Reinventing intellectual craftsmanship through book reviews

Abstract

Book review editors across management journals have long argued that the under-appreciation of books is the outcome of academic work being increasingly subjected to quantifiable metrics (e.g. Suddaby and Trank, 2013), and the instrumentalization of career progression (e.g. Lindebaum et al., 2018). While we are in deep agreement with them, the rising dominance of journal rankings, such as FT50 and the chartered association of business schoools’ academic journal guide, has increasingly marginalized books and, concomitantly, book reviews. As such, we want to make a different argument here for books: rather than criticizing such career progression, we stress that to craft one’s career, one cannot do it without books; to realize and actualize one’s intellectual potentialities, one cannot do it without books; and to capture one’s intellectual opportunities, one cannot do it without books. In this sense, books are ‘a choice of how to live as well as a choice of career’ (Mills, 1959: 196) located at the centre of our ‘selves’ and involved in every intellectual product we cultivate. To say one ‘has experience’ for career cultivation, would mean that their intellectual accumulation in the past has shaped their present and influences their capacity to future experience. Mills (1959) called this ‘intellectual craftmanship ’ within which books play a reflective and engaging role in constructing characters and qualities of our craft of career and, in turn, of ourselves as craftsmen – whether we realize it or not. Drawing upon the commitment of Management Learning to critique and to engage in thoughtprovoking discourse, to reinvent intellectual craftsmanship through book reviews is to keep moving book reviews away from descriptive summaries and passive outlines into a form of stimulating engagement with the book. This engagement is a collective process of crafting ways and possibilities to voice, scrutinize, share and celebrate the potentialities of management and organization studies scholarship. We might be researchers, practitioners and/or users of phenomena and practices focused on in a book. The communicative performativity of book reviews enables us as readers in different roles or from different perspectives to interpret how authors interpret a particular reality, even if they might have lived centuries ago and many miles away. At the same time, it enables us as authors to be interpreted differently and inspired by such differences. The performativity of book reviews is generative in cultivating alternative sensemaking and the multiple being of ourselves as intellectual craftsmen.