Notes for anniversarifiers

Abstract

A reflection on the celebration of journal anniversaries, and of anniversaries in general.

Recently I seem to be writing a lot of pieces for journal anniversaries. First it was Management Learning’s 40th (Grey, 2009) then Organization Studies’ 30th (Grey, 2010) and now Organization at a more youthful but perfectly respectable 20. Hold on to that word ‘respectable’ because we will need it later. Given the number of journals in the field that have been hanging around for a good few years, one could envisage being fully and pleasurably occupied as a specialist in such things, becoming, so to speak, ‘an anniversarifier’. As a journal approached a noteworthy milestone, its editor would make a note to send for a suitable anniversarifier, much as relatives of the dying begin to consider which undertaker to call.

It will become clear that the literature on anniversaries is at present quite limited, and that on journal anniversaries non-existent—until now! Nevertheless, as the phenomenon becomes more common it is reasonable to anticipate a new discipline of ‘anniversary studies’ (with ‘journal anniversaries’ as a particular specialism, perhaps) which will in due course have its own journal with its own anniversaries to mark. It may be that anniversarification becomes a recognized profession and even, as the ultimate sign of respectability, become the target of critical analysis. Until that time arrives, it will be helpful to have at hand these notes for anniversarifiers.

The marking of anniversaries is so familiar that the practice itself seems literally ‘unremarkable’, indeed natural. In everyday life we celebrate birthdays and weddings, in particular, but this is in some way arbitrary: why should a year be particularly significant? Why not celebrate each month that passes? And then, within these anniversaries, there is a hierarchy. Some of them are more significant than others. With birthdays that significance is sometimes related to particular legal and cultural norms so that in the UK, for example, an 18th birthday occasions a particular celebration as it marks attainment of complete citizenship including such things as the right to vote and to buy alcohol. Some rights (such as, again in the UK, being able to give legal sexual consent and serve in the armed forces) begin at 16, but that anniversary is less significantly celebrated; yet 21st birthdays are celebrated as special even though the origin of this in being the age of legal independence no longer applies. These milestones aside, the ‘special’ anniversaries are typically those of decades, although for wedding anniversaries in one case only—25 years—a half-decade is marked as especially important. Wedding anniversaries have a particular hierarchy of significance denoted by attaching a particular material to them: silver for 25th, ruby for 40th, gold for 50th, diamond for 60th (in those terms, a 20th anniversary is ‘China’).

Within work organizations, anniversaries also abound. In many cases these are variations on wider cultural practices, for example the marking of staff birthdays or of Christmas (Rosen, 1988) and with respect to the latter Hancock and Rehn (2011) demonstrate that anniversaries are organized as well as organizations anniversarified. Organizational anniversaries are often marked by the production of company histories or other celebratory texts. Centenaries are the commonest occasion, but other decades may be celebrated. Indeed my first experience as an anniversarifier was as a contributor an internally-produced volume marking 40th anniversary—the ‘ruby’ anniversary so to speak—of Sage, the publishers of this very Journal. As with companies, the rule for academic journals—though how it is agreed and by whom it is enforced is entirely unclear—seems to be that decades may be celebrated. It would be as peculiar for Organization to have a 19th anniversary issue as it would be for a person to mark a monthly birthday. And whilst the hallmark of the journal has been intellectual unconventionality it seems that it is not so heterodox as to defy the ‘rule of decades’. Such parsimony severely restricts the opportunities for the anniversarifier although, happily, there is a growing tendency to anniversary issues as opposed to a meagre editorial, so we can envisage a steady stream of work.

The marking of significant dates according to established conventions, then, should alert the would-be anniversarifier to the fact that anniversaries are neither unremarkable nor natural, but carry meaning, potentially considerable meaning, and as such have received some attention from sociologists and anthropologists. Some of the most obvious cases are those of anniversaries which memorialize rather than simply celebrate events, for example annual remembrance of the war dead tied to the anniversary of the armistice which ended the First World War on the 11 November 1918 (here, indeed, a particular hour is marked—the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month). Memorialization is an important part of the construction of cultural and especially national identities (Domansky, 1992; Kitch, 2002) as it draws attention to (‘marks as significant’) particular events. These might be foundational, as in ‘national days’ (McCrone and McPherson, 2009) marking the establishment or liberation of nations, and entail celebration or they might memorialize tragedies and disasters (Domansky, 1992; Forrest, 1993). In some way both celebratory and tragic modes of anniversary serve at least potentially to cement a set of shared meanings about the past and in the process, of course, about the present.

Traditional religious practice is permanently engaged in anniversarifying. In the Christian calendar every day is associated with a particular Saint or other commemoration. Industrialization swept away the widespread observance of most of these (Thompson, 1963) but in etiolated form their remnants, especially in Christmas and Easter, continue to structure the public year as Holy Days became holidays. But for all that the extent of religious anniversarifying may be much more limited than in the past, there seems some reason to think that we live at a time of revived interest in anniversaries, to the extent of making a ‘cult’ of them at least in Europe and the Unites States (Johnston, 1991). Famously, all who were alive at the time remember where they were when President Kennedy was assassinated. Yet there has grown up no habitual anniversary-making of this event unlike, say, the death of Princess Diana, the fall of the Berlin Wall or the Twin Towers attack. In an analogous way, one minute silences have given way to two or even three minute silences to mark tragic events. Anniversaries seem to have become bigger and better, rather in the way that the jelly and ‘pass the parcel’ of childhood birthday parties in the past have, in some circles, given way to conjurors and bouncy castles, if not whole funfairs.

One way of understanding this anniversaryism is as a response to the ‘time-space compression’ (Harvey, 1989) in which cultural life had speeded up to the extent that the very frame of history has changed, with the very recent past becoming immediately a subject for historical reflection and the present being immediately evaluated for its historicity (Augé, 1995). How can we hold on to meaning in the face of the compulsive logic of speed (Virilio, 1977)? Anniversaries speak to this situation in two ways. First, they provide pegs upon which to hold and so to make sense of fast-fluxing time. Second, they satisfy a need for historicity by providing a sense not just of ordering the events around us but allowing us to feel that we ourselves are partaking in a moment of history. Anniversaries allow us both to make sense of history but also, in marking them, we become a part of history: they allow us to say: ‘it happened then, it is happening now, and I am here’.

Anniversaries of academic journals hardly carry so heavy a weight of significance, as even the most self-important of anniversarifiers must acknowledge. Nevertheless they are not without meaning. At the most basic by marking a date as significant the implicit claim is made that the thing itself—the journal—is significant, significant enough, at least, to warrant a special issue and of course the other basic meaning is that of longevity: for better or worse it has survived. But that is of course the wrong formulation. It is to be understood that the survival is ‘for the better’ and in this sense there is something unavoidably self-congratulatory about the journal anniversary. Longevity here is not simply about survival but about a growth to maturity and a claim to venerability, announcing that the journal is of established worth. Anniversaries are not occasions to discuss, or at any rate to question, what that worth might be, any more than a birthday party is the occasion to enumerate the faults and failings of the celebrant. It is enough to have reached a ripe old age—the older the better, for there is a clear hierarchy here if the currency is that the passage of time bestows venerability—and are entitled to respect on that account alone.

In one way that respect is well-justified. Launching and running an academic journal entails very considerable amounts of individual and collective effort. It is, in a literal sense, an achievement. But if that same amount of work had been undertaken across a series of fleeting titles it would be no less; and so part of what is being given respect to is the thing itself and not simply the work that has made it. And here I think it becomes clear that part of what is being celebrated is status. No doubt academic journals in all manner of fields are desirous of status; and no doubt they celebrate their anniversaries. However, the organization studies field is probably particularly desirous of doing so. As a subject it has become, although that was not always so (Greenwood and Hinings, 1992), intimately bound up with the institution of business schools and within those is but one subject. Business schools are rather academically insecure, both prone to and sensitive about the sneers of other disciplines; whilst organization studies is, within business schools, often the butt of derogatory comment from those subject areas more heavily invested in quantification (especially the quantification of investments).

So perhaps for us there is a particular premium on claims to respectability which anniversaries help to advance. We, too, are here and have been for a long time. We, too, are a ‘proper’ discipline with a history to celebrate. The ‘we’ is important in this in several ways: we the subject, we the journal but, in a more diffuse sense, we a community of people associated with the subject and the journal as readers of and writers for it. How meaningful that community is may not always be so easy to determine: editors of journals may often feel a strong sense of belonging and ownership but others are more fickle, if not downright promiscuous, being equally willing to read and write for all manner of other journals. Nevertheless, in ways which are less profound than, but a distant echo of, high-profile public anniversaries, journal anniversaries may serve to articulate a certain set of somewhat shared meanings. They too allow us to be a part of a little moment of history and in the process to cement some sense of shared identity. If, as Paul Ricoeur says, ‘cultures create themselves by telling stories of their past’ (in Kearney, 1984: 29) then anniversaries serve as a particular moment of that creation.

The task of the anniversarifier, then, is to convey some or all of this. To do so may entail a reflection upon the past of the journal, making it a shared past; it may entail an analysis of the past and present state of the subject field. In doing so, as readers of this Journal in particular will surely be aware, what is occurring is not some neutral or natural marking of elapsed time. It is part—no doubt minor in itself—of an ongoing social and organizational process in which institutions, identity and meaning are constructed, and we should notice this rather than take it for granted. We should be reflexive about anniversaries as social phenomena.

And of course a degree of reflexivity is called for on the part of anniversarifiers themselves. For if a journal anniversary marks a claim to respectable status, so too does an invitation to anniversarify. Such invitations normally go to those within the field who are seen as being amongst ‘the great and the good’, for how else is respectability to be made manifest? It is rather like the publicity blurb on the back cover of books: why should we care what Joe Bloggs of no fixed abode thinks of the book when we can read the opinion of Professor Jospehine Bloggs of Harvard? Great, then, is the potential self-satisfaction of the anniversarifier but along with that satisfaction comes a certain melancholy akin to the realization on, perhaps, one’s 40th birthday that one has become middle-aged. Yet a remedy for this exists which is, by writing one’s anniversary piece with a little bit of cheekiness and disrespect, to retain the illusion, at least, that one is still young at heart. Unfortunately, this is a pyrrhic victory over melancholia since its comfort disappears at the moment it is recognized as a comfort, necessitating further, indeed never-ending, rounds of reflexivity which become burdensome for reader and anniversarifier alike.