On the Erosion of ‘Passionate Scholarship’

Abstract

Let me reflect for a short while on what several years of editorship at Organization Studies ‘taught’ me about the dynamics of the collective scientific enterprise in organization and management theory. In this farewell note, I will aggregate subjective impressions, everyday editorial experience and scholarly work to stimulate reflection about the possible ‘crisis’ of social sciences disciplines and the consequences of this crisis on organizational research. Nothing less. It is modestly intended to share thoughts, disappointments and hopes. The dynamics of organization studies are characterized, as in all types of scientific fields, by the configuration and the binding of its boundaries. Therefore, it partly depends on what boundaries scholars wish to establish and, subsequently, on what they wish to substantially address, on what is deemed to be legitimate research. But that is obviously not the whole story. I would even suggest that it is not what triggers changes and dynamics in this field. Those dynamics are also strongly related to the behaviours of individual members and how these behaviours influence the nature, the content and the ‘style’ of research that is going to be published and acclaimed. And that is obviously not finalized: educational and research institutions exert more and more influence, through their managerial practices and policy decisions, on what is going to be submitted to journals. A point I wish to quickly highlight here is that the present compulsion for individuals to compete for jobs and status could well be now more influential than individual willingness to tackle difficult ideas and subjects, partly because difficult ideas lead to writing complicated papers that journals do not have time to handle and are therefore inclined to neglect and reject. The outcome of that tendency is that the field of organization studies is, I am afraid, replete with low-influence and low ‘idea-intensive’ scholarship. I suggest that it is both a matter of topics and underlying ideologies, and a matter of individual and institutional behaviour. I am not going to repeat a (relatively) well-known diagnosis, although certain things should be said several times. And we also need to convey some understanding of the situation of many scholars, especially junior scholars, facing the power relations now embedded in academic careers. That said, I will rather rapidly offer a direction to move away from what I see as an erosion of what I call in this short note ‘passionate scholarship’. Passionate scholarship refers to commitment to a personally meaningful and socially relevant topic, ‘close to the heart’ (Heinrich, 2010). It is the recognition that intrinsic interest in a topic might help to break through institutional and competitive pressures to study or not study certain issues.