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 cliches 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).