some notion of cultural and social relativism, this has not had much of an impact on meta-methodology, leading to a state where different schools mostly resemble papal states. And I think this is a question of language. Taking a cue from Norbert Elias (1978), it would seem that we, as academics, have gone though a lengthy civilization process and are now socialized into a mode of talking about method that equates propriety in method with a more general morality. Youre either right or, metaphorically, dead wrong. What I wish to put forth here is the argument that methodology could be thought outside of this dominating discourse of a moral science and, instead, be discussed as a path towards aesthetically pleasing, and, thus, better, research. Talking about methodologies as aesthetic practices is here presented as a way to enliven the discussion about research and make methodology meaningful, and so as not to be misunderstood before I have had the chance to explain myself, I have to stress the following: I do not believe researchers to be akin to artists. Such a claim would, in my mind, not only be trite but disdainful to research. In arguing that aesthetics could be incorporated in the methodological discourse, I do not wish to present any pseudo-psychological statement la we are artists all but merely to discuss methodology as more of a path and less of a toolbox.
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Still, research is, to some extent, a creative process, one which produces artifacts that can be aesthetically appreciated. Curiously, just these end-products of our scholarly endeavors are quite routinely ignored (cf. Becker 1986, Czarniawska 1999), as if our texts were mere coincidental effects of the real deal of scientic inquiry. But Im not talking about art, not at all. Aesthetics here simply denotes a way of talking about human expression that is tied neither to calculative logic or an ethics (although such divisions are dangerous, but youll just have to bear with me). Being somewhat naive, I happen to believe that appreciation (Nice, innit?) rather than approval (Thats a well done bit of discourse analysis, that is.) might allow for a more diverse discussion. To further confuse the issue, the question of method, particularly in the eld of organization theory, raises specic questions. Because method is a practice that by its very nature organizes data, organizes research, organizes disciplinary boundaries, and organizes schools of practice, increasing attention to its ordering qualities would seem important. And whereas the importance of a research ethics is routinely brought forth, the possibility of a more fundamental set of moralizations already present in the very fabric of research is seldom expressly discussed. The following should, therefore, not be read as a nished argument but as a slightly bewildered look at the idea of method in research, the notion of a known and communicable way of conducting research, as if the path was already decided. The following will also consequently by its very nature be a blunt instrument taken to a ne weave, an organizational theorist taking on the organizing of that which makes him one.
The Origin of the Work of Art

When it comes to aesthetics, Martin Heidegger is at his most lucid in The Origin of the Work of Art (1936/1993), which, in many ways, is his easiest work. The work deals with nothing less difcult than nding the source where art springs from. Recapitulating his argument, he rst approaches the thingness of art, the way in which a work of art is a mere thing. By incorporating his earlier analysis of the ontological position of things, Heidegger shows how different types of things show us their being in different ways. Mere things are here the basest elements, a stone, a clod of earth, a piece of wood (Heidegger 1936/1993, 147). All that is more than this are Zeug, which could be translated into tool or equipment, and is that of which we acquire knowledge (of its being) through using it, like a pair of peasant shoes that is half thing[and]at the same time it is half artwork (Heidegger 1936/1993, 155).
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The Zeug is that which contains a necessity of purpose, as it is imbued with the world in which it is to exist. The artwork no longer contains the thingness of what it depicts, but instead is the disclosure of what the equipment [Zeug]is in truth (Heidegger 1936/1993, 161). The artwork works through the unconcealment of the Being that served as the inspiration for it. Heideggers own example (later criticized by Derrida 1987) of Vincent van Goghs painting of a pair of peasant shoes for him not only shows the shoes themselves but the world in which they Are, the smell of the earth, the sun on the peasants back, blisters. All this should be well known. Now, contrast this with the way descriptions of organizational life can be attempted. We can tell of the things that are immediately at hand, the mere matter of the organization, such as ofcial reports or returned questionnaires (the latter being a wonderful example of the reduction of organization, and simultaneously the very organizing of organizations). We can also attempt a Zeug-like description, telling of organizational praxis and the like. But if we are to go beyond this, we must create ways in which our description of the organization and its behavior(s) not only show that which has been at hand but the world in which this Being exists. This would be, lacking a more elegant name, aesthetic research. Problematically enough, this would also entail a reduction of the praxis of research, the way of the intellect. Ever since Marx scribbled down his thoughts on Feuerbach, famously (and, to my mind, correctly and particularly poignant in the elds of organization and economy) dismissing scholarly thinking that is not tied to praxis as a purely scholastic question, the scholars Cartesian split between doing and thinking about doing has been difcult to uphold. The problem is, intellectuals, whether they are researchers, demagogues, or ideo-logicians, are constantly at risk to fall into their own closed practice, the praxis of doing research becoming self-contained and the scripture of methodology working as the researchers handmaiden. Heidegger in his Letter on Humanism (1947/1993) tries to ask this question, particularly turning to the possibility of thought prior to a distinction between theory and practice, thinking that is its use, tool-like, instead of the rational path towards available answers (the way of method). Returning in his writings again and again to the non-thought, the poverty of over-intellectualizingand we are always there, perilouslypointing out the need for less philosophy, less metaphysics, Heidegger becomes a paradox, or as Jacques Derrida reframes him, Thinking is what we already know we have not yet begun; measured against the shape of writing, it is broached only in the epistm. (Derrida 1976/1997, 93)
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The path then, the stroll through the thickets of metaphysics towards the Lichtung of thinking, goes from the thing-ness of the world toward praxis, and farther. The later Heidegger was consequently occupied with battling an attitude toward the world he called technological (Heidegger 1954/1993). Technology in the sense used here is not a question of engineering but of the tendency to rationalize, improve upon, order, instrumentalize, and structure the world. This tendency is, of course, inherently present in the modern view of science (Toulmin 1992) and has been criticized by a fair amount of scholars. For Heidegger the path to escape this totalizing and reductionism is art (specically, in his case, poetry) and the revealing of the true nature of Being that an aesthetication of the world can bring. It is this reductionism and effort toward totalization that also continuously endangers the researcher, making the aesthetication of research an important question. But is the path from techn to poeisis tenable in anything except a metaphoric way? Are we merely romanticizing research, believing that we could approach the communicative powers of the artwork? And even if we could, what is it we are attempting? All claims from below have been scurrilously disguised as claims from above: and the surrealists, having become the laughing-stock of those who have seen close up a sorry and shabby failure, obstinately hold on to their magnicent Icarian pose. (Bataille 1985, 39) The difculty, then, is that the invocation of the word aesthetics often makes people go into conniptions of a particularly ugly sort, imagining that the mere aura of art is sufcient to carry or stand in for argumentation and/or analysis. The process of aesthetication then becomes just another instrumentalization, another moral goal to be attained. And Heidegger doesnt argue for art, he argues for thinking. The analysis of the artwork that Heidegger presents can be read as dealing with how a human artifact is connected to that from which it sprung, as a phenomenological naturalism. In such a reading, the artwork referred to ceases to be a specic cultural form of expression and stands for expression more generally, namely, the expression of thinking. The engagement with the world that is present in the use of equipment, whether a hammer or the sun, shows us the tool, but thinking reveals it and the world within which it exists.
The Economy of Method and Its Ironies

To complement his pragmatic and anti-foundationalist view on epistemological questions, Richard Rorty (1989, 1998) has called for a new approach to research,
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an approach he calls ironic. To reiterate, this view builds upon the researcher being able to balance two opposing forces in thinking, namely, both believing in the validity of nal vocabulary and being able to constantly question and doubt the same. It is important to realize that these two forces here should have equal weight with the ironist (Note that this is an ironic reading of Rorty, based in part on Hall 1994 and that it in fact stands partly at odds with Rortys vocabulary that tends to downplay the dialectic dynamic of thinking.). The postmodernists continuing skepticism is as much a mistake as the positivists incorrigible trust in nal truths. In some instances, one can even nd the two forces at work in a symmetric but unattached manner as Rorty seems to see in critical theory in general and in Jrgen Habermas in particular. Then the lack of irony has become pathological, for neither trust nor doubt longer holds an edifying position towards the other. Ironic thinking is uid but with a certain rigor, sort of like properly chilled vodka. Stated otherwise, an ironist could be seen as a thinker who does not take him or herself wholly seriously but, instead, revels in the possibility of someone destroying his or her argumentation. In this sense, the ironic attitude could be seen as complementary to the post-empiricist school in the philosophy of science (Bohman 1991). By allowing a certain amount of holes in defenses, the ironist makes science a little more interesting, a little more dangerous. So maybe methodology lacks irony. Why? Because even the most strident proponent of reective and critical research proposes reection and critique as remedies for ailments present in other forms of methodology, thereby taking a moral standpoint. Methodology, as it is presented in learned books on the subject, seemingly cannot exist without positing itself in relation to others, establishing hegemony, and claiming victory, however tentatively. Reading texts on methodology, I am in awe of the seemingly unending amount of evil that other researchers partake in. Mostly these researchers are merely buffoons, clumsy and insufciently subtle. In extreme cases, these other researchers turn out to be homicidal maniacs, killing and maiming (textually, of course) with their evil ways of bad methodological conduct. Textbooks and articles on methodology almost always show that, until now, until the publication of this text, some of us have been doing things wrong. Not that they dont accept that there are many ways to skin a cat, they just seem to insist that some of these ways are right and some others wrong. A method, as it is usually talked about, is a technological concept, an application. It places the world as available and free to be manipulated; it frames the world.
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Just as Heidegger showed that the essence of technology would, in its totality, leave the world as standing reserve that can be roused for the technological apparatus (Heidegger 1954/1993), methodology usually posits the world as a surface to be penetrated and mined, with nuggets of knowledge to be had as long as the tools are kept sharpened. Use the wrong tool, and nothing is to be had. Use the right tool and the world is yours. This is the path of technology where everything becomes-for something else. If method is viewed as a technology, a set of tools, it makes that-which-is-studied a subject, a reserve. Method, as a technique and a tool, frames the world and makes it a commodity for the academic potlatch. It becomes a ground suitable for dividing into easily digestible chunks of studies presented to a voracious band of research junkies eagerly awaiting their next x. Is your junk pure enough? This is where my argument, naked and despairing, turns to economy and organization theory. For what is method if not the organizing of the world? Even without turning to the machinic theories of Deleuze/Guattari, the way in which the notion of a separated constituent of inquiry which functions as a device for turning the input of the world into the output of science is fundamentally technological. Method is, in such a view, a productive function and posits the world as a supply of data, some of which can efciently be turned into scientic value. This economic unconscious of research enables us to talk intelligibly about good or bad methods, as we by this seem to mean more or less efcient way of producing the aforementioned science-values. Method produces results and contributions and improves data. It organizes research into the do-rights and dowrongs, creating efcient divisions between orthodoxy and the great unwashed. Those who have the method-capital, the correct tools of knowledge, and those who wander poor in the world. The revealing that rules throughout modern technology has the character of a setting-upon, in the sense of a challenging-forth. Such challenging happens in that the energy concealed in nature is unlocked;, what is unlocked is transformed, what is transformed is stored up, what is stored up is, in return, distributed, and what is distributed is switched about ever anew. [] Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We call it the standing-reserve [Bestand]. [] It designates nothing less than the way in which everything presences that is wrought upon by the revealing that chal-
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lenges. Whatever stands by in the sense of standing-reserve no longer stands over us as object. (Heidegger 1993, 321322) The specic modes of organizing that method conceived of as a tool creates are not neutral or natural ones, and this observation has been made repeatedly. We know that research has a political side and that this should be acknowledged. But method also has its economic side, an inherent quantication of value that might pervert the interpretative project. Conceived of in the way it is usually done, method does things and is, through this fundamentally economic. This has made the discussion regarding method moral insofar as it discusses how such production can be optimized and made more efcient, with less efciency in the generation of research immediately perceived as a undesired state. The way in which such teleological argumentation is used renders any statement regarding the way to conduct research ethical to the core. What is more, it makes method an economy (and, thereby, ethical to the core) and a discourse where accumulation and the efcient use of resources reigns supreme. Right now Im thus expected to say that this is not how methodology should be done and that I have a brilliant idea that will solve this problem forever. I wont and I havent. Im not going to butt heads with Gareth Morgan (1983) and Alan Bryman (1992). Ill skirt around them, tentatively, as in any strategic movement. Much as the ironist can skirt around the metaphysician, I could now refer to another one of Richard Rortys weapons, namely recontextualization. By playing with concepts, Rorty encourages the circumvention of those discussions that one no longer feels to be fruitful. This is similar to the use of metaphor, but instead of trying to enhance our understanding of a phenomenon by looking at it in a different manner, recontextualization (in Rortys sense) aims at changing the phenomenon itself by altering the language game. Its kind of like a form of Wittgensteinian reengineering (a term I am fond of and wish to copyright). By presenting a new way to talk about things, one introduces a vocabulary that can either be adopted or rejected by a community, but either way, one forces people to think about their language. In a sense this makes Rorty a hacker of epistemology, rerouting around what he does not feel like attacking head on. My small, personal hack in this vein tries to bring in aesthetic concepts to a place where moral ones have reigned supreme. I have no interest in discussing whether, say, grounded theory is a good way to study motivation, but a lot of the research I see is pretty ugly. Not bad, but ugly, as in overblown, pretentious, piddling, boring, and unoriginal. Maybe I do mean bad. But not bad in the sense that I can
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point to any distinct aw in reasoning or conduct, rather bad in the sense as displeasing, repugnant, grotesque. By recontextualizing in this way, we can try to bring irony (as aesthetic concepts might not function in the same totalizing manner as moral ones do) into the discussion and to enable other forms of the same. A discussion of method that would work in the manner of, for example, art criticism instead of ontological criticism might, to me, be both more interesting and more edifying. Am I not, then, inviting that nal ogre of researchabsolute relativism? Rorty has, according to his critics (Brandom 2000), been accused of never standing still long enough for anyone to get off a decent shot. Recontextualization seems like the perfect dodge, a way of dismissing any criticism by calling it uninteresting, making Rorty (and, I guess, myselfgosh!) a dandy, waving off any substantive critiques by a witty remark or snide put-down. Such critique is quite understandable but misses the mark somewhat. Rorty never claims that a recontextualization can take place instantaneously, far less so that it could take place in a total fashion. Rather, different contexts can and do exist simultaneously, in an intellectual version of the evolutionary primal soup. Playing with language in such a way is not a quick x for anything at all but a move in the game of competing discourses, tentative and incomplete. Take the foolish notion of discussing research through aesthetics. It is not that this isnt already done to some extent through notions with certain resemblances: creativity, elegance, style, intuition, and sophistication. (The problem with aesthetics within the research eld of management and organizations might actually be that it is perilously close to becoming an industry. One should always be wary about a perspective thats in fashion. And there has been a lot of attention on aesthetics recently, with several conferences (Bolton in 1999, Siena in 2000) and journal special issues as visible manifestations. In addition to this, weve seen several books that in some way approach the question (Wiesmann 1989; Czarniawska-Joerges and Guillet de Monthoux 1994; Strati 1998; Linstead and Hp 1999) and it seems to be increasingly difcult to organize a conference without some smart-alec wanting to incorporate aesthetics in at least a sub-theme.) Making claims strictly about aesthetics and trying to create a niche for this is fundamentally futile, just another little circle of friends. The point lies in the juxtaposition of arguments. The heresy of non-rational (i.e., aesthetic) method has no strength at all until it is posited as a perspective on method as fundamentally a moral economy (a trade in values and the attaining hereof). Words, such as shock value, cute, forcefulness, etc., could all be utilized in the discussion of methodology, and their difference to the logical analysis of data-gathering could infuse the
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eld with a certain dynamic. Just as the existence of the poor can serve as a perspective on bloodless economic theory and the neo-liberals Panglossian idea of ours as the best world possible. We might need a poverty of method, more aleatory scholars. Now the truth can be told. This article shouldnt be read as forming an argument. It is born out of the poverty of my thinking, pained, battling. I just dont understand what people are talking about when they discuss method. They have stuff, obviously, cherished methods with which they get into journals (My Precious!). I have none, or, at least, I dont think I do. So what do I have? I know when I like what Ive written. I know when I like what others have written. I just dont always know why. Kants third critique names it Urteilskraft, clumsily translated as judgment in English. It could be called Erziehung. Stephen Toulmin refers to a lecture given by Isaiah Berlin: We mean nothing occult or metaphysical; we do not mean a magic eye able to penetrate into something that ordinary minds cannot apprehend; we mean something perfectly ordinary, empirical, and quasi-aesthetical in the way it works. (Toulmin 2001, 181182) We need fewer discussions on method and more discussions on thinking. Less highfalutin theory and more ordinary writing. We do not need method; we need reason.
Postscript
As both a devoted student and aggressive critic of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller holds a special place in the history of aesthetics. By distilling some of Kants theories of aesthetics and spicing them up with some of his own, he wrote twenty-seven letters on the need for aesthetics, later publishing these as ber die sthetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (Schiller 1995). This work stands as one of the most important popularizations of aesthetics ever. Here Schiller tries to show the importance of aesthetics in the life of a balanced individual, and the ways in which an aesthetic sensibility is a necessity for freedom and the possibility to create (cf. Savile 1987). Schiller is prone to discuss things by invoking opposites, positioning spirit against matter and chaos against form. His argument is, then, that in between these pairs of opposites there exists a eld that functions as a crossroads, a meeting point, an exchange. Of particular interest to Schiller are the two opposites of form and matter and the two forces that steer man, namely, the propensity
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towards either form (Formtrieb) or matter (Stofftrieb). Stofftrieb draws us towards the material in the world, toward our basest instincts and the immersion in the world of things. This is the world of the barbarian, the one who is disassociated from all that would make his surroundings meaningful. Formtrieb draws us toward the pure abstractions of the mind, toward dogmas and empty formalism (Guillet de Monthoux 1993). This is the world of the bureaucrat, the person who has no connection to the world he lives in but only to the meaningless logic of his thinking. These two forces are the frame of humanity, the sterile endpoints of letting either one of the forces take over. They are not necessarily moral categories, but extremes that have to be lived with in some way. The way Schiller says that we can live with these two extremes is through Art. In between the two there exists a space where something fecund can happen, a place created by the Spieltrieb, the drive to play. By utilizing this drive, the artist can overcome the hindrances present in staying xed at either of the poles, form or matter. In the space of Spieltrieb, the two are in harmony with neither taking a dominant position. Here we can nd the pure aesthetics and it is here that beauty can come into being. What is further, here one cannot talk of progress in the systemic sense but only of development (Erziehung), or even the state of becoming learned (Bildung). The Hegelian space that is formed in battling both barbaric matter and soulless form is not a given method. It is a lived process, the task of thinking.
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