Friday 4 October 2013

The paper that never got there

The very wonderful Kean Birch, (well worth following on the Twitter) does something very interesting. On this page on his blog he puts up PDFs of papers that were rejected by journals and the referees comments.

When I first came across this I was quite inspired to follow, but also a little bit scared. To be frank, I was ashamed of my rejected papers as I could see they had been rejected on valid grounds.

But, I'm not with it this afternoon, so I've created a PDF of one of my papers that was rejected entitled "Ways of Seeing". It's on Google Drive, help yourself, but drop me a line if you want to cite it (don't know why you would, mind). As you'll quickly gather it was heavily inspired by this paper co-authored by my PhD examiner Dvora Yanow. Basically, I took their painting metaphor, which I thought was useful, and certainly helped me a lot, and took it further to also explore reflexivity through a metaphor of art appreciation.

I also submitted it to Organization Studies. And, well, basically, it didn't even get to peer review. The editorial board knocked it back, primarily because I'd missed a load of papers in OS about reflexivity that I've never found the time to read. I was also getting quite rusty on the literature by then. Frustratingly, I do wonder if it would have got published if I'd got it to the journal in say, 2009, straight after my PhD, rather than in 2011.

Anyway, make of it what you will.

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