ASQ's December Issue and Thoughts on Why We Must Keep Reading
New articles, book reviews, and a reflection on reading by Jerry Davis
December Issue Overview
ASQ’s latest issue ends the year with our last essay in honor of our 70th volume, which focuses our attention on the need to study (and hopefully ameliorate) wicked crises. Additionally, this issue offers two empirical articles about how organizational and market outcomes differ by race. One focuses on the uneven racial reactivity to credit score evaluations, while the other demonstrates the disparate influence of work histories in hiring. A qualitative study of Chinese porcelain artists demonstrates how disintermediation of the art markets leads to changes in expert autonomy. Finally, a paper tracing the development of the biotherapeutic industry uncovers how religiosity influences the evolution of industry clusters in cases of morally contested technologies. Happy reading!
Wicked Crises and the (In)capacity to Act
Renate E. Meyer
This essay, in honor of ASQ’s 70th volume, defines wicked crises and discusses two forces, organizational fragmentation and societal fragmentation, that weaken society’s power to address such thorny problems. Reminding readers that crises can also be optimistic given their potential to spur positive action, Meyer calls for organization and management scholars to undertake studies that address the complex, interrelated nature of wicked crises and the fragmentation that characterizes their longevity.
A Racialized Engine of Anxiety? Race, Reactivity, and the Uneven Tax of Credit Scores
Davon Norris
Evaluations based on credit scores are known to generate anxiety, but is this effect uniform across populations? Shifting the traditional focus from the scores to the people being scored, this study shows that the experience of being scored differs across racial groups. In a mixed-methods study, the author’s interviews and surveys reveal that Black participants experience higher anxiety about their credit scores compared to their White counterparts, regardless of whether respondents have high or low scores. The author enlists the work of W.E.B. DuBois and Frantz Fanon to develop a racialized reactivity perspective that accounts for the disparity in respondents’ reactivity, emphasizing how credit scores can change the world rather than merely represent it.
Applying While Black: The Collateral Effects of Racial Differences in Work Histories
Prasanna Parasurama, Ming D. Leung, and Sharon Koppman
In this study, the authors reveal a previously unidentified driver of racial disparities in employment: work histories. Whereas prior scholarship has assumed that work histories are race neutral, this study pinpoints structural constraints that limit job-search strategies and available jobs for Black job seekers. Examining nearly 500,000 job applications at two U.S. technology companies, the authors show that experiencing and anticipating racial discrimination leads Black applicants to apply to and accept broader types of jobs than White applicants do, ultimately leading to less-specialized and competitive work histories. The findings thus extend our understanding about how supply- and demand-side choices in the labor market interact.
Art for Whose Sake? Managing Professional Autonomy and Empowered Clients in the Porcelain Capital of China
Siyin Chen, Marlys Christianson, and Chen-Bo Zhong
In the age of ubiquitous review platforms and disintermediated marketplaces, how do professionals safeguard their autonomy? Conducting a qualitative study of porcelain artists in China, the authors find that some experts preserve their autonomy by decomposing and distilling their expertise in order to incorporate clients’ feedback into their art. Other experts, who see their work as indivisible, choose to forgo their autonomy in order to satisfy clients, or they relocate it by pursuing alternate career paths. The findings challenge traditional conceptions of professional autonomy and client compliance and offer new insights on creative work and cultural production.
Roadblock on the Highway to Heaven? The Effect of Religion on Cluster Development in Controversial Industries
Olga M. Khessina, Samira Reis, and Yisook Lim
Focusing on biotherapeutics firm entry rates in U.S. metropolitan statistical areas, the authors find that religion suppresses the development of industrial clusters when some religious denominations view an industry as morally controversial. The study theorizes three underlying processes in this suppressive effect related to levels of oppositional religiosity in regions: high negative attitudes among religious locals, the resistance of religious social movements, and the ecological impact of neighboring regions. The findings contribute to scholarship on cluster development and the role of religion in entrepreneurship.
Book Reviews
Ethan Mollick. Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI
Subrina Shen
Matt Beane. The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines
Jason Davis
Christopher Marquis. The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profits and Socializes Costs
Michael L. Barnett
Kara Swisher. Burn Book: A Tech Love Story
M. Diane Burton
Benjamin C. Waterhouse. One Day I’ll Work for Myself: The Dream and Delusion That Conquered America
Robert Eberhart
Bruce G. Carruthers. The Economy of Promises: Trust, Power, and Credit in America
Mark S. Mizruchi
Ilana Gershon. The Pandemic Workplace: How We Learned to Be Citizens in the Office
Tsedal Neeley
Hatim A. Rahman. Inside the Invisible Cage: How Algorithms Control Workers
Matt Beane
Why Read?
By Jerry Davis (Former ASQ Editor)
ASQ celebrates itself as a reader’s journal. The quality of the writing has been central to the identity of the journal since Linda Johanson became managing editor and insisted on putting every accepted article through an exacting re-revision process. Clear writing is clear thinking, and Linda’s style rules rivaled those of The New Yorker: limited italics, no exclamation marks, few “In sum”s. Joan Friedman and Ashleigh Imus have carried on this tradition, and it helps explain why ASQ is vastly over-represented on doctoral syllabi around the world. If it’s in ASQ, it’s worth reading.
But what if reading were to just...stop? We are living through a shift from print culture to oral culture in which the spoken word regains dominance (as Marshall McLuhan foretold). Why read an article if NotebookLM can give you the five-minute podcast (or, no doubt soon, a TikTok video with an interpretive dance)? Does science even require reading anymore? And if not, is reading so compelling that we might do it without compulsion?
AI and other tools are forcing the issue on us. Here, I consider what the challenge is, what’s at stake, and why we might save reading from the ashbin of history.
Enter The Matrix
One of my favorite scenes in The Matrix is when Trinity and Neo need to escape a skyscraper and make their way to the roof, where a helicopter sits unattended. “Can you fly that thing?” asks Neo. “Not yet” says Trinity. “Tank, I need a pilot program for a B212 helicopter. Hurry!” And Tank downloads code into Trinity’s brain that makes her an expert pilot. It’s a fantasy that comports well with our tech overlords’ vision of efficient education.
Doctoral education, in contrast, is exceptionally inefficient because it revolves around reading and thinking. (I myself am a slow reader. And a slow thinker.) Imagine you’re a first-year doctoral student confronting seminars that include dozens of articles and books. Now imagine that you live in a futuristic world where NotebookLM makes it easy to upload PDFs of every article on the syllabus and provides summaries and smart critiques, writes one-page memos on each week’s readings, finds themes and tensions across the readings, notes historical developments, suggests novel paper topics -- and, if asked, will turn it all into a podcast you can listen to at the gym at 1.5X speed.
Reader, we are living in that simulation. It is not hard to foresee a time when all course materials, including transcripts extracted from seminar recordings, will be dumped into LLMs and distilled into conveniently accessible insights. “Tank, I need a scholar program for a Ph.D. in management. Hurry!”
Perhaps you have heard of Cluely. It’s an app created by Columbia students to help cheat on remote interviews. It runs in the background on one’s computer, listens to the interviewer’s questions, prompts AI for answers, and provides them in teleprompter format for the interviewee to read. Voila: You aced the interview, and now you’re going to medical school! After getting kicked out of Columbia, the founder expanded Cluely’s remit to “Cheating tool for literally everything,” and received venture funding from Andreessen Horowitz, the highly honorable VC behemoth. (This horrifying 90-second video is worth watching.) Wearing Meta’s AI glasses would allow users to make their way through life with answers for everything.
A scholar equipped with Meta glasses and Cluely trained on the corpus of an entire doctoral program would be a formidable interlocutor at a seminar or job talk or oral exam. Of course, they might have no idea what they were talking about as they read the scripted comments, but they would certainly look well-read -- even if the only reading they did was from a tiny teleprompter.
Reading Optional; Writing Required
Judging by the scenario above, soon it may be possible to enjoy a successful academic career without ever reading an article. But unless there is a sea change in our publish-or-perish incentive system, scholars are still required to write articles.
A doctoral student once confided that their faculty seemed to write more than they read. Which...seems accurate. We get measured and evaluated based on our publications, but nobody gets rewarded for reading (other than the intrinsic joy of reading about fixed effects and variance inflation factors). The prior literature can often seem like a convenience store to drop into for a few quick essentials. In the worst case, lit searches are driven by a confirmation bias: “Can somebody point me to an article to explain why this result makes sense?”
In organization studies, we spend a surprising amount of our energy on tips and tricks to entice our readers -- baiting the hook, springing the trap, highlighting the novelty of our findings. It is almost as if the point of our science was to bring delight to readers rather than to reveal the truths we have uncovered about the world. More pragmatically, we aim to get reviewers and an editor to accept the merit of our work so it will end up in print. This may fuel the idea that these are the readers that really count; any beyond this set are a happy bonus. To quote the most poetic line in volume 70, issue 1 of ASQ: “Like unworn articles of polyester clothing piling up by the acre in Chile’s Atacama desert, unread research articles pile up by the thousands in online open access journals.” Reading is not the point; publishing is.
Does Science Need Readers?
A skeptic might wonder why so much effort goes into the creative writing aspect of journal articles in organization studies. Crazy metaphors about polyester clothing seem like misplaced energy if the point is to convey important discoveries yielded by our research.
And there are alternatives. My experience publishing in a finance journal (owned by an unnamed Dutch conglomerate) suggests that some fields view the text of an article as mere adornment. The real science is conveyed in the results tables. All the editorial input is aimed at making sure the tables are sufficient to stand on their own. Readers in finance evidently head straight to the findings -- if they know what the variables are, they can impute the story behind them. The pages of words that came before are optional, aimed at slower-moving scholars who have not kept up with the literature.
An even harsher skeptic might ask why the public should be supporting work aimed primarily at pleasing the palate of fellow academics. We don’t fund sailing for pleasure; why should we fund prose-poetry about polyester? (Why indeed? The proof is left as an exercise for the reader.)
But suppose the finance journal is right and that science is mostly about the findings, not the gift wrapping of words around them. “Articles” in this world may be a vestige of an old-timey world gone by.
James Evans and Eamon Duede describe the emerging world of “science after science“ in which AI produces the truly frontier research, which may not be comprehensible to humans. Instead, human scientists end up being the interpreters of the work done by AI, which is off…folding proteins or something. They caution, “As AI comes to dominate all aspects of scientific practice, alternative approaches and methodologies can be squeezed out. Although some of this replacement represents genuine epistemic progress by superseding outdated models, creative destruction of this kind can also drive diversity collapse. This poses a unique challenge: Unlike traditional scientific progress, where new methods enhance disciplinary toolkits but disciplines remain distinct, AI’s efficiency could create a monoculture of research practices within and across fields.”
Keep Reading
Perhaps this is the function of reading: maintaining and expanding the diversity of science. Maybe science is not (just) about tables full of numbers, inscrutable to humans but transparent to AI. Maybe the interpretive element -- reading metaphors about polyester -- is essential too.
I spent this fall at Copenhagen Business School in a department named Business Humanities and Law. The group included philosophers, historians, legal scholars -- people for whom writing and reading are the essence of their scholarship. I had the privilege to attend their annual writing retreat near Elsinore (Hamlet’s castle), where we spent two days discussing each others’ work in small groups. Everyone had done the reading, and the conversations were intense and exhilarating. Drafts of pieces on corporate personhood, the ethics of hierarchy, tort law, AI and entrepreneurship, international taxation, soccer team ownership, and the weird popularity of the business model canvas created a diverse buffet. And every piece made me reflect on my own work in different ways.
Specific conversations, in a specific place, about specific pieces of writing, sparked insights, not just about findings but about how to think about them. We were a community of readers engaged in a common cause, centered on reading. (And for the record: Polyester is an excellent metaphor: it’s synthetic, slippery, unnatural, uncomfortable, and disposable, yet non-biodegradable, leaching microplastics into the environment for centuries. Really, polyester is the tofu of metaphors, readily absorbing the flavors around it.)
Perhaps humans and reading are superfluous in some realms of science. But I’m happy to be dialed into conversations where reading is fundamental. At its best, ASQ and other journals serve to convene these conversations, creating a community of careful readers (starting with editors and reviewers) and advancing our collective understanding about organizations. That community is worth preserving.
From December 24 through January 4, the ASQ office will be closed. No decision letters will be sent, and no submissions will be processed. Happy holidays!