Poetry, said Robert Graves, is a struggle with “the huge impossibility of language”.

When Roland Barthes announced the “death of the author” it was as a consequence of his views on writing (a term he preferred to “literature”). He distinguished the act of writing, we might say, from the fact of language, from which “the writer literally takes nothing”. The language does not shape the content of the writing; it only establishes a horizon for it. Language, says Barthes, “is a field of action, the definition of, and a hope for, a possibility”. But writing is ultimately a Utopian gesture. Its freedom lies beyond a “frontier”; it is almost “supernatural”. In that sense, Graves was right. Language is the impossibility of poetry. The drama of a poem is precisely to exist in the face of that impossibility.

In this regard, I suppose, scholars sometimes feel a bit like poets. But we have to remember that a scholar doesn’t, properly speaking, work within a language, but within a discourse, and a discourse is not a so much a “huge impossibility” as a particular difficulty. Indeed, as I have said before, discourse is what makes it possible for us to attain a particular degree of precision on particular topics. While the language doesn’t, as Barthes rightly notes, provide the writer with a “stock of materials”, the discourse does exactly that. And more. Foucault has argued that discourse shapes the objects and the subjects, the concepts and the strategies of research, and thereby makes it possible to form statements, i.e., claims about what is going on in the world.

Now, discourses can express themselves in several languages. Here in Denmark, most scholars will speak of what they know in Danish as well as English, and sometimes also in French or German, or any other national language. In each case, the tiny possibilities of discourse are exposed to the huge impossibility language.  It is difficult sometimes, but that difficulty is worth facing. It the essential difficulty of scholarly writing.

Colloquium: Thursday, March 5, 14:00 to 16:00  in room A 2.35 (inside the CBS Library at Solbjerg Plads)

This Thursday we’re going both “old school” and “hard-core” in the Craft Colloquium. We’ll be talking about Boolean searches of the Library’s databases, i.e., searches that partition the articles that are indexed into distinct, if often overlapping, “sets” of search results, and then connect them with logical operators like “and”, “or” and “not”.

Consider an imaginary database that indexes every article in the management literature. Each entry will identify the title, author and journal (including date and issue number), and will provide abstract and keywords. Many databases today will also include the reference list of the article and will, additionally, be able to identify all the articles on the reference lists of which this particular article appears. These are all “facts” about the article. And we can group the articles into sets according to those facts.

Now, there will be millions of articles, thousands of authors and perhaps hundreds of journals. There will be a set of all articles published in the Administrative Science Quarterly and another set of articles published by the Academy of Management Journal. Probably many thousands in each journal. Since an article is only published in one place (republications get a separate entry in the databases) the sets are completely distinct from each other. There is no overlap. In Boolean terms, this means that, while there are thousands of articles that are published in ASQ or AMJ, there are exactly zero articles that are published in ASQ and AMJ.

Unlike titles, keywords and authors are not unique to articles. This means that the set of articles that are about finance and organization is not necessarily empty. Nor is the set of articles that are written by Jones and Smith (since, in addition to the papers they’ve written separately, they may written some together). But the set of articles that are “about finance or organizations” and the set of articles that are written by Jones or Smith will often be much larger. (There will be rare cases of author “teams” that never publish separately.)

The ramifications of this basic logical approach to searching are, of course, endless. And Liv will help us work through the possibilities in our session. What is the set of all articles that are written by Smith and published in AMJ? Notice the difference between this and the completely unwieldy set of articles that written by Smith or published in AMJ. Or, what is the set of articles that are written by Smith or written by Jones and published in the AMJ? Here we have to take pause. Consider the difference between the set of articles that are written by Smith (and published anywhere) or written by Jones and published in the AMJ, and the set of articles that are written by both Smith and Jones and published in the AMJ. Here Boolean notation will often use brackets to ensure that the right result is produced.

The basic logic is simple. But its application can be very complicated. If you want to try it, please come on Thursday. As always, bring examples from your own research that we can work with. That will ensure maximum relevance.

We’ve also decided on what our themes will be up to Easter. On March 12, we’ll talk about problem of language, i.e., the status of English in scholarship and the difficulties associated with alternatives. On March 19, we’ll open the floor for whatever issues people want to talk about, either because we’ve left some hanging from a previous session, or because we haven’t gotten to it yet. This will also be a kind of brainstorming sessions for our topic for after Easter. We’d like to have a full calendar of topic for April and May.

Colloquium: Thursday, February 26, 14:00 to 16:00  in room A 2.35 (inside the CBS Library at Solbjerg Plads)

 

“I have heard it said that the two standard tutorial questions at Oxford are “What does he mean?” and “How does he know?” I doubt the report—no university could be that good…”

Wayne Booth

The first thing to remember about a journal article is that it is, ideally, written by one of your peers. (One of the things that reading can discover is that the author is not really working in your discipline, and in that case your reading strategy will be very different. I’ll save that kind reading, i.e., reading outside your discipline, for another post.) By a “peer” I mean someone who has been trained in the same methods and steeped in the same theories that you have. A peer is someone who speaks your language and sees the world much like you do.

The next thing to keep in mind is that the article has been published in order to make you more knowledgeable than you would be if it hadn’t been published. That means that it addresses you as someone who already has a great deal of knowledge but who presumably does not know this thing that the article’s author has recently discovered. One of the things you’ll be noticing as you read is what the author presumes you know, and don’t know, about the subject. When you’re reading, be on the lookout for what you are actually learning from the reading. What do you know to be true after reading that you did not know before.

Paragraph for paragraph, you can apply Booth’s Oxford tutorial heuristic. Ask yourself, What is the author trying to say (trying to convince me is true) in this paragraph? You’ll be looking for what we call the “key sentence”, which should also be the focus of your own writing. Sometimes (hopefully not too often) you’ll have to construct a key sentence that is not in the paragraph. More often, the challenge is just to identify the sentence that makes the point of the paragraph. Then ask yourself, How does the author know? What kind of support does the author adduce for the claim made by the paragraph? Why should you believe it? And at this point you have to invoke your own authority as a reader, a researcher, a peer. You have to decide whether or not to believe it.

The claims in a paper are of course not just stated in any random order. They are normally grouped into sections. There’s an introduction, a background, a theory section, a methodology, an analysis, a discussion and a conclusion. Or something like that. Each section is trying to produce a different effect on you as a reader: to get your attention, to  inform, to make you expect something, to win your trust, to challenge your expectations, to reason with you about the implications of that challenge, to say goodbye. Be aware of these rhetorical postures, which change throughout an article. It might be useful to label the key sentences you’ve identified in terms of the effect its truth (or falsity) has on you.

Just as writing a paper essentially means making about 40 claims and supporting or elaborating them. Reading one means understanding about forty claims, some of which you already knew before reading and some of which contribute something new. When reading concentrate on finding those claims. They are what the author is trying to tell you.

Colloquium: Thursday, February 19, 14:00 to 16:00  in room A 2.35 (inside the CBS Library at Solbjerg Plads)

Research contributes to the growth of knowledge. So it is reasonable to ask how much knowledge we have before our research is completed. What is it that supposedly “grows” by the addition of my research results? One answer is found by doing a literature review. Here you try to characterize the current “state of the field”, i.e., what is known within your specialty, by people who use your theories and your methods, and often also people who have investigated the same or similar phenomena. This kind of knowledge is part of a conversation; it is highly active and dynamic.

But there is also a much more stable store of existing knowledge. It’s what you find in dictionaries, encyclopedias, and handbooks. While these resources are becoming increasingly specialized, they are not, normally, sites of conversation. Rather, they are repositories of common, uncontroversial knowledge. They constitute the background against which the conversation proceeds. Ideally, then, a specialist reader will have no cause to dispute what an encyclopedia or dictionary says, even when its subject matter is embroiled in controversy.

To take a simple example: the Oxford English Dictionary defines “capital” both as “real or financial assets possessing monetary value” and as “the holders of wealth as a class” (and as many other things besides). That is, it provides both the economic and sociological meanings of the words. Neither an economist nor a sociologist will take issue with the presence of the other sense of the word in the dictionary. They will even be tolerant of imprecisions in the definition of “their” sense of the word. They understand that a dictionary is only able to provide a very broad, somewhat vague, definition. A place for the layperson to begin.

The same goes for more substantive issues. While an article in the journal of Organization Studies, may be committed to a postmodern perspective, the entry in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Management about “postmodernism” will describe it in neutral terms, as a “cultural movement”, as one way among others to view the world. While what the journal article says may not be able to hold up if postmodernism is finally wrong, the handbook entry will not be affected. A good encyclopedia will have articles on defunct sciences and cultural movements too. And if it has an article on postmodernism it will also have one on modernism.

Note, however, that The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Management doesn’t have an article on modernism. This is because there was never a distinctly “modernist” movement in management science. Indeed, management science is better thought of as an aspect of modernity in general. This is not true in the arts, where both modernism and postmodernism deserve their own entries. This is an important insight to be gathered from reading an encyclopedia.

Next Thursday, we will look at the CBS Library’s dictionaries, handbooks and encyclopedias. Many of them (and pretty much all of the ones you’ll want to use) have online access. For this reason, we’ll also look at how best to cite these resources in our writing. (But with the caution that scholarship normally does not rely on handbook knowledge; rather, handbooks rely on scholarship.) And we’ll consider the most famous alternative to the library: Wikipedia. This resource is becoming an increasingly important tool in the craft of research. It’s well worth talking seriously about.

Colloquium: Thursday, February 12, 14:00 to 16:00  in room A 2.35 (inside the CBS Library at Solbjerg Plads)

Interdisciplinarity is normally approached as a meta-theoretical issue. This week’s craft colloquium will be devoted to its infra-methodology. If the meta-theoretical issue is one of why we should mix our methods, combine our theories and multiply our paradigms, the infra-methodological questions turn on how to go about it. I should say at the outset that this is difficult work, and to fully appreciate this difficulty we must count it as a reason (though not an overpowering one) not to do it. What this means is that we should have our meta-theoretical arguments for interdisciplinarity in place before we struggle too much with the materials of the craft. We need a reason to make the effort.

This actually reproduces the basic problem of matching theory and method in general. After all, methods don’t provide easy routes to knowledge. Rather, they prescribe a particular set of difficulties that make possible a particular degree of precision in knowledge. They are the means by which we can come to know difficult things. Since the application of a method, then, means grappling with a particular set of difficulties, we must have some good reason to do it. And it is our theory that requires this effort of us. The conceptual apparatus that govern our thinking indicate the methods that generate our data. The precision of our concepts make demands on the precision of our instruments.

Now, in traditional, paradigmatic research, which is to say, in Kuhnian “normal science”, one does not, properly speaking, choose one’s theories and methods. They are given in advance of any research project, and are what we were taught in graduate school. At some point in time, early on in our careers as scholars (while we’re still students) we chose our discipline and, subjecting ourselves to it, we learned the received theories and their associated methods. Being a competent researcher meant knowing what combinations of theory and method were acceptable to our peers. It was a matter of doing ones part in the community.

Interdisciplinary work is precisely a challenge to this community feeling. The founding theoretical and methodological choices that are “normally” experienced as necessary, are now experienced as contingent. We see ourselves as having a choice of what theories to invoke and what methods to employ. And this, finally, means giving ourselves a choice of what company we keep, what community we are going to work in. We even sometimes imagine we have the ability to found an entirely new community, establishing an entirely novel combination of theory and method. In any case, the problem is to a large extent that of constructing your audience.