The Essay as an Endangered Species: Should We Care?

The essay as a literary genre has, over the centuries, delivered profound insights into a wide range of topics and even contributed to social and political change. As part of academic apprenticeship, the essay has served to develop students’ intellectual and reflective qualities and to assess their mastery of many different disciplines. Yet, in recent times, the essay has lost some of its allure, arguably becoming an endangered species both in its political and academic uses. Politics and public debates are increasingly dominated by gladiatorial spectacles, punditry, sound bites and an overt commercialization of political campaigning. Academic research in the social sciences, for its part, has come to rely increasingly on a genre of scientific writing, the ‘research paper’, which has become institutionalized and has moved increasingly away from the qualities of the essay. For the purpose of student assessment, essay-writing is rapidly replaced by other types of academic work such as projects, case studies, portfolios, tests, and indeed ‘papers’. In this essay, I argue that while the genre of the essay is neither the only nor the major means of developing and disseminating knowledge in management and organizational disciplines it retains an important role in today's fast-moving, complex and commercialized environment. The essay gives a voice to an author's creative imagination, enabling him or her to critique assumptions that are rarely questioned and explore new possibilities for intellectual and social change. As such it can still make a useful contribution both in academic and political fields. Unlike research papers and monographs, essays do not seek to build their argument on comprehensive reviews of existing literature. Such literature reviews belong to other genres which define an author's contribution and its claims to novelty and importance in relation to what has already been argued by others. Instead an essay may draw its inspiration from a single question (‘Why war?’), a work by another author, a set of statistics, a casual observation, a work of drama or fiction, an image, a story, or any artefact of popular culture. Thereafter, the essay is driven forward by an exploratory logic, a logic dominated by the questions ‘Why?’ ‘So what?’ and maybe above all ‘What if?’ ‘I would praise any skepsis thought to which I am permitted to reply: “Let us try it!” But I do not want to hear anything any more of all those things and questions that do not permit of experiment … for there courage has lost its rights’ M51/Gay Science 51 Each essay represents not only an intellectual exploration into some aspect of the world, but also an exploration into the mind of its author, indeed not only the conscious mind, but the unconscious mind too. The connections, the illustrations, the metaphors and analogies, the wit, the discontinuities, the very words deployed by an essayist, the idiosyncrasies of style and expression, are not incidental but core features of the text. In this regard, an essay is as much a work of art, as a scientific text. At its best, the essay is an object of beauty, affording readers a degree of aesthetic pleasure in the text itself, while provoking them to look at the world with fresh eyes. Given its experimental nature, the essay offers no guaranteed road to success – if anything, failure may be its more common destination, though failure itself can be the mother of subsequent experiments and essays. Nor do successful essays necessarily deliver what is now comfortably described as a ‘contribution’. Indeed some of the most successful essays, including some of those listed above, do not reach any firm conclusions. What successful essays always do, however, is enable us to consider possibilities of thought and of action that seemed inconceivable before. The essay's iconoclasm is no mere flight of fancy or intellectual game for the dilettante, leaving everything as it finds it. Far from it. As Adorno recognised, ‘the law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy. By transgressing the orthodoxy of thought, something becomes visible in the object which it is orthodoxy's secret purpose to keep invisible’ (Adorno et al., 1954-84, p. 171). In this way, an essay can make an intervention not merely to academic debates but crucially to political and policy discussions, changing hearts and minds and, occasionally, altering power dynamics and balances. Every essay has to be critical, in the double sense – critical of beliefs and assumptions and critical of social and political formations that sustain these beliefs and assumptions. The essay may be used to attack the 'establishment', both as a political elite and as the set of ideas and beliefs that sustain and legitimate it, from the left in the name of the disenfranchised and the oppressed. Yet, as the insurgent right in the 20th century discovered, it too can deploy the essay to attack what it views as the establishment of decaying and tired elites (Pareto's (1901/1968) ‘foxes’) from the perspective of dynamic and ambitious new forces (Pareto's ‘lions’). Thus, the essay need not be politically left-wing, as demonstrated by the long line of famous right-wing essayists from Joseph De Maistre and Edmund Burke to Ayn Rand, Irving Kristol and William F Buckley. In short, then, the essay as a genre represents a dual intervention against what it declares as a status quo – an intellectual or academic intervention that challenges established ways of thinking as well as a political intervention that challenges the political interests supported by these ways of thinking. Having endured for centuries, the essay today is itself facing challenges that are edging it to the margins of both academic and political discourses. In politics, the power of the essay to shape public opinion and influence policy has been greatly undermined by the emergence of new writing and communication technologies, the explosion in the availability of information, the rise of a society obsessed with spectacle and image, and, maybe more importantly, the general speed of contemporary life. To be sure, there are still essayistic havens like the pages of The New York Review of Books or The New Yorker, but their wider political influence is restricted. Similar to slow food competing against the demands of a society based on speed, hype and instant gratification, the essay finds itself competing against the sound bite, the image, the tweet and the Facebook ‘like’. The essay is the product of quiet contemplation and must generally be consumed in quiet contemplation – one can hardly imagine an essay composed or read in the hectic environment of a Starbucks café. Unlike the blog, the email, the reportage, the op-ed, the review, PowerPoint slides and many other now prospering genres, the essay demands to be read on paper, often with pen and highlighter at the ready. It also is better suited to writing on paper by pen or typewriter, away from the electronic screen's temptations to multitask, divert, check and waver. If the essay as a genre of political persuasion has yielded to more immediate forms of influence, its role in the production and dissemination of academic knowledge has been usurped by the now hegemonic ‘research paper’ which dominates academic publications and substantially determines academic careers. The research paper, increasingly formulaic, anodyne and conservative as the result of the review procedures, is markedly different from the essay in a number of respects. Usually the product of several authors working together, it undergoes numerous revisions prior to publication, in the course of which unorthodox, experimental or controversial claims are ironed out. In contrast to the patient and at times meandering exposition of the essay, the research paper's linear logic attacks its target head on and delivers its prey through a series of inevitable and highly disciplined moves. Its contribution can be readily distilled by reading the abstract and its core argument can easily be translated into a series of bullet points on PowerPoint slides. Essays make different demands on the reader – they cannot be scan-read, demanding patience and ‘engagement’, sometimes calling for suspension of disbelief before the reader can pass judgement on an essay's merits. It is for this reason that journal reviewers reviewing essays find it hard to resist the familiar reflexes of ‘Has the author not seen what X has said on the matter?’ ‘What is this essay's unique contribution?’ or ‘Why does the author not get down straight to the point and deliver his/her conclusions?’ The essay has also suffered as a means of student assessment, especially in management and business disciplines, but also in the social sciences as a whole. Writing long essays is becoming less common today, no doubt due to the increasing numbers of students but also to the technological imperatives of reading and grading assignments on a computer screen often on-line. Marking a student essay and giving proper feedback is a time-consuming and at times frustrating task, requiring well-honed skills of its own. Marking 150 student essays, especially in quick succession, represents a truly Herculean labour – few academics can discharge it with the necessary accuracy and care. It is scarcely surprising then that many students reach their senior years hardly able to write an essay or even to read one, often resorting to on-line sources for convenient summaries and distillations of essays they are called to read for their studies. All in all, it seems to me that the essay, once a cornerstone of the humanistic tradition of education and culture, is now in decline. Does this matter? More specifically for readers of this journal, is the essay still relevant today to the education of managers and leaders any more than reading the items on the lists of Great Books of the Western World so beloved of humanistic education? Is essay-writing or indeed essay-reading a skill necessary or helpful for people who are going to seek employment in the fast-moving, information driven, visually supercharged, team-working, multi-tasking, low attention span, world we inhabit? Do the skills cultivated by the essay offer any guarantees against unethical practices in business and government, against the exploitation of employees, customers and citizens, against the ravaging of the natural environment, or the ratcheting up of social inequalities? Hardly. It seems to me obvious that the most exquisite essayistic sensibility (as indeed the most developed musical or literary sensibilities) offers no guarantee for either competent management or for ethical and just behaviour. In particular, as a preparation for the types of communication and decisional skills required of today's manager, the essay would seem entirely inappropriate – instead of speed, the essay privileges deliberation, instead of decisiveness it privileges equivocation, instead of short bursts of activity it privileges prolonged concentration, instead of hypersensitivity to novel information it privileges immersion in long-winded arguments. Should we, therefore, content ourselves to see the essay gradually disappear as a living genre, becoming a museum piece, maybe preserved in specialist publications like The New Yorker, representative of a world that has irredeemably vanished? The essay may have lost many of its uses as a means of mass education and training, but I would argue that it maintains some of its relevance to the world we inhabit. I therefore welcome initiatives like that of Journal of Management Studies to provide a regular home to essay-writing in its pages and believe that this can be beneficial to academic discourses and practices. In the first place, essays published in academic journals can offer a useful corrective to the hegemony of research papers, a space where arguments and ideas can be developed and explored without the flattening influences of traditional academic reviews. A research paper that strongly divides reviewers ends up either rejected or revised to the point where most criticisms are silenced. An essay that strongly divides up its readers, provoking intense positive as well as negative responses may indeed be a text that can be published exactly as it stands, in order to promote dialogue and debate. Indeed, I would go as far as to argue that an essay that fails to divide up critical opinion is too conservative and too comfortable to justify publication. More generally, an essay spot in an academic journal can become an oasis that affords some much needed aesthetic pleasure to the reader, a space where the censoring controls of the ‘left brain’ may be temporarily relaxed making room for intuition, imagination, sensibility and moral impulse. Reintroducing the essay as a legitimate genre in academic journals calls for a degree of re-education of editors, reviewers and readers, all of whom must learn to read essays differently from the way they read other academic texts. Essays are unlikely to be improved much as a result of anonymous reviews and repeated revisions. An essayist may justifiably respond to an invitation to revise his or her text with Pontius Pilate's immortal words: ‘What I have written, I have written’. This places extra onus on editors who must make decisions to publish or to reject without the reassuring support of reviewers, based on less precise criteria than those applied to academic papers. Thus an essay's claims of originality, social relevance or even aesthetic beauty may offset other flaws or inaccuracies. By contrast, boring the reader is a cardinal failure in any essay which no amount of scholarship or rigour can mitigate. There are many more ways in which an essay can fail and therefore justify its rejection. It can be navel-gazingly narcissistic, cliché-ridden, incoherent, politically ultra-correct, pompous, pretentious, timid or simply full of hot air. In all these situations, editors should have no hesitation in dismissing essays, since inflicting bad essays on their public brings down not only the reputation of the author and the reputation of a journal but also the reputation of the genre of essay itself. In most instances, editors must abandon their faith in the belief that if only an author can do enough to meet the reservations and criticisms of reviewers the ensuing essay will be worthy of publication. If anything, the opposite is true – silencing the reviewers is often the result of the gradual emasculation of an essay of most of its creative and dynamic qualities. Notwithstanding welcome initiatives such as JMS-Says, it is unlikely that essay-writing will experience a widespread renaissance in our times. Yet, as a genre that encourages questioning, probing and critiquing, as a genre capable of liberating the imagination and affording aesthetic pleasure, as a genre that can in some cases prompt significant changes in the ways we think, we feel and we act, as a genre that encourages reflection and thought, the essay deserves a place in the noisy, fast and fast-moving world that we inhabit. Some of the arguments presented here were prompted by observations by Larry Rosenthal and Stephanie Schreven. I would like to thank them both.