Laytonian Writing: Some Processes and Experiences of Co-authoring with Roger A. Layton

Abstract

This short commentary shares some insights into the reading, writing and critical thinking strategies behind the many award-winning papers of Roger Alexander Layton.

Roger Layton described his “Current Research Interests” on his 2020 CV as “Marketing systems in macromarketing theory; The evolution of marketing systems in ancient, transitional, and contemporary societies; Efficiency and effectiveness in the operation of marketing systems. Links between structure, function, and outcomes. QOL and distributive equity concerns. Questions about resilience and possible collapse or failure; Marketing systems as complex adaptive systems and Disruptive change in provisioning systems”.

Current Research Interests

Co-authoring with Roger on those research interests, as Sarah Duffy and I had the honour to do, was a development for Roger from 2016 onwards. His stated preference was for sole authorship regarding his research interests, primarily due his time in 1964–1965 in Purdue University as associate professor where he began a lifelong habit of documenting his travels and what he saw and understood through photographs of loved ones, people, and markets. He often shared photographs of faraway and exotic markets (sometimes including family members) with Macromarketing conference participants and students as part of his presentations over the years. He used his extensive travels and photographs over a lifetime to reflect, deeply and critically, on markets, marketing systems and macromarketing. His focus, as he explained once in 2017 during a visit to him in Australia, was to “understand marketing systems”. He wasn’t interested in changing the world or documenting impact, the way scholars are today. Roger was unique in trying to understand, read about and test concepts that applied equally well to 6^th century monks who lived a spartan life on Skellig Michal (a remote island off the west coast of Ireland where Star Wars once filmed) and traded seagull eggs and puffin meat for parchment with passing ships as well as twenty-first century war torn, flood affected, forest fires and climate change devastated communities around the world. To his unique and unusual mind, the unit of analysis was communities – small groups of people – where common social processes characterised all human interactions, societies, and indeed civilisations over time. This manifested in his famous MAS theory and social mechanisms such as trust, exchange, collaboration, self-organisation in his “Formation, growth and adaptive change in marketing systems”, Journal of Macromarketing, 2015 Vol 35,3. Pp 302–319 and Slater Award 2017 and “When the commons call “Enough”, does marketing have an answer?”, with Sarah Duffy, Journal of Macromarketing, 2017, Vol 37, 3, 268–285, Slater Award 2018.

Reading Strategy

As well as photographs and time travels to past civilisations to understand communities, markets and marketing systems, Roger's writings and papers always started with his prolific reading – well beyond what might be considered ‘normal’ or ‘above average’ for an academic. Anyone who was fortunate enough to visit Roger's home over the years will testify to the enormous library he amassed over his seven-decade long career. His guest room, living room, hallway, kitchen, and bedroom were jam packed with books. What many didn’t know was that Roger had two garages also packed to the brim with books he had read over the years! The advent of computers, the internet and Kindle was both lifesaving and the biggest scholarly advancement for Roger, providing him with a global library that allowed him to access to books, papers, articles and more 24/7/365 providing the vital reading materials for his marketing systems thinking. When asked once about his reading and search strategies for writing, Roger shared a few hints including: -

He firmly believed and published to the fact, that for him, Marketing was a social science, not a Business School management function, which resulted in Roger constantly reading materials from analytical sociology, anthropology, law and other social sciences. He kept up to date with award winning papers and the latest breaking news from sister and complimentary social science disciplines.

His background in economics set Roger up well to read and digest the latest thinking from econometrics to behavioural economics and more to inform his marketing thinking. He was as interested in the ‘economic’ as well as the ‘social’ aspects of marketing systems, knowing one can’t have one without the other, especially when it came to value-based exchanges.

He used his travels to broaden his reading mind and feed his curiosity to understand how communities’ provision for their daily way of life. His many visits and sabbaticals to the USA, put, for example, the Santa Fe Institute and law volumes on his reading list.

His PhD students and colleagues always provided fertile ground for new materials, sometimes newspaper articles e.g., bush fires, and other times policy documents such as nursing homes. Roger subscribed to robust magazines, such as the New Scientist, as well as community newsletters, testifying to his appetite to know about tomorrow's world and frontier knowledge.

Conversations

As much as travel and reading go to the core of Roger's writings and writing style, conversations were for testing his understandings as “Just talking helps to focus my mind on what is central and important in the work” (April 2019 email). Often, the events of the week, either at home or somewhere else in the world, provided a launching point for a conversation. Sometimes it was a macromarketing paper published and other times it was breaking news such as the pandemic, panic shopping or a development in a university policy. As was Roger's way, he savoured a meeting or coffee conversation with current staff in his university and other institutions, such as the young and emerging scholars he supported through a grant or scholarship, affording him opportunities to test his ideas in real time, in the real world as it continuously evolves.

Once again, technology brought improvements as skype calls became another conversation hallmark in later years that informs and shaped his papers. For example, I had the privilege and honour of a two-hour long weekly skype call (Christmas week being the exception) for over four years, as many others did around the world. During those conversations, we discussed, debated, critiqued, analysed, argued and on rare occasions, agreed to disagree about events, concepts, theories, readings, books, and papers. Inevitably, maybe the next conversation or conversations later, Roger would return to a point discussed which he had thought about and he would present the conclusion he had reached to test it, again, based on further reading, observations, and draft writings. He was never so entrenched in his understanding that he couldn’t and didn’t take account of new information and insights. To help him get to a point where his thinking was complete on an issue or concept, he might draw a picture or image to summarise his newfound understandings. That pattern of rich and diverse conversations and images based on constant critical thinking, continued when Roger would visit in person whether it was the Macromarketing conference breakfast over orange juice, cereal, tea and toast or a lovely dinner with family and friends, all preserved in his travel photographs and sometimes in drawings on breakfast napkins! That ability, desire, interest and motivation to absorb new findings, to make sense of cutting-edge insights in a fast-changing world marked by complex diversity and constant ground breaking innovations such as AI, and more, while keeping daily life for ancient and contemporary communities in focus, was the essence of Roger.

Writing a Paper

Together, these conversations with readings resulted in a very good first draft of any paper he published. Like all award-winning authors, he put his papers through a number of drafts, not several plus versions, not to get the structure and flow correct or but to polish the complexity of his understanding. Often, this was about fine tuning a diagram or a sentence. In the main, the working title he selected for the first draft of a paper was 80/90% of the final title published showing the clarify of thought that was a hallmark of Roger's paper throughout a hugely productive life. Significantly, he did this work over weeks and months, not years, as his extensive portfolio of publications shows. In writing, Roger always tried “to focus a little more on more general issues linked to the application keeping in mind that all being well this might be read when much of the fuss dies down or where readers do not understand the detail of the local industry” (June 2019 email).

Conclusion

Roger was always “rethinking of what marketing is all about. And this is what we are trying to help along!” (Sept 2020 email). When Roger first became Professor of Marketing in 1967, he wasn’t “exactly sure what I was Professor of”. To his mind, marketing was going through a transition – marketing management was emerging, and the concept of the customer as king was taking hold. Agricultural marketing was in decline. Fast forward over fifty professional years to 2019 and for the second time in his life, as an active Emeritus Professor of Marketing, Roger wasn’t sure what Marketing was. Roger was sure Marketing is in transition once again as we face a very different, rapidly evolving, networked world with dramatic social change, technological advancements, climate change and sustainability. He believed Marketing is on the edge of re-inventing itself in the way it is seen and should be seen, as social systems, as provisioning systems. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5_sCYR8BGc. To assist us on this global journey into marketing's future, Macromarketing, communities, societies, scholars, and researchers are the better for Roger's desire to understand ancient, transitional, and contemporary societies. In Roger's prestige and numerous award-winning papers and research, there is a treasure chest of wisdom, insights, knowledge, theory and application to be found, all with elegance and grace.