Abstract
This remarkable little book shows that organization studies operates under a myth of oral superiority, an assumption that oral communication, especially face to face, is the ideal mode: richer and more authentic, deeper and more powerful than writing. This assumption is expressed directly in influential theories of media richness (Daft & Lengel, 1984, 1986) and social presence (Short, Williams, & Christie, 1976), but Fayard and Metiu show persuasively that it underlies much of our thinking about organizational behavior. Indeed, in western thought, the myth of oral superiority goes back at least as far as Plato, a fierce critic of writing as well as the first philosopher to write. Among Plato’s influential teachings is his argument that written words cannot teach us because they are dead signs that cannot speak, answer questions or come to their own defense. Writing is an inferior mode for developing knowledge. The impact that Plato’s ideas have had throughout the ages may be seen to refute this view or at least to complicate it. Similarly, the ideas put forward in media richness and social presence theories that writing is an inferior mode of expressing emotions and building communities—theories that have tremendous face validity because they build on our commonsense ideas about the advantages of oral versus written communication—are only sometimes supported in empirical studies. By carefully revealing how writing works and the mechanisms that give writing its power, Fayard and Metiu build a conceptual framework that helps us to unravel these seemingly contradictory empirical findings, to better understand the effects of new media on the organizational processes of knowledge sharing, the communication of emotions, and widespread collaboration, and to open up fruitful new lines of research about distributed work, virtual teams, and innovation.
To achieve this, the authors take a historical perspective, an inductive approach, and draw upon previous research on writing from a broad range of disciplines. They examine several remarkable examples of written correspondence throughout history that show the full potential of writing to express emotion, develop knowledge, and build communities. They use communication and literacy theories from organizational behavior, sociology and anthropology, and research in cognitive psychology—in particular the work of Havelock, Ong, and Goody—to build a theory of the four mechanisms that enable people to express emotions, develop knowledge, and build communities in writing: objectifying, addressing the reader, reflecting, and specifying. What is interesting is that each of these mechanisms reveals a way in which a commonly noted weakness of writing is also a strength.
It is often when we write an idea down, objectify it so that we can examine it ourselves and share it with others, that we realize that what seemed like a crystalline notion is in fact vague, unclear, and fleeting. This is how we think through writing. Inconsistencies become plain and can be eliminated. By choosing our words carefully to be precise and evocative, we gain the ability not only to express new ideas but also to stimulate our thinking—and eventually the thinking of our readers. We are pushed to do this when writing because of Plato’s criticism of written words as dead signs “that preserve a solemn silence if one questions them” (The Phaedrus, 275d). We must clarify and articulate an idea or an emotion in words that explain themselves to us and to others without recourse to dialogue and hand waving. It may be that we are unable to find the words to adequately express, for example, an emotion that we are feeling, but by trying our best to articulate what we are feeling a lot is gained in our own understanding and in how connected our reader feels to us. The process of objectifying leads to better ideas, better expressions of the emotions we are feeling, and helps create a shared understanding across different members of a community.
Whenever we write, we write with an intended audience in mind. We address this audience with our writing. The criticism of the written word that it is too universal and too general has again a flip side that proves to be an advantage. Because we cannot see our reader and the reader cannot ask questions and request complementary information, we imagine the reader and provide sufficient contextual information to ensure that our message will be correctly understood and not misinterpreted. We take time in advance to express ourselves in ways that are mindful of our readers’ full range of possible emotions and reactions. We are forced to imagine the readers’ reaction ahead of time and this helps us better to express the emotions we want to convey. We are forced to provide contextual information and answer anticipated questions in advance and this helps us think through our idea better and helps in the interpretation of knowledge. This contextual provision also helps create a set of shared references that builds identity in a community.
Because writing enables us to objectify ideas, it allows us to read those ideas several times and reflect on them. It allows the same for our readers. As a mechanism, then, reflection is dependent upon, but separate from, objectification. Writing is criticized for being asynchronous, but this time to think provides an opportunity—should we decide to take it—to deepen our thoughts and become aware of new ideas and feelings. Fayard and Metiu show that this can be enormously helpful in the expression of emotions. The lack of immediate feedback allows us to reflect more deeply on what we are feeling because we don’t have to manage our nonverbal and facial expressions as we would in a face-to-face setting; it makes it easier to share difficult emotions because we don’t have to take into account the immediate reactions of the audience and can express ourselves fully without interruption. In the development of knowledge, multiple readings facilitate understanding and suggest questions and areas for further elaboration.
The process of objectifying our ideas and addressing them to an intended audience enables us to become specific about those ideas and pushes us to be as precise, clear and detailed as possible to provoke the intended response and understanding in our reader. Oral communication unfolds over time and allows us to be more vague and incomplete in the formulation of our ideas. It allows us, in other words, to be lazy. Writing forces us to be as specific as possible. Fayard and Metiu show that this extra work is an advantage when expressing emotions, developing ideas, and building communities.
The analyses upon which this theory is built are fascinating. The authors look in detail at several sets of correspondence from different periods of history. They look first at the letters sent between 1703 and 1740 from the North American forts of the Hudson Bay Company back to corporate headquarters in London. The Hudson Bay Company was a trading company that supplied basic goods such as food, tools, guns, traps, and clothing to settlers in remote areas along the Hudson River, covering a territory of almost four million square acres. Decisions were made in London, but the only communication with the posts in North America was in the form of letters sent in the ships that sailed once each year between the two continents. This is an extreme example of distributed organization, whose letters Fayard and Metiu use to show how emotions were expressed, how knowledge of practices was transferred, and how the company cohered in such a decentralized setting.
Then they look at the correspondence of Virginia Woolf, the 20th-century British novelist and essayist. Woolf is famous for her ability, in novels such as Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), to express in writing the emotions that arise in her characters in response to what they see and experience. She wrote five or six letters per day to friends and family and, analyzing these letters, the authors are able to understand how writing can express emotions in a way that would be impossible in face-to-face situations.
Next, they examine the letters written between Albert Einstein and the French mathematician, Élie Cartan. This correspondence sets the basis for the development by later physicists of the Cartan–Einstein unification theory. The authors show in their analysis of these letters that, pace Plato, the processes of generating ideas, debating ideas, and articulating a theory are possible to achieve in writing. Traditionally, studies of the importance of writing on knowledge have focused on the output: the written word. Thus, they have examined the role of writing in codifying and recording knowledge. They have assumed—explicitly or implicitly—that writing is appropriate only for the transfer of explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge transfer and knowledge creation, in the myth of oral superiority, has been assumed to be beyond the power of writing. By studying the process of writing revealed in the Einstein–Cartan letters, Fayard and Metiu are able to show the role that the act of writing and reading plays in knowledge creation. This is something that the readers and authors of Organization Studies, or any academic journal, should be intimately familiar with and is nicely conceptualized here.
Finally, the authors examine two sets of correspondence in the so-called Republic of Letters, the Enlightenment creation of a community of intellectuals spanning Europe and involving thousands of individuals, a network sustained through the practice of letter writing. Fayard and Metiu show how letters created a space for experimentation with new ideas, testing them with others and establishing proof of scientific contributions. They exemplify another power of writing as well: The use of writing by outsiders to gain access to community exchange that would be denied to them in formal face-to-face settings. At a time when universities and academies of science were largely closed to women, the Republic of Letters allowed women to participate in the intellectual community. The way in which writing on the Internet plays the same role for excluded groups in contemporary society is expressed nicely in the caption of the much-republished 1993 New Yorker cartoon: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
For me, the letters and Fayard and Metiu’s discussion of them are the heart of the book and I would have liked to read more of the letters to better understand the nuance that the authors pull out. Unfortunately, difficulty securing the permission to quote long passages made this impossible. Many readers, though, may find the next section of the book, where the authors apply their framework to questions of modern organizations, to be the most interesting. The authors show that we can understand the effects of new media in organizations with reference to how well those technologies, and the social practices of their use, support the four mechanisms of writing. The potential is there for any new media to support the objectifying, addressing, reflecting, and specifying that give writing the power to express emotions, develop knowledge, and build communities. Fayard and Metiu give detailed examples of this possibility from the Linux open-source software development community, the OpenIDEO open innovation platform, and the KM Forum online forum for the exchange of ideas about knowledge management. Then they analyze aspects of new technologies and how we use them that may lead us away from particular mechanisms of writing, such as the use of shorter chat-style messages or tweets that degrades objectification; the quasisynchronous emailing and texting from our mobile phones with a fast reply cycle that sacrifices reflection; the ability to cc many readers to an email that makes effective addressing difficult; and the use of bullet points and minimal text in PowerPoint presentations that allow us to avoid specifying.
The Power of Writing in Organizations suggests that we view writing, the process of writing, as being mostly about an ability to think, that is, to analyze, understand, and develop a reflection about a feeling or an idea. Fayard and Metiu show us what we may lose in organizations if we neglect the mechanisms that give writing its power, but also how we can ensure that new technologies and the practices through which we engage them can support these mechanisms. In so doing, they give students of organizations a useful conceptual framework for thinking better about organizational communication and the impact of new media. They provide an interesting complement to discourse perspectives on organizing that focus on the context, content, and consequences of discourse but seldom look at the powerful impact that the modalities through which discourse is enacted are shaping what can be expressed and what meaning is created. Well-written and structured in such a way that each chapter can be read in isolation, so that the reader is never overwhelmed and can easily pull out the key ideas in context, Fayard and Metiu’s book exemplifies the power of writing about organizations.