Your Excellency

Method

Having put together their sample of 62 excellent companies, Peters and Waterman (1982: 19) admitted that if they were ‘too precise’ about the definition of ‘excellence’ then they would ‘lose the essence of what [they] thought [they] were after’. Happily, we face no such problems in our own study as we do in fact have a rigorous and scientific measure of academic excellence in management and organization studies: the Association of Business Schools Academic Journal Quality Guide (Harvey et al., 2010), commonly known as the ‘ABS list’. Although other journal quality guides are available, the ABS list is the most widely used for research assessment exercises in the UK and is becoming increasingly influential in other European countries. Taking into consideration a range of criteria including the impact factor and research quality of published papers, the list ranks journals on a scale from one (the lowest) to four (the highest), which allows for the evaluation of research published in these journals.

For the purposes of this paper, we are interested in academics who are not only ‘objectively excellent’ according to the ABS list but also avowedly critical. Towards this end, we selected a sample of academics from the editorial board of Organization. This journal is currently ranked as a three-star journal on the ABS list, which makes it ‘semi-excellent’. Given the left-field nature of the journal’s aims and objectives (Parker and Thomas, 2011), we would also expect that members of the editorial team would share an ‘ethos which is explicitly … open, reflective, imaginative and critical’ (Organization, 2011). In our interviews we spoke to one editor-in-chief, four serving and two former associate editors, and ten editorial board members. All of our interviewees have an excellent publication record. By this, we do not mean that they have written ground-breaking monographs or informative think-pieces in quality newspapers; these types of publication fall firmly outside the remit of excellence (as defined by journal ranking lists). Rather, we mean that they have recently published at least four papers in three- or four-star journals. At the time of writing, eight of our respondents belonged to the elite club of ‘4-by-4s’, that is, four publications in four-star publications over the last six years. Eleven of our respondents work in the UK, three elsewhere in Europe, two in Australia and one in the US. We also interviewed an editor of the Academy of Management Review who is based in the USA, although to be fair he just happened to walk into the room while we were interviewing someone else and it felt a bit impolite to kick him out. All of our interviewees are professors who are, we might say, at ‘the top of their game’. In total, we conducted 17 semi-structured interviews lasting 50 minutes on average, with 18 participants in total. Our respondents spoke candidly to us under the condition of anonymity. They have all managed to balance the pursuit of research excellence with the need for critical thought, although some are of course more excellent than others (one admitted to us that he is ‘ex-excellent’, meaning that his hit-rate in the premier journals has declined significantly in recent years). So, following Peters and Waterman, let us now turn to the lessons from academia’s most excellent critical management scholars.

The secrets of excellence

We initiated most of our interviews with the provocative question ‘How did you become so excellent?’. Some respondents were thrown by this question and began immediately to disassociate themselves from the label of excellence. For example, one stated bluntly that ‘I do not consider myself to be excellent’ (Respondent 6). Another thought it was ‘really, really bizarre’ to think about oneself in this way (Respondent 9). Others simply laughed. Having explained to them that according to the ABS list they are objectively excellent, we asked our respondents to speak about the strategies and tactics they use when targeting top-ranked journals. While some were initially reluctant to be drawn into a discussion about ‘cheap little tricks’ (Respondent 6), or claimed not to have used them (Respondent 18), most respondents did talk about specific ‘secrets of excellence’ they have employed to get their work published. Often, they spoke in metaphorical terms of ‘playing the game’.

Before we discuss the rules of the game, we should note that most of our respondents attributed their excellence to the environment in which they received their research training. Having an excellent PhD supervisor, or pursuing doctoral studies in an excellent department, increases the chances of becoming an excellent academic. This means that you do not need to be intrinsically gifted to become a high-flying critical management scholar: ‘I don’t think I was particularly bright or more intelligent than others, I just think I was better trained’ (Respondent 1). Much of this, of course, is down to chance. One academic we spoke to managed to publish an article in a leading American journal as a graduate student: ‘I don’t really know how that happened, but it did’ (Respondent 6). Others respondents said they had ‘stumbled into excellence’ (Respondent 12) or had become an ‘accidental careerist’ (Respondent 2). According to some of the scholars we interviewed, excellence is about being in the right place at the right time: in many ways excellence is ‘just a freak of circumstance’ (Respondent 10) or ‘just the luck of the draw’ (Respondent 14). What matters most, perhaps, is absorbing the secrets of excellence from those around you.

From our empirical material, we have distilled five key secrets of excellence (attentive readers will note that three of them happen to correspond to Peters and Waterman’s attributes of excellence). Sometimes our respondents mentioned these secrets in the context of their own research, at other times they were reflecting (often critically) on the strategies of others; in both cases, these practices are seen as being widespread in management and organization studies.

The costs of excellence

The advantages of excellence are obvious: improved career prospects, job mobility and peer esteem are all rewards for publishing in premier outlets. As one respondent put it: ‘I’m paid massively well to write what the fuck I want to’ (Respondent 3). But there is also a price to be paid for pursuing excellence. Some academics have certainly had to make personal sacrifices. For example, one of our respondents who has published extensively in top tier European journals admitted that he has not been able to live ‘a normal life’ (Respondent 10) due to his immense productivity. The pursuit of excellence, especially for female academics, can certainly have an impact on family life and decisions about having children (Respondent 16). Another told us that ‘it doesn’t feel so great’ when you write purely for the sake of publishing in a top-ranked journal, as it goes against the principle of autonomy and genuine intellectual inquiry (Respondent 13). Most respondents, however, highlighted the negative consequences for research quality. In particular, there was a feeling that the preeminent journals in the field do not necessarily publish the most interesting types of research, and may actually have systems in place that serve to stifle imaginative work.

One common complaint revolved around the peer review process in top-ranked journals, which was seen as being so rigorous and exacting as to inadvertently produce bland or trivial results. Although some of our respondents defended the peer review process in four-star rated journals, others were concerned that the costs may actually outweigh the benefits. As one respondent put it, ‘that kind of careful, meticulous standard has generated as much uninteresting bells and whistles … as it has really novel, careful ideas’ (Respondent 6). The same respondent went on to note that papers published in four-star journals can be deficient in some way despite (or perhaps because of) a painstaking review process:

When … I look back through … what was apparently produced by these rigorous standards, I am so totally unimpressed. I am so totally uninterested. Honestly, wading through it is painful enough, but then trying to discern how one is better than another, more relevant than another, more interesting than another, that will put anyone to sleep. (Respondent 6)

By this the respondent did not mean that everything published in objectively excellent journals is boring and irrelevant. The point, rather, is that reviewers and editors of top-ranked journals oblige authors to conform to established methodological procedures and a particular style of writing that often limit expressions of thought. The review process is undoubtedly useful in developing arguments and raising levels of scholarship, but it can also act as a ‘kind of hegemonic force that … sort of waters down and makes similar, creates just a lot of homogeneity in what is excellent’ (Respondent 6).

This hegemony of excellence, according to one of our respondents, has a ‘chilling effect’ on academic research (Respondent 12). Top-ranked journals place expectations on authors to conform to a rigid set of standards, which has the consequence of stifling genuinely innovative work: ‘I think the term is, they expect you to “engage in conversations” in the journal. [But] what if you want to start a new conversation?’ (Respondent 12). One respondent noted that he has abandoned projects that he thought were interesting and potentially valuable purely because they were unlikely to appeal to the leading journals in the field (Respondent 5). For this reason the pursuit of excellence was seen as a rather double-edged strategy, particularly for academics who are relatively new to the game:

I can see some young scholars who are understandably quite happy to subject themselves to these rules of the game and to begin to career-plan very instrumentally around them. And I think the potential benefits for them is that they may well, if successful, go on more quickly. But the costs, I think, are that they don’t explore their avenues for writing for other audiences to engage with or other forms of scholarship that could be important to them. (Respondent 9)

On this view, excellence has a chilling effect not only on the type of research being done but also on the intellectual horizons of early-career academics.

It is no surprise, then, that some of our respondents thought that journals with a lower ranking on the ABS list, or absent from the list altogether, were more open to novel ideas and provided scope to ‘stretch and think and write without constraints’ (Respondent 6). Similarly, academic monographs—although they may well be a series of papers stitched together into a coherent whole—offer scholars a space where ‘you can be broader, you feel less constrained, you don’t have to be that mainstream or narrow or make compromises or write in order to satisfy a particular reviewer’ (Respondent 17). It is interesting to note that many respondents felt that their best piece of work, or the one they are most proud of, was not a widely-cited paper that had been published in a top-ranked journal; in fact, it was often a little-known paper in a low rated journal, a book-chapter in an edited collection, or in one case even a book review that was published in an unranked journal. While we do not wish to make too much of this—after all, the academics we spoke to were simply expressing their own personal preferences—we might wonder how it is that the objective measure of excellence fails to correspond on a basic level with a more subjective criterion of excellence, especially as many of our respondents play an active role in setting the standards for top tier journals. If even the most excellent papers in the most excellent journals are seen as ‘boring and deadly depressing’ (Respondent 10), as one respondent put it, this tells us that something has gone strangely awry in the world of management and organization studies.

Playing the game or being played?

Despite the reservations expressed by most of our respondents towards the regime of excellence, many critical management scholars publish extensively in three- and four-star journals. The complete list of 118 ‘4-by-4’ academics in the 2008 RAE contains a high number of scholars that are associated with critical management studies (15% to 20% by our own rough estimate). Critical management scholars therefore ‘play the game’ at the same time as they condemn its rule or lament its consequences. As one respondent neatly put it, excellence can be seen as ‘a machine that keeps producing contradictions’ (Respondent 4).

In the interviews, we encountered two specific ‘noble narratives’ that sought to explain this apparent tension. The first was the idea that publishing in three- and especially four-star journals allows critical scholars to create a space for academic freedom within the business school. Here is one typical example:

We have to agree that there is a game that we have to play. And we don’t need to be the slaves of the game, we don’t need to be defined by the game, but at the same time we need to acknowledge that this is a game that we have to play. And beyond that we can do original, interesting and creative work. […] You buy yourself freedom and you buy yourself the ability to be creative. (Respondent 13)

From this perspective, the primary motivation for publishing in highly ranked journals is to gain the autonomy to pursue more imaginative or innovative research (which, according to this respondent, is unlikely to be published in the most excellent journals). Another professor told us he targets the leading journals in the field ‘in order to lick the ass of my employers [laughs]’ (Respondent 11); meanwhile he is free to publish in what he considers to be more worthwhile outlets, such as monographs and lower ranked or unrated journals, which allow for more creativity in both form and content.

The second ‘noble narrative’ we identified is the idea that engaging with systems of excellence will allow critical academics to change the rules of the game from within. One respondent wondered whether ‘we need so many journals’, especially lower ranked critical ones, and suggested that that he would ‘do the field a better service’ by submitting his work to top-ranked American journals instead (Respondent 17). This would have the effect of introducing critical work into the mainstream, rather than preaching to the converted. Indeed, one of our respondents felt that this is precisely what has been happening over the last ten or 15 years: critical management studies has become institutionalized within some of the leading European journals in the field (Respondent 15). As well as legitimizing critical management scholarship by publishing within more orthodox outlets, joining the editorial board of a four-star journal also affords ‘the opportunity to actually make things more humane’ in terms of the process of publication (Respondent 5).

Both noble narratives—buying freedom and changing the system from within—are seductive for critical management scholars, but it is perhaps not so easy to put these principles into practice. One respondent was very sceptical of people who say ‘I do the four journal publications and then … I feel free 10% of the time’, because writing for top-ranked journals is really ‘quite demanding’ in terms of the time and energy spent in crafting a paper for submission and satisfying reviewers’ requests (Respondent 17). It is therefore ‘just an illusion’, the respondent continued, to imagine that critically inclined scholars will be able to reclaim some creative space for themselves in any meaningful way by playing the game of excellence. Analogously, the attempt to change the system from within may lead to academics simply becoming a part of the system itself. Despite having the best of intentions as a critical scholar, one respondent told us, it is very difficult to avoid being dragged ‘little by little’ into the game (Respondent 7).

Against this background, we suggest that the frequent use of the game metaphor by our respondents is perhaps less metaphorical than it may appear. When playing a game, Gadamer (2004: 106) tell us, ‘the game masters the players’. Playing requires one’s full effort and concentration, there is no holding back; the game must be taken seriously. Of course the player may experience great freedom in playing, but this freedom involves considerable risk: one may become so engrossed in the game that the game actually comes to outplay the player. This is both seductive and dangerous, as Gadamer (2004: 106) tells us: ‘The real subject of the game … is not the player but instead the game itself. What holds the player in its spell, draws him into play, and keeps him there is the game itself’. The rules of the game, in other words, enforce their own logic on the player. As a result, the player is unable to use the game for their own purposes; on the contrary, the game itself starts to structure the experience and suspend the subjectivity of the player, who loses him or herself in play. It is in this sense, for Gadamer (1975: 106), that ‘all playing is a being-played’.

We find this same tension between playing and being played among the players of the game of excellence. For example, one respondent claimed to use publication strategies to her own advantage: ‘I consider myself selectively playing with these regimes [of excellence] for certain purposes. But I’m not a believer in them, if that makes sense’ (Respondent 6). The idea that one can play the game of excellence without believing in it certainly does make sense, but perhaps not in the way the respondent imagines. As soon as one begins to play, the question of one’s ‘belief’ is no longer a concern; what matters is that one plays. By its very playing, the game exerts its own force and direction over the player to the extent that the purpose of the game—in this case, establishing and maintaining regimes of excellence—is served regardless of the player’s own personal values or intentions. We would therefore be mistaken to think that the subject of the game of excellence is the well-published (and perhaps critically inclined) scholar; the subject, here, is the game itself.

Some of our respondents were able to recognize and reflect on the tension between playing and being played, albeit at times somewhat falteringly. In one case, a respondent struggled to express the way he felt about his own relationship to the game of excellence. At first he took aim at academics he sees as ‘writing stuff they can get published rather than stuff they care about’, but after some hesitation he admitted that this is something he also recognizes in himself: ‘It’s not quite as calculating or explicit, but subconsciously, I think, yes’ (Respondent 4). Others needed little time for reflection to make a similar point: ‘I’m so colonized that I have a hard time thinking outside of journal publications’ (Respondent 1). One of our respondents reflected on a shift in his mindset: whereas he normally seeks to produce research that is ‘stimulating, interesting and hopefully also rigorous’, he admitted that he occasionally gets ‘seduced’ by the game (Respondent 18). This can lead to him making ‘compromises’ in order to get a paper through the review process, approaching the task in terms that would be more familiar to a sportsman or puzzle-solver than a professional academic: ‘I’m bloody well going to get this through, somehow I’ve got to be victorious … I’m going to crack this one [laughs]’ (Respondent 18). Another respondent seemed to be taken a little by surprise at her own responses to our questions as she realized that she had, perhaps unwittingly, become assimilated within the game of excellence: ‘Like when you asked, “What is my best work?”, I noticed, part of the reason I giggled is, I noticed that my temptation is like, “Well the stuff that’s published in the best journals, I guess”’ (Respondent 6). Here, the respondent notes that she has almost lost her sense of how to assess the quality of her own work; she has effectively outsourced her judgement to the game of excellence. Tellingly, the respondent refers to highly ranked journals as the ‘best’ journals (instead of a more precise signifier such as ‘top-rated or ‘four-star’), even though she admits that they publish a lot of ‘uninteresting’ papers (Respondent 6).

While these respondents were able to reflect meaningfully on the problematic consequences of game-playing in academia—and their own ambiguous status as players of the game—others seemed less aware of the potential dangers of playing and being played. For example, one respondent told us that he has never ‘felt the need to compromise’ with his research although he went on to say that he has on occasion included arguments in his paper that he thought were ‘irrelevant’ for the sake of placating hostile reviewers (Respondent 14). Another claimed not to be a ‘trick-oriented person’, in the sense of using particular strategies to get published, but later admitted to us that ‘once or twice’ he has reused a significant amount of material that was originally published in a book chapter for a journal paper: ‘Sometimes we can copy and paste some of the stuff, but not too much’ (Respondent 17). When probed further, the respondent suggested that even 50% of reconstituted material would be acceptable in certain circumstances. These examples-on our reading at least-suggest that there is a tension between the self-understanding of the respondents and their publication practices, which may be a sign of how researchers can become enmeshed within systems of excellence.

Becoming fully absorbed within the game of excellence is not necessarily an unpleasant experience; after all, it confers numerous rewards on its most skilled and able players. Moreover, despite the exertion of playing the game—and all players must take it seriously if they are to advance within its parameters—game-playing in academia removes the burden of trying to answer fundamental questions about the nature and purpose of our research, such as: is my work important, interesting or relevant, and in what way? The players of excellence are relieved of those questions for as long as the game continues.

Conclusion

Previous research shows that gaming in academia is practiced by a number of actors at various levels: authors, editors, publishers, universities and governments may all seek to skew the system of which they are a part (see Macdonald and Kam, 2010). What we have been concerned with in this paper is the gamesmanship of critical management scholars. We are not suggesting that critically inclined academics are more prone to gaming than other researchers, such as those working in the functionalist tradition. Indeed, gaming seems also to take place in fields outside of management and organization studies, such as economics and accounting (Faria, 2005; Moizer, 2009). What we are saying is that critical management scholars often imagine they can play-and master-the game when at times the game comes to master its players. In effect, it seems difficult for academics to play the game of excellence without at the same time being played by the game. Critical management scholars are therefore not only objectively excellent according to the ABS list, but are also shaped subjectively by excellence in that—far from buying themselves freedom or changing the system from within—playing the game alters the way they approach and assess their own academic work. At worst, it becomes difficult for game-playing critical academics to extricate themselves from a regime of excellence that they may see as being fundamentally ‘unfair’ (Respondent 4) and even ‘inhumane’ (Respondent 6).

This has considerable implications for thinking about critical research in management and organization studies. We saw that critical scholars tend to play the game at the same time as they distance themselves from it by condemning its rules or lamenting its consequences. This suggests that academics in the business school do not need to endorse the publication game for them to sustain and reproduce it, which is perhaps indicated by the high level of critical management researchers who featured prominently in the 2008 RAE in the UK. For this reason, we are sceptical of MacDonald and Kam’s solution to gamesmanship in management and organization studies. While they suggest a ‘Tinkerbell Solution’ to the cult of publication in top tier journals—that is, simply ceasing to believe in the regime of excellence (Macdonald and Kam, 2007: 651)—we have shown that it is not necessary to believe in the game at all; what matters is that the game is played. Perhaps the game is even more powerful if its players do not express their approval of journal rankings and impact factors since this allows them, using Fleming and Spicer’s (2003) phrase, to ‘work at a cynical distance’ without fear of unsettling their critical identity. Indeed, our interviews point to the fact that there is a great deal of ‘enlightened false consciousness’ in CMS, which takes the form of an assumption that one can take part in a system one does not agree with or believe in without becoming either entangled in it or changed by it (Žižek, 1989).

The authors of this paper are by no means innocent bystanders to the game of excellence, merely observing from the sidelines; we, too, are part of the game. By virtue of having published the present paper in a ‘semi-excellent’ journal, we will have simultaneously improved our career prospects and pleased the Director of Research in our respective departments. As one respondent tried to reassure us: ‘Maybe even a “Speaking Out” piece in Organization qualifies [as] three-star’ (Respondent 4). Moreover, the process of conducting interviews with some of the most excellent academics in critical management studies also serves to raise our own profile as aspiring critical scholars in the field. Perhaps we are guilty, then, of submitting to excellence, being productive through people and using CMS as a USP. We might argue that the secrets of excellence, whether intentionally or not, have been partially absorbed by the authors of this paper.

All this is true. We are not claiming, however, to be outside all forms of gamesmanship in management and organization studies. Indeed, playing the game may be an unavoidable state of affairs or even a condition of possibility for university life as it is presently constituted—unless, of course, we detach ourselves completely from all academic institutions. For some, this is no doubt a reasonable proposition (Berglund, 2008). But for those of us who wish to remain sheltered within the ‘ruins’ of the university (Readings, 1996), reflecting on our predicament may be the first step to extracting ourselves from regimes of excellence. This could begin with a consideration of how one’s own research interests and intellectual aspirations have, over time, been shaped and modified by playing the publication game. In our case the process of researching and writing this paper has further sensitized us not only to the demands made on scholars such as ourselves to produce and disseminate worthwhile research, but also to the way that success is measured by the outlet in which one’s work is eventually published.

A final note on ‘excellence’. It is well-known that many of the companies that had been singled out by Peters and Waterman as exemplars of excellence soon found themselves in dire financial straits. Of course, if we were being glib we might make the same point about some of the leading journals in the field and the research that gets published in them: four-star today, one-star tomorrow. Such a predicament is certainly possible, if not especially likely (Clark and Wright, 2007). However, we would like to close this paper with a different kind of reflection on the potential to reconfigure the meaning of excellence in management and organization studies. In the early 1990s, a decade after the publication of In Search of Excellence, Tom Peters told a live audience of managers that he had redefined what he understood by ‘excellence’: ‘My definition of excellence today is very simple, nonfinancial, and a one- sentence definition. And that is, would you want your son or daughter to work here?’ (Peters, cited in Newfield, 2003: 212). Tempting as it is to mock Peters’ cloying sentimentality, perhaps we might take this redefinition of excellence as a (only slightly tongue-in-cheek) guiding principle for academic research within the business school: would you want your son or daughter to publish here? Assuming one would not wish one’s offspring to prostitute themselves for academic success (Frey, 2003), this notion of excellence may at least prompt some critical reflection about one’s own motivations for targeting the most highly ranked-but at times poorly regarded-journals in the field.