Why read ? - By Jerry Davis

 ( This article by Davis appeared in Administrative Science Quarterly' (ASQ) . ASQ is one of the most respected journals in the field of organizational studies. Jerry Davis is a Professor of Sociology at University of Michigan and was an editor at ASQ) 

Why Read?

By Jerry Davis (Former ASQ Editor)

ASQ celebrates itself as a reader’s journal. The quality of the writing has been central to the identity of the journal since Linda Johanson became managing editor and insisted on putting every accepted article through an exacting re-revision process. Clear writing is clear thinking, and Linda’s style rules rivaled those of The New Yorker: limited italics, no exclamation marks, few “In sum”s. Joan Friedman and Ashleigh Imus have carried on this tradition, and it helps explain why ASQ is vastly over-represented on doctoral syllabi around the world. If it’s in ASQ, it’s worth reading.

But what if reading were to just...stop? We are living through a shift from print culture to oral culture in which the spoken word regains dominance (as Marshall McLuhan foretold). Why read an article if NotebookLM can give you the five-minute podcast (or, no doubt soon, a TikTok video with an interpretive dance)? Does science even require reading anymore? And if not, is reading so compelling that we might do it without compulsion?

AI and other tools are forcing the issue on us. Here, I consider what the challenge is, what’s at stake, and why we might save reading from the ashbin of history.

Enter The Matrix

One of my favorite scenes in The Matrix is when Trinity and Neo need to escape a skyscraper and make their way to the roof, where a helicopter sits unattended. “Can you fly that thing?” asks Neo. “Not yet” says Trinity. “Tank, I need a pilot program for a B212 helicopter. Hurry!” And Tank downloads code into Trinity’s brain that makes her an expert pilot. It’s a fantasy that comports well with our tech overlords’ vision of efficient education.

Doctoral education, in contrast, is exceptionally inefficient because it revolves around reading and thinking. (I myself am a slow reader. And a slow thinker.) Imagine you’re a first-year doctoral student confronting seminars that include dozens of articles and books. Now imagine that you live in a futuristic world where NotebookLM makes it easy to upload PDFs of every article on the syllabus and provides summaries and smart critiques, writes one-page memos on each week’s readings, finds themes and tensions across the readings, notes historical developments, suggests novel paper topics -- and, if asked, will turn it all into a podcast you can listen to at the gym at 1.5X speed.

Reader, we are living in that simulation. It is not hard to foresee a time when all course materials, including transcripts extracted from seminar recordings, will be dumped into LLMs and distilled into conveniently accessible insights. “Tank, I need a scholar program for a Ph.D. in management. Hurry!”

Perhaps you have heard of Cluely. It’s an app created by Columbia students to help cheat on remote interviews. It runs in the background on one’s computer, listens to the interviewer’s questions, prompts AI for answers, and provides them in teleprompter format for the interviewee to read. Voila: You aced the interview, and now you’re going to medical school! After getting kicked out of Columbia, the founder expanded Cluely’s remit to “Cheating tool for literally everything,” and received venture funding from Andreessen Horowitz, the highly honorable VC behemoth. (This horrifying 90-second video is worth watching.) Wearing Meta’s AI glasses would allow users to make their way through life with answers for everything.

A scholar equipped with Meta glasses and Cluely trained on the corpus of an entire doctoral program would be a formidable interlocutor at a seminar or job talk or oral exam. Of course, they might have no idea what they were talking about as they read the scripted comments, but they would certainly look well-read -- even if the only reading they did was from a tiny teleprompter.

Reading Optional; Writing Required

Judging by the scenario above, soon it may be possible to enjoy a successful academic career without ever reading an article. But unless there is a sea change in our publish-or-perish incentive system, scholars are still required to write articles.

A doctoral student once confided that their faculty seemed to write more than they read. Which...seems accurate. We get measured and evaluated based on our publications, but nobody gets rewarded for reading (other than the intrinsic joy of reading about fixed effects and variance inflation factors). The prior literature can often seem like a convenience store to drop into for a few quick essentials. In the worst case, lit searches are driven by a confirmation bias: “Can somebody point me to an article to explain why this result makes sense?”

In organization studies, we spend a surprising amount of our energy on tips and tricks to entice our readers -- baiting the hook, springing the trap, highlighting the novelty of our findings. It is almost as if the point of our science was to bring delight to readers rather than to reveal the truths we have uncovered about the world. More pragmatically, we aim to get reviewers and an editor to accept the merit of our work so it will end up in print. This may fuel the idea that these are the readers that really count; any beyond this set are a happy bonus. To quote the most poetic line in volume 70, issue 1 of ASQ: “Like unworn articles of polyester clothing piling up by the acre in Chile’s Atacama desert, unread research articles pile up by the thousands in online open access journals.” Reading is not the point; publishing is.

Does Science Need Readers?

A skeptic might wonder why so much effort goes into the creative writing aspect of journal articles in organization studies. Crazy metaphors about polyester clothing seem like misplaced energy if the point is to convey important discoveries yielded by our research.

And there are alternatives. My experience publishing in a finance journal (owned by an unnamed Dutch conglomerate) suggests that some fields view the text of an article as mere adornment. The real science is conveyed in the results tables. All the editorial input is aimed at making sure the tables are sufficient to stand on their own. Readers in finance evidently head straight to the findings -- if they know what the variables are, they can impute the story behind them. The pages of words that came before are optional, aimed at slower-moving scholars who have not kept up with the literature.

An even harsher skeptic might ask why the public should be supporting work aimed primarily at pleasing the palate of fellow academics. We don’t fund sailing for pleasure; why should we fund prose-poetry about polyester? (Why indeed? The proof is left as an exercise for the reader.)

But suppose the finance journal is right and that science is mostly about the findings, not the gift wrapping of words around them. “Articles” in this world may be a vestige of an old-timey world gone by.

James Evans and Eamon Duede describe the emerging world of “science after science“ in which AI produces the truly frontier research, which may not be comprehensible to humans. Instead, human scientists end up being the interpreters of the work done by AI, which is off…folding proteins or something. They caution, “As AI comes to dominate all aspects of scientific practice, alternative approaches and methodologies can be squeezed out. Although some of this replacement represents genuine epistemic progress by superseding outdated models, creative destruction of this kind can also drive diversity collapse. This poses a unique challenge: Unlike traditional scientific progress, where new methods enhance disciplinary toolkits but disciplines remain distinct, AI’s efficiency could create a monoculture of research practices within and across fields.”

Keep Reading

Perhaps this is the function of reading: maintaining and expanding the diversity of science. Maybe science is not (just) about tables full of numbers, inscrutable to humans but transparent to AI. Maybe the interpretive element -- reading metaphors about polyester -- is essential too.

I spent this fall at Copenhagen Business School in a department named Business Humanities and Law. The group included philosophers, historians, legal scholars -- people for whom writing and reading are the essence of their scholarship. I had the privilege to attend their annual writing retreat near Elsinore (Hamlet’s castle), where we spent two days discussing each others’ work in small groups. Everyone had done the reading, and the conversations were intense and exhilarating. Drafts of pieces on corporate personhood, the ethics of hierarchy, tort law, AI and entrepreneurship, international taxation, soccer team ownership, and the weird popularity of the business model canvas created a diverse buffet. And every piece made me reflect on my own work in different ways.

Specific conversations, in a specific place, about specific pieces of writing, sparked insights, not just about findings but about how to think about them. We were a community of readers engaged in a common cause, centered on reading. (And for the record: Polyester is an excellent metaphor: it’s synthetic, slippery, unnatural, uncomfortable, and disposable, yet non-biodegradable, leaching microplastics into the environment for centuries. Really, polyester is the tofu of metaphors, readily absorbing the flavors around it.)

Perhaps humans and reading are superfluous in some realms of science. But I’m happy to be dialed into conversations where reading is fundamental. At its best, ASQ and other journals serve to convene these conversations, creating a community of careful readers (starting with editors and reviewers) and advancing our collective understanding about organizations. That community is worth preserving.

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