Description
Headed or intending to head in a specified direction: commuters bound for home; a south-bound train.
Study on Management Writing out of Bounds
Whatever the form of academic research, the results are almost invariably presented as a written text. Indeed, even when the means of presentation are nontraditional, the result can still be interpreted as text. Its creation can thus also be perceived as writing. ere is no doubt that academic writing is a topic worthy of detailed discussion and, appropriately, it has received a fair amount of attention over the previous few decades. In 1988, John Van Maanen showed how the results of one ethnographic study can be presented in completely di erent ways based on the intended audience and e ect. Two years later, Ben Agger (1990) argued that the prevalent systems of publication serve to degrade literary qualities of academic texts. In 1995, Barbara Czarniawska wished for organization theorists to engage in a
conscious and re ective creation of a speci c genre, which recognizes tradition without being paralyzed by it, which seeks inspiration in other genres without imitating them, which derives con dence from the importance of its topic and from its own growing skills (1995: 28).
Alexander Styhre's Management writing out of bounds, a recent contribution to that debate, couples the idea of multiplicity of possible academic writing styles and strategies to the notion of postcolonialism, i.e. the breakdown of the universalist claims of the Western civilization. It has to be noted, however that the author uses this idea
in the broadest possible sense?. us, when the concepts of colonialism and postcolonialism are used, they denote the loss of a jointly shared view of what constitutes adequate and legitimate writing practices" (p. 26).
As a result, the notion serves Styhre as little more than a convenient shorthand for the bundle of ideas already present in the various critiques of the objectivist approach to academic research reporting. is should not imply that there is no reason for using such a shorthand: it allows the author to engage in what he terms, after Brian Massumi (2002: 20), "shameless poaching," i.e. bringing in disparate concepts and ideas from within and without the academia to illuminate the notion of management writing. Such strategy allows for including a very broad array of perspectives (and for highlighting the wide range of author's interests), but runs the risk of watering down the focus of the book. Here, the variety of idea sources serves quite well to underscore the central tenet of the work: the loss of innocence in management (and, more generally, academic) writing, and the realization that it is no longer possible to treat scienti c texts as merely providing a dispassionate re ection of the world outside. is theme unfolds in a relatively straightforward trajectory; the rst chapter focuses on identifying the book's subject matter, namely the "crisis of representation" and its relevance to management writing. Next three chapters enumerate and discuss the various aspects of the production of academic texts: the use of genres, the possibility and dangers of breaking conventions, and the barriers posed by the noninformative properties of language (which can be seen as an instrument of power, a template for organizing one's world, or a tool for anchoring the utterance in a local context). e fth and nal chapter attempts to nd tentative solutions, and invites
2
Jerzy Kociatkiewicz
the reader to break with the perception of writing as simply a tool for communication (understood as transfer of information), and adopt a more active, or performative, understanding of the role played by texts in our culture. Unfortunately, the same broad stroke that allows for a broad exposition of the problems of unre exive writing simultaneously underscores the central problem plaguing the book: the subject has been the topic of heated discussion for decades. As usual, it would be tricky to pinpoint any de nite beginning of the debate; I would personally see it as an imaginary meeting between Ludwik Fleck's (1935/1979) e genesis and development of scienti c fact and JL Austin's (1962) How to do things with words. e rst book, virtually unknown until its rediscovery by omas Kuhn, pioneered the notion of the social construction of facts in science, the second, wildly successful though published after the author's death, brought the concepts of performative use of language into the general academic consciousness. Regardless of how its history is framed, it is not easy to bring fresh air into the debate. Amusingly, Styhre himself sums up the di culty, claiming that ''[w]riting without empirical research is blind, but empirical research without writing is empty" (p. 39). By these standards, Management writing out of bounds clearly quali es as blind. is is of course a cheap shot based on a single quote and an always disputable de nition of the word "empirical", but it nevertheless points to the central weakness of the text: it o ers little in the way of original insight into its subject matter. Styhre certainly explains the challenges to unre ective use of ideas such as representation, language, and authorship, and convincingly argues for the necessity of reexamining the dominant writing practices. It is just that this point (or a very similar one) has been made numerous times already (e.g. Wolf, 1992; Levine, 1993; and particularly Czarniawska, 1999). e coupling of the topic to postcolonial discourse o ers a novel and interesting twist, but Styhre's very broad de nition of postcolonialism radically lessens its bite. Many of these complaints would lose their validity if Management writing? were to be considered an expository text directed as students or readers from outside the academic discourse. Yet the book simply does not read like a handbook, but rather like an exploratory monograph. e writing style is rather
heavy and not very accessible, and academic jargon abounds. At the same time, Styhre certainly provides a good overview of the discussions around the issue of academic writing, both in general and as regards the speci cs of management studies, even as he synthesizes the wide range of his sources into a very congruent argument. Each chapter is followed by a summary, and both introduction and conclusion contain additional summaries of all the chapters; some of the subchapters also end with a summary. Interesting and illustrative examples are used throughout the text to demonstrate relevant points. My issue with the book can be thus reformulated to lie not in the (lack of ) novelty of presented ideas but, ironically, in the curious choice of writing strategies and in its apparently unre exive usage of di erent conventions academic writing. A symptomatic example is the intermittent usage of rst ("we") and third person ("one) in explaining the ow of the argument in various parts of the book. In the end, I believe the book works better as an introduction to the topic of management writing rather than as a voice in the ongoing debate. However, its e ectiveness in this role is limited by cumbersome writing, and by the author's commitment to creating a synthetic line of argumentation (and overabundance of summaries).
References
Agger, B. (1990) e decline of discourse. Reading, writing, and resistance in postmodern capitalism. New York: Palmer Press. Austin, J.L. (1962) How to do things with words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Czarniawska, B. (1995) "Narration or science? Collapsing the division in organization studies." Organization 2/1, p.11-33. Czarniawska, B. (1999) Writing management: Organization theory as a literary genre. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fleck, L. (1935/79) Genesis and development of a scienti c fact. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Levine, G. (ed., 1993) Realism and representation: Essays on the problem of realism in relation
3 to science, literature, and culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Massumi, B. (2002) Parables of the virtual: Movement, a ect, sensation. Durham: Duke University Press. Van Maanen, J. (1988) Tales of the eld. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wolf, M. (1992) A thrice-told tale: Feminism, postmodernism, and ethnographic responsibility. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
doc_498094679.docx
Headed or intending to head in a specified direction: commuters bound for home; a south-bound train.
Study on Management Writing out of Bounds
Whatever the form of academic research, the results are almost invariably presented as a written text. Indeed, even when the means of presentation are nontraditional, the result can still be interpreted as text. Its creation can thus also be perceived as writing. ere is no doubt that academic writing is a topic worthy of detailed discussion and, appropriately, it has received a fair amount of attention over the previous few decades. In 1988, John Van Maanen showed how the results of one ethnographic study can be presented in completely di erent ways based on the intended audience and e ect. Two years later, Ben Agger (1990) argued that the prevalent systems of publication serve to degrade literary qualities of academic texts. In 1995, Barbara Czarniawska wished for organization theorists to engage in a
conscious and re ective creation of a speci c genre, which recognizes tradition without being paralyzed by it, which seeks inspiration in other genres without imitating them, which derives con dence from the importance of its topic and from its own growing skills (1995: 28).
Alexander Styhre's Management writing out of bounds, a recent contribution to that debate, couples the idea of multiplicity of possible academic writing styles and strategies to the notion of postcolonialism, i.e. the breakdown of the universalist claims of the Western civilization. It has to be noted, however that the author uses this idea
in the broadest possible sense?. us, when the concepts of colonialism and postcolonialism are used, they denote the loss of a jointly shared view of what constitutes adequate and legitimate writing practices" (p. 26).
As a result, the notion serves Styhre as little more than a convenient shorthand for the bundle of ideas already present in the various critiques of the objectivist approach to academic research reporting. is should not imply that there is no reason for using such a shorthand: it allows the author to engage in what he terms, after Brian Massumi (2002: 20), "shameless poaching," i.e. bringing in disparate concepts and ideas from within and without the academia to illuminate the notion of management writing. Such strategy allows for including a very broad array of perspectives (and for highlighting the wide range of author's interests), but runs the risk of watering down the focus of the book. Here, the variety of idea sources serves quite well to underscore the central tenet of the work: the loss of innocence in management (and, more generally, academic) writing, and the realization that it is no longer possible to treat scienti c texts as merely providing a dispassionate re ection of the world outside. is theme unfolds in a relatively straightforward trajectory; the rst chapter focuses on identifying the book's subject matter, namely the "crisis of representation" and its relevance to management writing. Next three chapters enumerate and discuss the various aspects of the production of academic texts: the use of genres, the possibility and dangers of breaking conventions, and the barriers posed by the noninformative properties of language (which can be seen as an instrument of power, a template for organizing one's world, or a tool for anchoring the utterance in a local context). e fth and nal chapter attempts to nd tentative solutions, and invites
2
Jerzy Kociatkiewicz
the reader to break with the perception of writing as simply a tool for communication (understood as transfer of information), and adopt a more active, or performative, understanding of the role played by texts in our culture. Unfortunately, the same broad stroke that allows for a broad exposition of the problems of unre exive writing simultaneously underscores the central problem plaguing the book: the subject has been the topic of heated discussion for decades. As usual, it would be tricky to pinpoint any de nite beginning of the debate; I would personally see it as an imaginary meeting between Ludwik Fleck's (1935/1979) e genesis and development of scienti c fact and JL Austin's (1962) How to do things with words. e rst book, virtually unknown until its rediscovery by omas Kuhn, pioneered the notion of the social construction of facts in science, the second, wildly successful though published after the author's death, brought the concepts of performative use of language into the general academic consciousness. Regardless of how its history is framed, it is not easy to bring fresh air into the debate. Amusingly, Styhre himself sums up the di culty, claiming that ''[w]riting without empirical research is blind, but empirical research without writing is empty" (p. 39). By these standards, Management writing out of bounds clearly quali es as blind. is is of course a cheap shot based on a single quote and an always disputable de nition of the word "empirical", but it nevertheless points to the central weakness of the text: it o ers little in the way of original insight into its subject matter. Styhre certainly explains the challenges to unre ective use of ideas such as representation, language, and authorship, and convincingly argues for the necessity of reexamining the dominant writing practices. It is just that this point (or a very similar one) has been made numerous times already (e.g. Wolf, 1992; Levine, 1993; and particularly Czarniawska, 1999). e coupling of the topic to postcolonial discourse o ers a novel and interesting twist, but Styhre's very broad de nition of postcolonialism radically lessens its bite. Many of these complaints would lose their validity if Management writing? were to be considered an expository text directed as students or readers from outside the academic discourse. Yet the book simply does not read like a handbook, but rather like an exploratory monograph. e writing style is rather
heavy and not very accessible, and academic jargon abounds. At the same time, Styhre certainly provides a good overview of the discussions around the issue of academic writing, both in general and as regards the speci cs of management studies, even as he synthesizes the wide range of his sources into a very congruent argument. Each chapter is followed by a summary, and both introduction and conclusion contain additional summaries of all the chapters; some of the subchapters also end with a summary. Interesting and illustrative examples are used throughout the text to demonstrate relevant points. My issue with the book can be thus reformulated to lie not in the (lack of ) novelty of presented ideas but, ironically, in the curious choice of writing strategies and in its apparently unre exive usage of di erent conventions academic writing. A symptomatic example is the intermittent usage of rst ("we") and third person ("one) in explaining the ow of the argument in various parts of the book. In the end, I believe the book works better as an introduction to the topic of management writing rather than as a voice in the ongoing debate. However, its e ectiveness in this role is limited by cumbersome writing, and by the author's commitment to creating a synthetic line of argumentation (and overabundance of summaries).
References
Agger, B. (1990) e decline of discourse. Reading, writing, and resistance in postmodern capitalism. New York: Palmer Press. Austin, J.L. (1962) How to do things with words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Czarniawska, B. (1995) "Narration or science? Collapsing the division in organization studies." Organization 2/1, p.11-33. Czarniawska, B. (1999) Writing management: Organization theory as a literary genre. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fleck, L. (1935/79) Genesis and development of a scienti c fact. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Levine, G. (ed., 1993) Realism and representation: Essays on the problem of realism in relation
3 to science, literature, and culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Massumi, B. (2002) Parables of the virtual: Movement, a ect, sensation. Durham: Duke University Press. Van Maanen, J. (1988) Tales of the eld. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wolf, M. (1992) A thrice-told tale: Feminism, postmodernism, and ethnographic responsibility. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
doc_498094679.docx