Do we have something to say? From re-search to roi-search and back again

Research and publication are of the greatest importance to many academics. Publishing is essential for a number of reasons including material rewards and promotion, self-esteem and status, getting and retaining a job at a good university and, perhaps in some cases, reducing teaching load. As a collective I think we tend to become increasingly career-conscious, anxious about performance and assessments and instrumental about work and outcome. Of course, this is most salient for young people, but increasingly also senior persons like myself may feel that one is only as good as one’s latest journal article or book and increasingly aware of how much and in which journals we have published. This is certainly a drastic change from the past few decades. In this context, it appears vital to raise the question ‘do we have something to say?’. By ‘we’ I mean the parts of the OS community that have an ‘intellectual’ rather than a strong applied and managerial interest. (For ‘managerialists’, who wish to appeal to managers with technical knowledge, the situation is somewhat different from most OS people, who are more into ‘reflectionstimulating’ knowledge.) More broadly, the target is academics in management and organization, who are more inclined to look at journals such as Organization rather than Harvard Business Review. Of course, within this ‘we’ there are various groups. Much of what I am saying here may be less relevant for those struggling to get their bread and butter, and whose overriding concern may be about their CV and publication record in order to secure a position—and identity and status as someone who is a ‘real’ academic. But I think that most people should be concerned with more than just landing and keeping a job or experiencing acceptance and membership in academia; and thus having something to say should be vital. By ‘say’ I mean that there are knowledge contributions that an audience of people outside a specialized academic setting would be inclined to read and find interesting and relevant for their organizational life. This does not necessarily mean managers, but could be professionals, union representatives or general members of the public with some intellectual interest. To have something