'Challenging the Disciplinary Structures of Academia: A Performance in Talk-Balk and Repartee

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, mannerisms, 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.