Coincidences, punctuation, and originality

There is story told by the writer Bill Bryson which has always appealed to me. He recounts how, when working as a journalist, he was commissioned to write an article about strange coincidences. Moments later, he stumbled by chance on a book on the desk of a colleague. Its subject was ‘strange coincidences’.

I recalled this story because last week during a meeting I made a joke about the ‘Oxford comma’ (I know that sounds strange: you had to be there). The joke fell flat because no one else in the room knew what an Oxford comma is. The answer to that is that it is a comma (also known as a ‘serial comma’) inserted in a list of nouns before the final ‘and’ (and/or, sometimes, the final ‘or’). For example: ‘John, Jane, and Jill’. Sometimes, this can make a significant difference to the meaning of a sentence. For example: ‘This shirt is available in blue, black, green and white’ might be taken to mean that a green and white shirt is an option, whereas the insertion of the Oxford comma avoids this ambiguity. Thus: ‘This shirt is available in blue, black, green, and white’. It is called an Oxford comma because it is the house style of Oxford University Press (but by no means all publishers) always to use such a comma even if its exclusion would not create ambiguity or change the meaning.

So now for the coincidence. Immediately after the meeting, I logged on to twitter (my new addiction) and almost the first thing I saw was a link to a news story about how the absence of an Oxford comma had, that very day, proved decisive in a legal dispute about overtime payments between dairy drivers and their employer in the State of Maine in the USA. The State’s law says that the following activities do not count for overtime pay: “The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of: (1) Agricultural produce; (2) Meat and fish products; and (3) Perishable foods”. (By the way, unless I am wrong, that last semi-colon is an Oxford semi-colon, if there is such a thing).

The case hinged on the ambiguity created by the lack of a comma between “packing for shipment” and “or”. The drivers distribute but they do not pack and the lack of the Oxford comma means that the law implies that it is “packing for distribution” that is exempt from overtime payments, not distribution itself. The court agreed; the drivers are entitled to overtime payments, and this may cost the company some $10 million. That, by the way, is the tangential and only link between this post and the ostensible organization studies focus of this blog.

This is not the first time a comma has featured in a legal case (in fact, I am sure there are many examples). Famously, Roger Casement was ‘hanged for a comma’ in 1916 having sought unsuccessfully to defend himself from the charge of treason on the basis of an ambiguity created by a missing comma in the 1351 Treason Act. This case is discussed by Lynne Truss in her estimable book on punctuation Eats, Shoots & Leaves (2003: 99-101). It is a bit much to be hanged for a comma - it is not as if he had used the word 'disinterested' as if it meant 'uninterested'. That really is a hanging offence.

In my book (p.14) I refer to the saying ‘words are loaded pistols, we use them at our peril’ (I refer to it is an anonymous saying, but I’ve since learned that the ‘words are loaded pistols’ part, at least, is attributable to Jean-Paul Sartre). If so, punctuation is the firing mechanism. One should be wary, though, about pedantry as all too often it is liable to backfire as other pedants correct one’s own pedantry. So, like Yiannis Gabriel, who recently wrote about the use and misuse of the apostrophe, I see little point in being too fussy about punctuation. On the subject of apostrophes, though, I do like one arcane point which is that adjectival nouns do not take apostrophes. For example, there is no apostrophe after ‘boys’ in ‘boys night out’ (although Word spellcheck does not like it) in those cases when it is used to describe the nature of the night rather than the participants. Thus, pleasingly, one can write: ‘John went to the opera; the boy’s night out was enjoyable. Jim and Bill went to the pub; the boys’ night out was a great success. Meanwhile, the girls had a boys night out’. This knowledge, even if it is correct, has never been the slightest use to me.

However, as the Oxford comma court case shows, you can never tell when knowing about punctuation may come in handy. It may even provide material for an unusual blog post. Or so I thought. But, in a final coincidence, having written this post with the idea that it would relate to an obscure news story that very few would be aware of I discovered that it has featured in numerous articles in all the main national newspapers in the UK, USA and, no doubt, further afield. It was only when I searched for a link to the definition of an Oxford comma that I realised this. Attempts at originality, like linguistic pedantry, are fraught with risk. Perhaps the best way to put the lesson learned is in future to think, google, and write.

All about me

Rather shamelessly, my post today is to promote two books of mine that are about to come out. The first is a collection edited with Isabelle Huault, Véronique Perret and Laurent Taskin entitled Critical Management Studies. Global Voices, Local Accents. Published by Routledge on March 18 (but already available electronically) the idea is a simple one. Critical Management Studies (CMS) is largely dominated by Anglophone writings from Anglo-Scandinavian authors, but it has to some extent been picked up globally. So how does CMS play out in different locales and different linguistic communities?

Part of the issue here is one of travel and translation of ideas; another part is about how CMS perhaps ironically recreates the patterns of domination within ‘mainstream’ management studies. We wanted to capture this in a way that recognized some sense of a ‘centre’ and ‘margins’ but also to problematize that distinction by showing how, for example, CMS may be more fragile in, say, the UK than might be thought and also might be quite radically inflected in, say, Brazil. So there is more going on than a hegemonic centre ‘making’ CMS and a passive margin ‘taking’ CMS (although some of that may be going on, as well).

In a way it’s just a first attempt at a global ‘survey’ of CMS – a first attempt because there are large parts of the world that are not covered, either because there is not much CMS going on, or because we couldn’t find an author to write about it. The countries or regions that are covered are: Australia/New Zealand, Benelux, Canada, China, France, Germanic, Israel, Italy, Japan, Scandinavia, South America, Turkey, UK, USA.

The other book is entirely different. Written with Jana Costas and published by Stanford University Press on 30 March it is called Secrecy at Work. The Hidden Architecture of Organizational Life. It’s not in any but the broadest sense a CMS book. Rather it aspires to be a contribution to organizational sociology and theory on a big scale. We argue that secrecy should be added to the standard repertoire of the study of organizations because it is part of the standard repertoire of organizational life. We try to capture the whole gamut of ways that this is so, from trade secrets and restricted access laboratories through to whispered gossip in workplace corridors.

And more than that we try to show how such things create literal and metaphorical architectures of in groups and out groups. Secrecy is an incredibly powerful thing, creating a sense of exclusivity and specialness, but also sometimes a burden amongst those who possess secrets. Meanwhile imaginations, both beneficent and malign, abound amongst those on the outside about what goes on behind closed doors.

So this is, in intent at least, an ambitious book but of course it remains to be seen what others will make of it. Early omens are good. Yiannis Gabriel of Bath University has said that it “sheds brilliant light on an area of organizational life that has … been systematically excluded from organizational theory”. Amanda Sinclair at Melbourne University calls it a “brilliant analysis” whilst Steven Lukes of New York University found it to be “a pioneering, highly readable study; full of insights”. However it ends up being received it’s a book I’m proud of.

Since this post is irretrievably egotistical I will just mention that the manuscript of the fourth edition of ‘A very short etc.’ that is the basis of this blog has now gone to the publisher and should be out at the end of this year or the beginning of next.

Despair and hope for organization studies

The book which this blog accompanies is in part a reaction to my despair about the state of organization studies. In other posts I have bemoaned the lack of historical awareness within the subject and also the poverty of its academic journals. In that latter post I suggested that one problem with the journals is their invariable, and ludicrous, demand that each paper should make a ‘theoretical contribution’ whilst on the other hand caring little about disclosing anything interesting or new about how people actually live and work in organizations. I pointed out that this is something particularly associated with the ‘top journals’, publication within which is increasingly and slavishly lionized. And there are two aspects to this: the rigid hierarchy of journal rankings, and the downgrading of books.

But there are signs of hope. I mentioned elsewhere my sense that there is a renewed interest and appreciation of the rich history of organization studies. And now Steve Barley, one of the most influential academics in the field, has written a superb essay (a word I will come back to) in the sixtieth anniversary issue of no less than Administrative Science Quarterly. I don’t agree with all that he says, or all of the way that he says it: in particular I think he tends to over-value the idea of ‘incremental contribution’ and worries incorrectly that a desire for ‘novelty and surprise’ comes ‘dangerously close to admitting’ that organization studies is one of the humanities. Apart from anything else, I don’t think this would be either dangerous or an admission; and in fact I don’t think that the distinction of humanities and social science is a sustainable one. Still, most of his core concerns are very similar to my own.

Barley raises the straitjacket of journal rankings and the tyranny of the demand for theoretical novelty. In that regard he makes the interesting point that whereas he used to find that journal reviewers would pick up on issues of methodology and empirical validity, now they rarely do. That’s not, for Barley (or for me), a lament for positivism but a concern that only theoretical novelty matters. And that’s not, for me (or I think Barley) because of a disdain for theory but a concern about ‘theoreticism’.

By way of illustration of this point, I am struck by own experience of submitting papers (about a study I did of the organization of Bletchley Park) to journals that were not in organization studies but in intelligence studies. What I found was that reviewers’ comments in that field focused almost exclusively on challenging the empirical claims that I made. Admittedly that has its own problems – intelligence studies appears to be somewhat inattentive to theoretical debates within social science. Perhaps this sounds as if nothing will satisfy me: focus on theory and I complain about theoreticism, focus on empirics and get accused of empiricism. But what I want from empirical papers is that they be theoretically informed, and from theory papers that they be (at least potentially) empirically meaningful.

Another of Barley’s points is the desirability of book-length studies, combining theory and empirics, and that such studies have in fact been generally more influential in the field than have journal papers. He even identifies as exemplars the work of authors like Blau, Gouldner and Dalton who I have also cited in this regard. Yet books have become a devalued currency within institutional assessment and career systems and research monographs, which is what Barley is talking about, are increasingly shunned by publishing houses outside of the established university presses. Thinking again of my Bletchley Park work, the main ‘output’ (as UK REF-speak has it) was a monograph, precisely because I wanted to have what Barley calls the ‘space and freedom’ to present detailed empirical material and theoretical arguments. Not coincidentally, it was published by Cambridge University Press which continues to commission such works.

Books and journal papers are not the only forms of academic writing and one form that has long-interested me is the essay. So I was delighted to see Yiannis Gabriel, like Barley a highly distinguished and influential organization studies academic, sing the praises of this form, at almost at the same time as Barley’s – yes – essay appeared. Writing in the Journal of Management Studies, Gabriel’s own essay coincides with that journal’s launch of its ‘JMS-Says’ essay format. He sees essays as individual, idiosyncratic, experimental and sometimes influential provocations to thought and debate. I agree and, again speaking of my own work, some of my favorite publications (and possibly the only ones that have made much impact on others) have been essays. In a way, the book of this blog – although longer than is usual in the genre – is pretty much an essay.

Whilst essays may be idiosyncratic and experimental this does not mean that ‘anything goes’ or that it is an undisciplined or easy format, as Gabriel points out. Indeed, I would say that it is a hard form to master, requiring rhetorical skill and a capacity to provide a ‘between the lines’ understanding of its author’s knowledge and its audience’s sensibilities. Essays are not, or not simply, polemics – although the polemic is itself a difficult to write and under-rated genre by the way. There is now, at least in business schools, what might appositely be called a thriving industry in how to craft papers for ‘top journals’, with its own gurus, master classes and formulae. But it is difficult – and if not difficult then depressing – to envisage such an industry growing up around essays which are, at their best anyway, impervious to codification.

There are very powerful forces working against the arguments that Steve Barley, Yiannis Gabriel and – at a much lower level in the reputational pecking order – I are making. I don’t see hardcore business school deans recognizing them any time soon. But that these arguments are gaining a higher profile does give me, despite what I will admit is my temperamental pessimism, some cause to hope that organization studies might become – well, let’s not get carried away – a bit better than it is now.

 

References

Barley, S. (2016) ‘60^th Anniversary Essay: Ruminations on How We Became a Mystery House and How We Might Get Out’, Administrative Science Quarterly 61 (1): 1-8.

Gabriel, Y. (2016) ‘The Essay as an Endangered Species: Should we Care?’, Journal of Management Studies DOI: 10.1111/joms.12176 [By the way, a minor hobby horse, but how exactly are we meant to reference these ‘early online’ papers?]

Choice, by coincidence

The author and journalist Bill Bryson once wrote – I can’t track down the source - about how he was commissioned to write a newspaper article about amazing coincidences. Bereft of ideas, he found himself sitting at a colleague’s desk. Prominent on the desk was a large book – about amazing coincidences.

This came to my mind because of a sequence of events this week. In my last post on this blog I wrote about the limitations of choice as an over-riding principle. It’s a theme in the book, as well, where (e.g. p.75) I draw upon Barry Schwartz’s fantastic book The Paradox of Choice to talk about how choice in some strange way makes us less free, and can be burdensome and controlling.

A few days later, I went to have my hair cut (bear with me, this is going somewhere). For those who don’t know the ritual of the traditional English all-male barber’s shop it involves a usually awkward conversation about the weather, local traffic problems, and, especially, football. The latter has always been difficult for me, as I have no interest in football, but recently that has slightly changed since Crystal Palace, the team of my childhood home in Croydon, are now in the Premier League and out of nostalgia I have become (mildly) interested.

Anyway, that is by the way. Somehow, the conversation got on to the fact that the barber and his wife have taken to shopping at Aldi, a German-owned budget supermarket that has become increasingly popular in the UK. The reason they do so – and this is the interesting bit – is not because it is cheaper than the others but because there is far less choice. That, he said, made shopping much less hassle than going to the established supermarkets, such as Tesco where they used to shop.

Later that day, without seeking it out, I came across an article by Stuart Jeffries on the Guardian newspaper website, entitled ‘Why too much choice is stressing us out’, in which he reported that:

“Tesco chief executive Dave Lewis seems bent on making shopping in his stores less baffling than it used to be. Earlier this year, he decided to scrap 30,000 of the 90,000 products from Tesco's shelves. This was, in part, a response to the growing market shares of Aldi and Lidl, which only offer between 2,000 and 3,000 lines. For instance, Tesco used to offer 28 tomato ketchups while in Aldi there is just one in one size; Tesco offered 224 kinds of air freshener, Aldi only 12 …”

And, what’s more, the article goes on to analyse this in terms of Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice!

That same day I took a look at the excellent blog of my fellow, albeit rather more eminent, organization theorist Yiannis Gabriel where his latest post explained the background to the new edition The Unmanageable Consumer, a book which amongst many other things helps us to understand why consumers might not simply lap up the endless choices which marketeers assume everyone wants.

I have spent the last couple of days working on the revisions for what will be the fourth edition of my own book. It has been going well, so I am in an optimistic frame of mind. This leads me to think that, perhaps, the kinds of arguments I make are gaining traction. It surely cannot just be coincidence that all these things have happened this week? Alas, my wife has brought me down to earth by pointing out that coincidence is not what it seems. It is not even, as might be thought, the opposite of choice. Rather, it is the things that we choose to be interested in that gain our attention. It’s just such feminine realism that one goes to the men’s barber’s shop to escape, and only coincidentally for a haircut. Which reminds me, Crystal Palace are currently sixth in the Premier League.