Mortality, Reproducibility, and the Persistence of Styles of Theory

It seems somehow appropriate that Peter Frost’s letter sending me a draft of John Van Maanen’s (Van Maanen, J. 1995. Style as theory. Organ. Sci. 6 (1) 132--143.) article should have been dated November 7, 1994. For on November 8 we witnessed, at least in the United States and particularly in California, the culmination of a season of political campaigns notable for their viciousness and appeal to emotion rather than reason. Frost’s (Frost, P. 1995. Crossroads. Organ. Sci. 6 (1) 132.) characterization of Van Maanen’s article as “less restrained than we are used to” was an understatement. John is nothing if not a master of rhetoric, and his comment on my paper employs tried and true rhetorical devices. This includes contrastive pairs (Atkinson [Atkinson, M. 1984. Our Masters’ Voices . Methuen, London, England.]), in this instance, implicitly Weick and a style of theory that “rests on its more or less unique style” (p. 135) versus Pfeffer, a presumed apologist for (if not an example of) “a logocentric tradition of empirical science with its count-and-classify conventions” and “more than a little physics envy” (p. 134). Van Maanen’s article also follows Edelman’s ([Edelman, M. 1964. The Symbolic Uses of Politics . University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL.], p. 124) description of political speech as “a ritual, dulling the critical faculties rather than awakening them. Chronic repetition of clich’es and stale phrases that serve simply to evoke a conditioned uncritical response is a time-honored habit among politicians and a mentally restful one for their audiences.” Van Maanen promotes a caricature of normal science and reinforces its protagonists’ unacceptability with emotion-laden adjectives (shrill, sour, vain, autocratic, insufferably smug, orthodox, and naive, among many others).