I assume that, on occasion, many early-career researchers are tempted, as I am, to reach for those kinds of books that offer a system or model for publishing success. After all, what better way to reassure oneself that an academic career is feasible than to learn about others’ achievements? Dean A. Shepherd’s The Aspiring Entrepreneurship Scholar offers ample straightforward advice to early-career scholars—indeed, the advice is sometimes so straightforward, and the book’s tone so informal, that one may even begin to suspect, as I did, that Shepherd had managed to somehow manipulate the review process to publish it (a sure sign of his scholarly aplomb). How else to explain the offhand equanimity, the conversational register, of some of the remarks? Chapter 2 opens with an exemplary line: “Okay, so maybe this is self-delusional, but I think of scholars, at least the good ones, as highly entrepreneurial.”1
Despite a profusion of many such general statements in the book, statements with a wide application for would-be scholars of all types, what I discovered within a few moments’ reading—but which I had not, I admit, initially realised when I downloaded the book via my institution’s subscription—was that Shepherd’s manual is not for all scholars at all. It does not explicitly propose that we, in whatever fields of study, take an “entrepreneurial” approach to a scholarly career—and why would it? The book is not addressed to all scholars but is, rather—and of course!—a guide written for—quite literally—“entrepreneurship scholars.” Of course, as you might have guessed, I had somehow, no doubt frivolously, imagined that Shepherd’s title was a strange nominalisation of the phrase “entrepreneurial scholar,” and that his book therefore sought to advance a particularly “entrepreneurial” strategy for a “successful academic career,” whatever the field. How wrong I was. But, despite this, my own quite remarkable misprision, the book proved to grant a few noteworthy insights for all of us in academia.
But first a little more on the book’s tone. It should probably be noted regardfully that the book is published by Palgrave Pivot, an imprint of Palgrave Macmillan designed for scholars who wish to publish a work longer than a journal article but shorter than a monograph. These compact books are published as e-books, but perfect-bound volumes can be ordered on demand. And it seems that this Palgrave imprint facilitates—or, better, encourages—precisely the kind of informal, this expert-but-accessible, style of writing preferred by Shepherd; or, in fact, I should say that it facilitates this as well as many other kinds of idiosyncratic writing, since Palgrave Pivot is set up to allow authors to publish their works at their “natural lengths”—to save them the adversity of cutting a long work down to the standard 8,000-word article, and the hardship of elaborating a short book up to to the 80,000-word breadth of the monograph. The imprint is also, it seems, all for authors publishing works that do not bear the seriousness of the monograph, nor the epistemological rigour of the article. As such, you might even say that these books represent, in some ways, the formalisation of the academic blog. After all, they’re also very quickly produced, with a turnover publication time of only twelve weeks following peer review. Hence, I suppose, the name “pivot.” But just in case I am being unclear, I think these volumes represent a positive expansion of the academic publishing ecosystem.
And while I’m talking shop: one thing that I immediately noticed about this imprint’s productions were the books’ formatting details—clearly the ramifications of this new modality of academic publishing—such as the way the chapter title pages were organised. Like journal articles, each chapter title page had a selection of keywords, a copyright notice (stipulating that copyright in the work was held by the author), and a DOI number. It’s certainly a smart-looking series, typeset in the classically sleek but sharp ITC Galliard (the same font the Library of America uses in its books), as opposed to ITC Stone Serif, the usual fare in Palgrave’s non-Pivot series books; although it is also a curious hybrid, what with this strange chapter metadata in a text that is released digitally, as an e-book, but is yet-not-fully digitised, a “photographic” pdf rather than a “live” hypertext.
None of this has much to do with Shepherd’s writing, however. And, lest my earlier meaning be misread, none of my earlier comments were supposed to suggest that Shepherd’s informality, this aporetic self doubting (“Okay, so maybe this is self-delusional”), is threaded through the entirety of his book—far from it. Shepherd, I soon realised, writes not with the insouciance of the careless, and not with “informality” as such, but with the openness and directness of a guru. It is, of course, the appropriate tone for a guidebook, something of a Dale Carnegie or Carl Crow done gone academese. And I imagine that, as an “entrepreneurship scholar,” Shepherd’s “down-to-business” style of writing is an asset—and not uncommon in journals in the field of business entrepreneurship, such as the one of which Shepherd is himself the editor, the Journal of Business Venturing. But what I thought would make an interesting and productive addition to my notes, here, were the various references and allusions Shepherd makes to the emotional world of the aspiring scholar, and particularly to the emotional conflicts they face in their attempts to publish their research.
In the opening chapter, Shepherd discusses the unusually buoyant attitude he took to the revise-and-resubmit (“R&R”) decision letter while still a doctoral student: “Believe it or not,” he writes, “I was excited when I received a rejection letter,” excited “that three scholars had read my work, found something interesting in it, and provided me feedback.”2 And while Shepherd implies that he “no longer feels” as positive about receiving R&Rs as he did then, he does continue to feel more positively about them than most of his colleagues, one of whom, when they asked him “how to deal with the negative emotions associated with such a decision letter,” prompted incredulity on his part.3 But what Shepherd writes next about his process is worth quoting at length, if only because few scholars seem to have written as candidly as he does of their emotional reactions to R&R letters—that is, of the way in which they have learnt to manage their own emotions. But this long quotation will also allow me to quickly look at the tropological figures Shepherd produces to explain his emotional defences against the familiar melancholy of dejection:
Returning to the issue of excitement in receiving feedback on a rejected paper, I used that excitement to drop other work and immediately begin to interpret the letter and the spirit of the reviewers’ comment [sic] to improve the paper and resubmit it to another journal. I thought about a paper as having momentum and believed it was important to keep the momentum rolling. On the flipside, I felt that if a paper sat, it lost momentum and required more effort to “start the ball rolling” again. Fortunately, having peers as co-authors and choosing to work with people with similar values, I was able to quickly learn, enhance the quality of each paper, and put them “back in play” at journals. Speed came from energy and momentum, not from cutting corners.
Through speed and working with colleagues on papers out of our dissertations, my colleagues and I were able to generate a reasonable number of papers in the first couple of years post-dissertation. We believed that having a “reasonable” number of papers “in play” (i.e., at least three or four papers under review at top journals) was important for two primary reasons. First, we believed that the more papers we worked on, the more feedback we would receive. Feedback not only helped us improve the quality of the specific paper but also provided the basis for a deeper understanding of what reviewers were looking for and how to address these issues and follow their recommendations. Upon reflection, we were engaging in deliberate practice and hopefully building expertise. We certainly had many opportunities to learn from our failures, but fortunately, we also had some successes—some small wins—which allowed me to start to believe that maybe I could make a career as an entrepreneurship scholar.4
While Shepherd magnanimously—and doubtless truthfully—attributes a degree of his success in turning papers over quickly and effectively to his helpful peers and colleagues, what is perhaps more notable about the above summary is Shepherd’s emphasis on “excitement,” “momentum” and “speed.” None of these three words is a one that we would first associate with the monastic labour of research. They better convey the personality of the explorer or adventurer—even the champion sportsperson.
Better still, these nouns remind me of Freud’s haughty, swaggering vision of himself as a “conquistador” in the letter of which I wrote in my last post. The year was 1900, and Freud, vainglorious, wrote of his personality thus: “I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador . . . with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity of a man of this sort.”5 I suppose there are many ways to find success as a scholar; however, what strikes me as salient about Shepherd’s keywords and Freud’s self-portrait is the common emphasis they place on this constitutive tenacity, this positively “dopaminergic” sense of ferment, that seems required of the emotionally durable scholar. In different ways, both authors suggest the importance of maintaining, for want of a better idiom, something of a quickness of mind and spirit. Excitement and energy, it may be, then, are the emotional antinomies of dormancy, the affective defences to torpor, no less in academia than elsewhere. But then, of course, we already knew that.