Abstract
Several management scholars have recently discussed the consequences that emerge from the institutional pressures for research output. While an important debate for the field, thus far, it has wholly neglected to account for the voices of doctoral students—arguably, the most disempowered constituents within the academy. Working from a doctoral student’s perspective, the aim of this article is to integrate anecdotal evidence with Foucault’s idea of the panopticon gaze so as to illuminate how such institutional pressures become discursively codified. As argued, one especially poignant implication that materializes from the reification of these institutional pressures is intellectual inertia. This article concludes with some consideration of how our discipline can more fruitfully serve doctoral students by holistically embracing the concept of ‘ontological empathy’ and by redefining the meaning of ‘success’. Realization of ontological empathy and the redefinition of success will provide a constructive way to move beyond the orthodoxy of how research output is currently being defined and valued.
When our lived experience of theorizing is fundamentally linked to the processes of self-recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice. (hooks, 1994: 61)
When I entered the doctoral program in the fall of 2006 at a large North American business school, I was surprised to encounter the many forms of institutionalized pressures for research output. I commenced the program immediately after earning degrees—undergraduate and Master’s—in political philosophy, where expectations for research output, while being present, were not nearly as salient or vocalized. Ever more troubling for me at the time was the very stringent hierarchy associated with journal prestige that appeared to govern academic politics in the field. Indeed, from the very onset of the program there were dual demands cast upon doctoral students: i) to publish, and, ii) to publish in journals that count. 1 From the Dean’s message at the welcome reception to the comments made by professors with whom we had coursework to the sage advice offered by the luminaries of the field at various doctoral consortia, these two points transformed from words of guidance into a reified discourse; to which we as doctoral students were tacitly expected to acquiesce.
What seemed most interesting was that none of these scholars who noted the reality of the business school system ever took responsibility for its discursive construction or its subsequent maintenance (see Ozbilgin, 2009). That is, while most never overtly lauded the current system of research output—and, in fact, some even begrudgingly denigrated it—none of them noted their roles within it. As such, whatever opinions they might really hold regarding the merits or the legitimacy of the system were obfuscated by the powerful and ultimately uninterrupted message that emphasized publishing in certain outlets. Resigned to this reality, members of my cohort and I began to, not so metaphorically—but rather cynically—refer to academia as a game, in which if we wanted to play we had to accept and follow its pre-established rules. 2
The demand to produce research for publication in certain American journals immediately conflicted with my initial scholarly interests, which were located in the broad but very European domain of critical management studies (CMS). The ontological and the epistemological assumptions that underlie CMS research readily cohered with my prior academic studies in political philosophy and with my personal commitments to social justice. However, when I inquired with a senior and accomplished faculty member—one whom I continue to greatly admire and respect—how much critical research was being accepted into the coveted American journals, her short but very poignant response was, none. Her response to this inquiry simply solidified my acute awareness, which had developed since entering the doctoral program, regarding the axiological negation of scholarship that I was most interested in pursuing. At one point, a professor even commented that the appearance of publications in European journals on my curriculum vitae would not matter much if I hoped to secure a tenure-track position at a research-intensive university. Continuing to feel the institutional pressures, which were by then coupled with the realization that my research interests were largely impervious to the boundaries of the most valued journals, I felt compelled to alter my strategy for navigating my presence in the doctoral program. 3
Following my first-year, I seriously contemplated transferring to a European business school or to a different field within my current university, which would better respect the questions that I was interested in asking—the former option I pursued for a short period in my second-year. It is worth noting that my doctoral student colleagues were certainly not immune from these issues. Unable to placate the institutional pressures, which were codified in various manifestations of ‘office politics’, some of my peers transferred to other universities while others disappeared from academia altogether. I remained in the program as a result of the steadfast support of a professor and mentor who encouraged me to not only complete my doctorate but also to complete it on my own terms and with my own voice.
Over the last couple of years I have attended several doctoral consortia, where I have heard PhD students doing non-mainstream research relay their personal stories about the trials and tribulations involved in undertaking doctoral studies. A central theme that clearly unifies many of these narratives is that of how they have had to negotiate, through various idiosyncratic trajectories, the politicized game of business school academia. My story in this regard is not novel; notwithstanding this, it is a story that ought to be told. At minimum, it illuminates some of the tangible issues that doctoral students confront and the epistemological sacrifices that they are discursively encouraged—or perhaps, coerced—to make in their pursuit for an academic career.
To be clear, I am not attempting to deny or otherwise negate the enculturation process endemic to virtually all organizational environments. Indeed, I appreciate the fact that graduate school, akin to other apprenticeship and mentoring programs, necessarily involves a level of socialization of the novice subject into the ethos of the system (Wright et al., 2007). At one level, this process is intended to edify its subjects into the specialized esoteric discourse of their discipline; in doing so, the process, either intentionally or discursively, consolidates the academy’s privileged position within society. Notwithstanding the underlying concerns that may be raised regarding this phenomenon, my pivotal concern in this article rests in the fact that doctoral students are often the most disenfranchised constituents within the academic hierarchy. Not only is their potential placement contingent upon how well they have performed in the PhD program, but prior to even arriving at that point they must first pass a series of institutionalized hurdles—in the form of coursework, comprehensive exams and proposal and dissertation defenses—which, at any stage, can be ideologically utilized to encumber or completely terminate their progression in the program. 4 As such, doctoral students often find themselves in a precarious situation: If they choose to pursue a line of research that is not perceived by their institution as ‘valuable’, then, they risk jeopardizing their career mobility.
Considering the tangible implications that the present focus on research output poses for doctoral students, it is somewhat bewildering that perspectives from this group have rarely, if ever, been included in the ongoing debates in the field. Indeed, in my search to date, I found no journal article by a doctoral student that delves into the effect the current system of research output has on her or his personal or professional selves; especially one whose research interests or methodological approach do not fit the narrow parameters of the field’s elite journals. From experience, I can attest that our opinions and frustrations are predominately expressed to empathic peers in whispers behind closed office doors or in private conversations at various conferences. In this vein, this article seeks to complement the recent discourse on the current state of academic research within business schools [see the essays published in the special section on ‘Doing Work that Matters’ in Academy of Management Learning and Education (Bell, 2009); also see Baum, 2011; Oliver, 2010; Tourish, 2010; Willmott, 2011) by forwarding my narrative perspective as a doctoral student (this perspective complements the approach to understanding the nature of academic life used recently by Ford and Harding, 2008; Learmonth and Humphreys, 2011). I will certainly not claim that my narrative account possesses even the slightest veneer of universal validity. However, in amplifying my idiosyncratic experiences as a doctoral student in the field, this article does allow for consideration of the implications that the present system of research output has on the most junior constituents of the academy.
The remainder of this article is presented in three sections. First, through critical reflections coupled with consideration of Foucauldian thought, I describe how doctoral students are often subjected to the panoptic gaze, which effectively conditions their research inquiries in ways that render them attractive to top-tier journals. Second, I identify intellectual inertia as one significant implication that the salient pressures for research output poses for our field. Finally, in the third section, I invoke the concept of ‘ontological empathy’ to address the question of what we should do with doctoral students hereinafter (Oliver, 2010).
Academic life under the panopticon gaze
When I originally read Foucualt as an undergraduate student, I instantly appreciated his eloquent account of the panopticon. Borrowing the idea from English utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, Foucault (1997) describes the panopticon as an elaborate architectural design that functions to regulate human behaviour through the discursive exercise of power (McKinlay and Starkey, 1998). In elucidating the central aim of the panopticon within the specific context of the penal system, he explains: [T]o induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so … [The panopticon] is an important mechanism, for it automatizes and disindividualizes power. (Foucault, 1997: 360–361; also see McKinlay and Starkey, 1998: 2)
In simultaneously posing as an invisible threat through omnipresent inspection and undermining the possibilities of ‘unsanctioned’ actions, the panopticon serves as an effective and ubiquitous technology of surveillance and control (Deetz, 1998). Indeed, it utilizes available institutional measures, often codified in various discursive terrains, to ensure social compliance. The mere assumption of being under the gaze of authority provides the necessary impetus for subjects to conform to prescribed and (self-)disciplined behaviour (for a more detailed discussion see McKinlay and Starkey, 1998; Newton and Findlay, 1996; Townley, 1993). Townley (1993: 232) observes that, ‘[i]n combining hierarchy, unilateral observation and a normalizing judgment, the panopticon has been defined as the principle of disciplinary organization’.
While I certainly had an abstract understanding of the concept from my very first encounter with Foucault’s writings, it was only after I commenced the doctoral program that I came to really comprehend how the panoptic gaze manifests itself as an institutional device that governs intraorganizational behaviour. Indeed, through various technologies of surveillance doctoral students were rendered permanently visible—though, admittedly, not all of my colleagues read such practices through a Foucauldian lens. 5
The panoptican gaze was maintained within my doctoral program through myriad discursive edifices. As mentioned the most explicit path by which our professional behaviour was governed was through the concerted and unyielding message from professors that we need to publish our work in a select group of elite journals. However, more implicit processes also informed the institutional panoptican. Here, I will mention one such process.
Every few months, doctoral students were asked to provide a list of their achievements—papers accepted for publication, scholarships, research awards, etc.—from the previous semester. Such accomplishments were collated and presented at the faculty council meeting, which were attended by academic faculty members (who, of course, served as our research supervisors) and the Dean’s administrative team. Following the meeting, a document with an exhaustive summary of the accomplishments—a kind of a ‘who did what’ in the prior semester—was circulated by email to all active doctoral students within the business school. In my first reading of this process, I was pleased that the distinctions of doctoral students were being institutionally acknowledged; as such, I diligently tended to providing details of my own achievements for this purpose. However, as time went on, and as I shared some illuminating conversations with colleagues, I came to the realization that this process may have some unintended consequences. That is, I began to read this process as a way to not only congratulate those who earned various achievements, but also to concurrently monitor those whose names did not appear in the document. Indeed, the names of the students who were not on the document were as visible—if not more so—as the names of those who did. It served as a way of rhetorically asking certain students why they were not meeting the research output expectations in the same way as some of their peers, and encouraged them to alter their behaviour in ways such that they too met institutional standards (for a related discussion see Nkomo, 2009). In coming to recognize this inadvertent corollary, I made the decision to no longer participate in the practice.
Both the explicit and the implicit practices that maintained the panoptican gaze within my doctoral program reinforced the importance of the types of research output that was valued by the institution. These pressures for research output engender a range of implications for doctoral students, and for the field more broadly. In the following section, I briefly discuss one such implication, which immanently requires critical engagement and resolution.
Doctoral students: fresh perspectives or intellectual inertia?
As most academics can attest, entering a PhD program is a significant commitment, which often entails substantial emotional and financial sacrifice. Indeed, many students who embark upon this journey, which usually takes anywhere between four to seven years to complete, often leave lucrative positions in industry to once again assume the austere life of a student. Others delay or otherwise modify personal milestones—e.g. getting married, purchasing a home, having children—to devote their time and their energies to undertake the program.
Notwithstanding the sacrifices that might come with the decision to complete a doctorate, often the individual’s intent to pursue a career in academia outweighs the things that must be forsaken along the way. Indeed, many of my colleagues and I decided to enter the doctoral program because of what such a program represents: an arena in which we are afforded the opportunity to explore questions and ideas that have been cultivated through myriad personal and professional experiences. Many of us chose this career path with the intention of undertaking research that has substantive meaning for us; incidentally, I have yet to hear from a peer that she or he elected to complete a PhD with the aim of making an incremental extension to a particular psychological variable or to replicate a prior study. Moreover, because doctoral students in business school disciplines often possess diverse academic training—in my cohort class of 11 students, we collectively had prior degrees in anthropology, conflict resolution, computer science, economics, engineering, journalism, law, political science and psychology—and often bring with them a wide range of work experience, they frequently are in a position to offer fresh perspectives on phenomena traditionally studied in business schools. Yet, at the time many of them enter the job market or begin a tenure-track position, their CVs reveal a rather bewildering story. The fresh perspectives which they brought in with them at the start of their doctorate—which would of had so much potential should these perspectives have been duly fostered by their institution—are often entirely missing from their research trajectories at the time of their convocation.
So, then: what happens between the commencement and the conclusion of the doctoral program that essentially erases or, at minimum, negates these fresh perspectives? One logical explanation to this question would be to point directly to the current institutional system that expects certain types of research output (Adler and Harzing, 2009)—a system which, as the previous section indicates, is governed by the surveillance effects of the panoptican gaze functioning discursively at the intra-organizational level. This point merits further elaboration, particularly in terms of the dilemma it poses for the discipline of organization and management studies.
From the very moment that we enter the PhD program, doctoral students are inundated with messages that underscore the importance of writing papers for certain outlets. Indeed, one of the key pieces of advice that I received early in the program was to write for the journal—that is, before I begin any project I should know for which scholarly outlet it is being targeted. Depending on what criteria the particular business school uses to assess journal quality—e.g. Financial Times 45, Social Science Citation Index, the Australian Business Deans Council or the Association of Business Schools rankings; for a substantive list see Harzing (2010)—the list of available journals that qualify as worthy of submission is often quite narrow (Adler and Harzing, 2009; Oliver, 2010), and the paradigmatic scope of these journals is even narrower (Willmott, 2011). From experiential knowledge, a rather disconcerting phenomenon emerges, in which doctoral students are particularly implicated and which has tangible repercussions on the field.
We are at the risk of falling into a state of what some scholars have called intellectual inertia [for example, Gary Becker invokes this concept in the acknowledgment section of his well cited book, A Treatise on the Family (1991)]—many may argue that we are already there. Hugh Willmott (2011: 429) observes that research conducted within business schools is often ruled by journal lists, which ‘stifle[s] diversity and constrict[s] scholarly innovation’. Intellectual inertia is a particularly sensitive issue for doctoral students as they are often at the vanguard of new ideas. Namely, as they often possess diverse academic and professional backgrounds and have yet to be rigorously trained into the ethos of the discipline, and because they are not intimately familiar with the extant literature on their research topic, doctoral students are not conditioned to conform to the dominant paradigms or pervasive ways of understanding organizational phenomena. In short, they are, perhaps, most capable of thinking outside of the box—to ontologically question, or provide alternative perspectives on, things that have become taken-for-granted by more seasoned scholars [or, as Alvesson and Sandberg (2011) have recently noted, to problematize the assumptions upon which knowledge about organization and management is predicated]. 6 Such a mode of thinking has the potential to create novel insights by radically envisioning, for instance, the antecedents, the outcomes or the very nature of a particular organizational phenomenon. However, we are at risk of losing this opportunity.
As pressures for research output and, more specifically, for publication in certain journals, mount and subsequently become internalized by students, what often occurs is, as Foucault’s articulation of the panopticon predicts, compliance to these pressures. In the case of most business schools this means that doctoral students begin to redirect their research agenda in an effort to make their projects more amenable to top journals. I certainly did this. At times, I sought to write about topics that would hopefully garner research output that was valued by my institution. Even though such projects did not ignite my scholarly passions to the same degree that other topics would have, and even though I had to compromise my interpretive predilections for positivist ones, I felt compelled to write on topics that were more mainstream—that is, on topics that occupied the pages of the recent issues of the field’s elite journals. This predicament was engendered by the fact that there were competing interests that were influencing my research agenda. On the one hand, I was cognizant of the research questions that I wanted to ask and the research approach that I wanted to adopt but, on the other, I was desperate to feel that I was a successful member of my institution and of the wider academy. And, to return to Foucault’s notion of ubiquitous power that is endemic to the efficacy of the panopticon, by this time I had internalized and confounded the meaning of success as research output in the journals that count.
While I was struggling with these issues, one of my peers commenced the PhD program to pursue a fascinating study on gender. However, upon being told by professors that, essentially, gender is dead and not a subject that is of much interest to leading journals, this student made the decision, within the first year of the doctoral program, to study something that was more sexy and completely different from her original interests. While this peer may have had a genuine change of heart in terms of what she wanted to research, given how dramatically and how quickly this change occurred, the stringent institutional pressures for research output that she experienced likely contributed to the new orientation of her scholarly pursuits. At the very least, the palpable declaration that research on gender is dead from someone of relational authority (a professor), functioned as a clandestine way to surveillance the types of research that is being conducted by the doctoral student—indeed, it tacitly suggested that a certain area of research does not merit scholarly exploration. Thus, the surveillance process—which, was in this case, reflected in the words of the professor—serves to establish the parameters and the scope of worthy research agendas.
Stories such as these abound. If the institutional pressures for research output are further reified, the field will (continue to) be stagnant. This will result in, to loosely borrow the words of Martin Parker and Robyn Thomas (2011: 423), the ‘[production of] structures which work to reproduce [current knowledge systems] and not question it’. Thus, radical ideas that challenge our discipline’s orthodoxy will be covertly discouraged as they do not fit the mandate of leading journals and, extension, the relevance question for business school research will continue to be raised and cause ontological angst (Adler and Harzing, 2009; Bennis and O’Toole, 2005; Pfeffer and Fong, 2002). Ultimately, the disposition of our field will be confined to a high degree of intellectual inertia.
Where should we go from here?
We are at a critical juncture—a juncture at which we can irrevocably harm knowledge creation within organization and management studies. In a recent editorial, Dennis Tourish (2010) has even gone so far as to assert that today, ‘business schools are at the cutting edge of bad ideas’. Given the dangerous implication of intellectual inertia, the question that must be raised is: where do we go from here? My response to this question is, admittedly, quite modest. We need to provide doctoral students with open intellectual space so as to foster their curiosity and their authentic interests. Indeed, doctoral students should be permitted to explore subjects that are genuinely of interest to them, even if such subjects may not lend themselves to the limited scope of top journals.
Navigating through the doctoral process, I continually struggled with establishing intellectual space to study that which really mattered to me. My endeavour to establish this intellectual space was, however, facilitated by progressive and open-minded mentors who provided support and guidance during the most frustrating days of the doctoral program. For example, shortly after I had commenced the program, I had lunch with a small group of professors and doctoral students. On this occasion, I recall lamenting about the dilemmas that junior academics encounter when they focus their research on critical or on other non-mainstream topics. A professor sitting next to me at the lunch advised me while perhaps reflecting on his own experiences: You may have to work a little harder and you may have to experience greater resistance to your work but you can achieve success. I think what I took away most from the professor’s advice was the idea that success and critical research are not mutually exclusive.
During this period, however, I maintained a rather narrow definition of success—again, one which focused almost exclusively on research output in leading American journals. Reading Dov Eden’s (2003) editorial in the Academy of Management Journal on the possibilities of critical management studies in a journal like AMJ, only served to nurture my belief, which was not dissimilar to the crux of the Protestant work ethic, that if only I worked hard enough I would be able to publish in such an outlet. From this point forward, I pursued a strategy of creating a hybrid ‘third space’ (Frenkel, 2008)—a concept which I am admittedly taking out of its original context but which, I believe, captures many of my experiences. Citing Bhabha, Frenkel (2008: 928) explains that the third space ‘is a liminal space in which the “cutting edge of translation and negotiation” between the colonizer and the colonized is to be found’. I sought to negotiate the institutional pressures for research output by strategically infusing my CMS-inflected studies with, or otherwise disguising it within, a positivist discourse. I thought that in doing so, I could maintain my authentic voice while simultaneously placating the institutional pressures that I confronted. I was at the pivotal moment of playing the game and trying not to lose myself.
While I am not suggesting that creating a hybrid third space is an ineffective strategy that CMS scholars can adopt in their research pursuits, I found that for myself, I was rather unsuccessful when taking on such a strategy. Indeed, I ultimately came to the realization that in pursuing this strategy, as a means by which to cope with the predicament of trying to publish in leading American journals, I was producing scholarship that would not be, due to its quality or the lack thereof, accepted by either the CMS or the mainstream community. 7
It was not until about two years after I started the doctoral program that, much to my utter surprise, I was the recipient of several accolades within a relatively short period of time. I received an external fellowship from the premier funding body in the country, a revise-and-resubmit on a sole-authored paper on poststructuralist theory at a good European-based management journal [and which would later be accepted by Human Relations (Prasad, 2012)], and the Best Student Paper Award from the Critical Management Studies division at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management. Upon hearing about some of these achievements, I went to the office of a professor who had been particularly supportive of me and my research throughout my program to share with her the good news. I still remember the conversation distinctly as if it occurred only yesterday. I tried to express to her how exactly I was feeling: I feel, I feel … . Knowingly, she finished my thought by simply saying, vindicated. This one word neatly captured it all. What I could not otherwise acknowledge on my own, the external validation that came with these accolades was verification that the work that I was doing was worthy—that the subjects that I was exploring merited scholarly inquisition. For the first time perhaps, I began to really feel that achievements outside the narrow scope of publications in the American journals qualified as success.
With a shift in how I understood success, and with a supportive supervisor, I elected to undertake a dissertation topic that can be considered anything but mainstream. As the precise topic of my dissertation is irrelevant for the present article, I will not describe it in any great detail here. However, it is worth mentioning that for my dissertation, I chose to adopt a largely neglected methodology within the field of organization and management studies (multi-sited ethnography) and I studied it in one of the most socio-politically extreme contexts that I could find (Palestine and Israel). While these choices were philosophically guided by ontological and epistemological considerations of the social phenomenon that I was seeking to explore (Morgan and Smircich, 1980), I was nonetheless all too aware of the fact that given that both my methodology and my context were at the fringe of organizational discourses, I would encounter increased difficulty in publishing my dissertation based papers in elite journals (albeit some minority perspectives have recently illuminated the importance of such studies—see Bamberger and Pratt, 2010). However, upon critical reflection, I felt that I needed to stay consistent with the substantive meaning of good scholarship that I hold.
In her insightful discussion on the goals of scholarship, Christine Oliver (2010) presents an excellent definition of the concept. As she writes: Scholarship, to me, is the ancient and noble pursuit of transformational truth. It is grounded in an imperative to improve the human condition through understanding and through new ways of looking at ourselves and the physical world of which we are a part. Scholarship, I believe, is creative ambiguity. It is imaginative, rigorous and true. It is vigorous, proactive and shared. Scholarship is the telling of a previously untold tale. (Oliver, 2010: 27)
I wholly concur with Oliver’s definition and so I pursued my dissertation study on a topic that I felt needed scholarly inquisition, and on a topic on which I believed I could make a constructive impact. I would not have been able to pursue such a study unless I had the intellectual space to freely explore an unconventional phenomenon using an unconventional methodology. For me, this intellectual space only became tenable through the unwavering support of several mentors and peers. From these individuals, I received steady encouragement that convinced me that my research project is important and warrants investigation—regardless of whether or not editors and reviewers of premier journals may hold the same opinion.
From my experience, one fruitful path for creating this intellectual space for doctoral students would require members of our field to rigorously engage with what Oliver (2010: 30) refers to as ontological empathy. Ontological empathy contends that, ‘we need to make a concerted and continuous effort to treat each other as scholars with dignity and respect’. This translates into valuing each other’s scholarship holistically and not based on a restrictively defined notion of research output. As a discipline, we are presently far from embracing this concept. We continue to define the quality of scholars not by the contribution that they make to the field or to their students or to society, but rather by how many times their names have appeared as authors in ideologically valued journals. Indeed, we often reduce a researcher’s scholarly worth to their publications in such outlets—it is not seldom that we hear at our disciplinary conferences, there is ‘the professor who has an AMJ, two AMRs, and an ASQ’ (Adler and Harzing, 2009: 92). Willmott extends this point in his astute discussion on the problematic institutionalization of journal lists. As he writes: Journal list fetishism is perverse. When it takes hold, scholarly work that many of us would consider first-rate in terms of its originality, significance and/or rigor is devalued simply because it appears in a lesser ranked journal. Academics are terrorized by university managers (e.g. Deans) who, as champions or tyrants of list fetishism, apply pressures upon us to confine our work to topics, methods and approaches that are suitable for publication in a small number of so-called elite journals. Refusal or reluctance to comply with this pressure invites the judgment, and perhaps also the self-assessment, that our scholarship is ‘second rate’ or perhaps that we are outright, ‘research inactive’ failures. These divisive and demoralizing effects of journal list fetishism are distasteful and damaging. (Willmott, 2011: 430)
Willmott’s provocative words are justification enough to begin to take the measures necessary towards actualizing ontological empathy.
If we are to take this concept seriously, this culminates, at the most fundamental level, into moving beyond the confines of what the field traditionally labels as worthy research output and beginning to expand the scope of what institutions ought to value. One way of achieving this objective would be for doctoral educating institutions to seriously engage with and redefine the meaning of success. Research output in the elite American journals is certainly a form of success; however, this should not be considered a mandatory precondition for it. In 2008, when I received the accolades mentioned above, it not only provided external validation, but it was also celebrated by the professors whose opinions I valued most. As a result, I felt successful. In the end, this led to the attenuation of the discursive power of the panopticon gaze as it prevailed over my academic life and allowed me to feel empowered to pursue a dissertation and other subsequent projects that were driven by my scholarly passions rather than by a poorly veiled endeavour to acquiesce to the institutional pressures for research output. Ultimately, the system of surveillance that governed academic affairs at my institution, and which was maintained by the ubiquitous panopticon, was replaced by a more holistic appreciation of what qualified as laudable research pursuits and scholarly successes. In sum, ontologically redefining what it means to be a success in the business school system would be an effective first step into affording doctoral students’ research—which may be profoundly antithetical to what our institutions and discipline typically expect—with the ‘dignity and respect’ that Oliver advocates.
Intellectual space for the most junior members of the academy coupled with a holistic appreciation of ontological empathy, has the potential to create transformative and positive effects by furnishing doctoral students with the freedom to explore ideas that are either posited at the periphery of our discipline’s discourses or research topics that have, heretofore, been entirely ignored from academic scrutiny.
Concluding remarks
I began writing this article while I was in the early days of my doctoral program. I recently commenced my first full-time appointment at a non-North American business school. In my new position, I have the privilege of teaching a PhD course and supervising research students. In such capacities, I am often asked to provide professional advice by students aspiring to enter the academic field upon graduation. In revisiting what I have written in this article, I cannot help but acknowledge my own complicity in preserving the current system that expects doctoral students to publish in a narrow set of scholarly outlets. Indeed, much of the advice that I currently offer to students regarding research output is quite similar to the advice that I was given as a doctoral student—which, in essence, underscores the importance of publishing in elite American journals. This advice ultimately achieves two things: i) as Robert Giacalone (2009) suggests, the advice gives my tacit approval to a flawed system, and, ii) the values that are instilled through the diffusion of this advice discursively operate as a mechanism of what Foucault describes in his work on the panopticon and elsewhere as self-surveillance and governance. The very fact that I—as a scholar reasonably well versed in critical theory and sensitive to systems of discursive and oppressive power—propagate this advice hints at how the panopticon becomes almost permanent in its effect.
A reviewer of this article astutely pointed out one explanation for the advice that I have imparted on to research students. Namely, that ‘as soon as the game [for research output] becomes universal, any institution that “denies” educating its doctoral students into the rules of the game leaves them at an inferior position in relation to their peers’. In contemplating this suggestion, I do acknowledge its veracity—as must have my own professors who guided me through the PhD program. Indeed, in the role of a teacher or an advisor, I want my students to succeed—and, implicitly, I have defined this success as securing a position at a leading research-intensive university. 8 The primary criteria habitually used for being seriously considered for such a position is, of course, research output in elite journals. Thus, from this circuitous logic, the ultimate corollary of my advice is the reification of the very problematic system that I am seeking to question in this article.
Given the claims made in this article, moving forward I will conscientiously strive to be more reflexive, and more critical, in terms of the advice that I provide to students. Namely, while it is my responsibility to describe the present disposition of the field—as I truly interpret it to be—I will equally emphasize the importance of pursuing lines of scholarly inquiry that really matter to the student and that are daring enough to challenge the orthodox assumptions of our discipline’s largely static knowledge systems (see Alvesson and Sandberg, 2011; Sandberg and Alvesson, 2011). Taking on such risks in research—and I would constitute them as ‘risks’ as they would not pander to the ideological conventions of the elite journals—becomes, in and of itself, an important contribution for the field. At minimum, it compels us to be reflexive about central epistemological questions pertaining to the disposition of the knowledge that we construct. This will not only render the research that a student pursues to have greater meaning for their professional selves, but by engaging in research that (potentially) moves beyond the dominant theoretical frames of the elite journals, it may prove to offer fresh perspectives on various organizational phenomena and may, therein, negate the intellectual inertia that has come to take hold in our field. If as trainers of doctoral students—these students, of course, being the individuals who will be the future of organization and management studies—we allow them the intellectual space to undertake such streams of research, this will be, I believe, a significant step towards actualizing ontological empathy and an advancement to knowledge creation in our field.