‘Challenging the Disciplinary Structures of Academia’:
A Performance in Talk-Back and Repartee
Michael Elmes and Mario Moussa. Tamara : Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization
Science. Las Cruces: 2003. Vol. 2, Iss. 4; pg. 39, 13 pgs
Abstract
This paper is a performance of a prior paper on discipline in academia. The
original paper was conceived over 10 years ago and had been submitted and rejected
at least 4 times at various journals in organization studies. It described the
way in which academia as an institution disciplined academics in their dress,
mannerism, writing style, and other kinds of academic performance. The data
for the paper drew from a variety of fictional and non-fictional sources. Reviewer
reactions were consistently mixed but in different ways; on the European side,
the paper was often described as trivial and obvious and on the American side,
over-the-top, caricatured, and unsubstantiated. To enrich the paper, we decided
to intersperse selected reviewer comments throughout the original and engage
in a repartee with those comments. The resulting dialogue, we believe, makes
transparent some aspects of the role of discipline – sometimes subtle
and other times not – in the academy as exercised through the review process.