Citation
Bazin, Y. (2013), "Talking about books: from reviews to dialogues", Society and Business Review, Vol. 8 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/SBR-08-2013-0057
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Talking about books: from reviews to dialogues
Article Type: Talking about books: from reviews to dialogues From: Society and Business Review, Volume 8, Issue 3
Since 2010, Laurent Magne and I were in charge of book reviews for the Society and Business Review. In its basic version, a book review is an interesting exercise for every young scholar because it requires being able to read books quickly and regularly from cover to cover (and not only research articles) and to extract their very essence. However, the exercise often remains fairly academic and its format tends to limit in-depth critical commentaries. Therefore, we have tried, from the beginning, to open a dialogue between several books by gathering their reviews in the same issue. Consequently, it was possible to respond to Lawrence, Suddaby & Lecas Institutional Work with Mary Douglas famous How Institutions Think and to produce a richer collection of summaries. This trick allowed for us to enrich book reviews by bringing them closer.
This approach found an unexpected echo in the second issue of this years Academy of Management Review that Laurent immediately sent to me. The editor, Roy Suddaby, recognizes that book reviews had been a bit forgotten by research journals and that their content had become sometimes too indulgent. Therefore, he initiated a new section called Book Reviews: What the Academy is Reading. Book reviews are transformed into essays in which scholars present a book and open a dialogue with the academic literature. Karl Weick is the first one to try and offers a fascinating analysis of Simon & Schusters The Lost Bank, an historical account of the failure of Washington Mutual. The book review becomes a critical hindsight that puts books in a deeper and richer context. It is this type of review that we now propose to offer in the Society and Business Review.
Concretely, book reviews will now comply with the following format. Classified as “viewpoint in Emeralds nomenclature, they will be blind-reviewed by the book review editors, Sebastien Picard, Emmanuel Ruzé and myself. The length should be between 2,000 and 3,000 words with a bibliography of a dozen references. The aim is to start from a book, not necessarily academic but connected to the “society and business editorial line of the SBR, and to put it in perspective through the literature. It can be criticized based on academic articles, as well as used to question and challenge them.
From now on, and with this format, our reviews will aim at offering open dialogues between scientific publications and recently published books.
Yoann Bazin
ISTEC, Paris, France