Management Communication Quarterly Spring 2024 Newsletter

Editor Interview with Dr. Iga Maria Lehman

For this newsletter, we interviewed Professor Iga Lehman from the University of Social Sciences in Warsaw, Poland. Iga and her colleagues recently published a forum in MCQ about academic writing and the field of organizational studies. We wanted to learn more about the motivation for their forum and the implications for our work at MCQ. Our interview was edited for length and clarity.

Matt Koschmann (MK): Tell us about the motivation for the forum...what sparked your interest and what did you hope to accomplish?

Iga Maria Lehman (IML): The motivation for the forum had its origins in considerations of the criticism leveled at a great deal of scholarly writing in the field of management and organization studies and my scholarly interest in issues surrounding academic discourse. The field’s scientific outputs have been criticized for being written in a language that has been described as complex, pretentious and loaded with jargon, leading to the legitimation of a reader-insensitive way of writing about science and the exclusion of alternative rhetorical styles. In our respective contributions to the forum, I and my co-authors argue for the use of reflexive writing practices when crafting our texts for publication to achieve a more meaningful communication between us, as writers, and our readers. We believe that to establish this meaningful communication, reflexive thinking needs to be employed throughout the whole process of text creation: in its conception, preparation and revision. Reflexive thinking acknowledges that writing is a relational process, which requires, as Sinclair and Grey point out, “recognizing and making explicit the relationship between the writer and what, how, why they write” (2006, p. 447), and which, in my forum essay, I extend to include “who we write for.” It is this relationship which is often seen as lacking in much scholarly writing.

Our purpose was to stress the notion that writing is always reader-centered. This is echoed in what Ken Hyland and I claim elsewhere that text “has no life of its own, it is incomplete until it is read and it is the reader who brings ‘something’ to complete it” (2020, p. 9). However, this relationship between the writer and the reader needs to be created, the text needs to provide an opportunity for this to happen. In the forum, I and my co-authors assert that by adopting reflexive practices when crafting our texts for publication, we can create this opportunity. Specifically, we suggest considering reflexivity through the following concepts: conformity and individuality, socialization, respect and tenderness, all of which sensitize writing practice and consequently, enable writer and reader to jointly construct meaning.

MK: An academic journal like MCQ needs to have high standards for theoretical sophistication, conceptual clarity, and methodological rigor. However, this inevitably involves discourse and ways of writing that can be difficult to access for those outside our scholarly community. Do you think it's possible to develop academic literature that is both accessible to broader audiences and maintains the high intellectual standards of academia?

IML: I don’t think that theoretical sophistication, conceptual clarity, and methodological rigor necessarily require stylistic complexity. Indeed, similarly to Grey and Sinclair, I believe that complexity of expression often obfuscates what the writer is trying to communicate for the many and that “the complexity of ideas is best served by striving for simplicity of expression” (Grey & Sinclair, 2006, p. 447). Surely, if as scholars our main purpose in putting pen to paper is to communicate our ideas, why would we want to do so in a way that excludes a wider and more diverse audience? So I believe that it is both possible and necessary to have academic literature that is accessible to broader audiences, which in no way implies any impairment of the intellectual rigor of the work.

For me, reflexive writing practice involves the strategic use of ethical and emotional appeals. In my forthcoming monograph entitled Charismatic Leadership in Organizations: A Critique of Texts, I elaborate further on reflexive writing practice with meaning at its core and develop the concept of ‘textual charisma.’ As I argue in the book, as writers we need to engage in an act of seduction and pull the reader into our frame of reference. This entails carefully balancing our idiosyncratic claims for the significance and originality of our research on one hand, and our perceptions of the background knowledge, convictions and expectations of the audience on the other.

"Textual charisma" entails the skillful employment of metaphors, personal accounts, stories, rhetorical questions, attitude markers, direct appeals to readers, and the like, but above all, a careful use of technical vocabulary. But as my research shows, despite the presence of reader-inclusive rhetorical text features, technical language serves to distance all but the initiated and in doing so, impairs the effective processing of the text. As scholarly writers we are charged with the responsibility to create a relationship with the reader in which the centrality of what is intended to be communicated is essential, but so too is how it is communicated.

MK: Where else should we look to see the kind of reflexive writing you call for in the forum? Have you seen examples of academic journals or other scholarly publications doing this well?

IML: We can find examples of such writing in many texts published in academic journals in both humanities and social sciences. However, similarly to Van Maanen (1995a), I believe that journals alone, even the mainstream ones, do not constitute a disciplinary field. We, as scholarly authors, need to write with a much wider readership in mind, aiming to activate “certain identifiable reader responses” (Van Maanen, 1995a, p. 135). In his two papers published in Organization Science in 1995, Van Maanen calls for the recognition of the role of rhetoric in writing about organization theory, arguing that “staking out a theoretical position is unavoidably a rhetorical act” (1995a, p. 134). According to Van Maanen, for theorizing to be persuasive it must move away from what is disciplinarily accepted and expected, and be conveyed in a unique writing style that might well violate “some of our received and more or less unquestioned notions of just how and what organizational texts (and theories) are convincing” (1995a, p. 135). Van Maanen discusses the linguistic aspects of such stylistic uniqueness in the context of Karl Weick’s work whose way of writing he labels as ‘the allegoric breaching style’ and identifies its four characteristics which include: dialogicality and equality, indeterminacy, conjunctive logic, and authorial presence.

MK: From your perspective, who is a journal like MCQ for? And what is our obligation to those outside our scholarly community?

IML: Management Communication Quarterly is a journal that has communication and social issues at its core. As such, its mission is to reach wider professional and lay audiences. In today’s world, it is often the case that areas of expertise need to look outside of a given professional community in order to find new ways of researching, talking about, and reporting ideas. In academia, this is reflected in the awareness that interdisciplinarity is essential. Therefore, if only a handful of ‘experts’ are able to participate in our conversations the likelihood of creating innovation and change is drastically limited.

MK: Recently, you participated in a podcast called Accessible Academic about your MCQ forum. Tell us about that experience and how the forum was received with the host/audience. What sort of feedback have you received from the discussion?

IML: Before I participated in the podcast in the series “The Accessible Academic,” I had received a concept note from my hosts which clearly revealed its objectives:

1. To contribute meaningfully to the dissemination of research knowledge and findings in the field of social sciences.

2. To foster an informative yet entertaining dialogue that resonates with our audience and enhances their understanding of your important work.

So far, from the feedback I have received, the notion of making academic writing more accessible is a very welcome and important movement. However, we agreed that one individual will not do much to change the existing writing conventions and create the possibilities for a relational experience in academic texts. It will take both grassroots movements and the collaboration of scientific journals to bring about the necessary changes. However, if every time we, as scholars, are brave enough to draw on less privileged discourses, including our own native linguistic resources, then this collective effort can and will contribute to change. In so doing, we will challenge and redefine notions of the relationship between reader and writer and of what constitutes effective and engaging communication in scholarly writing. In this way, the podcast is part of this vision of the future of academic writing in social sciences which will be the space where we, diverse authors, can create, defend and nurture our own voices, and establish a relationship with the reader that is satisfying for both parties.

References

Grey, C., & Sinclair. A. 2006. Writing differently. Organization, 13, 443-453.

Hyland, K. & Lehman I. M. (2020). Preface. Discourses on Culture, 1(13), pp. 7-20.

Lehman, I.M. Charismatic Leadership in Organizations: A Critique of Texts. Routledge Studies in Leadership Research (in print).

Meriläinen, S., Tienari, J., Thomas, R., Davies, A. (2008) ‘Hegemonic academic practices: Experiences of publishing from the periphery,' Organization, 15(4), 629-642.

van Maanen, J. (1995a). Style as theory. Organization Science, 6(1), 133-143.

van Maanen, J. (1995b). Fear and Loathing in Organization Studies. Organization Science, 6(6), 687-692.

Global Editorial Board Locations

MCQ Editorial Board members represent 15 countries and 5 continents.

These numbers represent the institutional affiliation of board members

Seeking a New Book Review Associate Editor

MCQ is looking for a scholar to take over the management and screening of book reviews to the journal.

If you are interested, please contact the editor, Matthew Koschmann at koschmann@colorado.edu.

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Newsletter created by Laine Zizka, MS