Kristine Fitch, Editor
Jean Allgood, Editorial Assistant
Editor's Statement
Behind the scenes, Part II
What is there for a new editor to say, in announcing the change? The editorial transition has already been made public in various ways, so there is little in the way of an informing function left to do. The phatic space is clear enough: I want to thank Don Zimmerman for his thoughtful stewardship of this highly regarded outlet for language and social interaction scholarship, more about which in a minute. The magnitude of his service, and that of Lars Linton, who went so far above and beyond the call of an editorial assistant, are matters I have come to appreciate in wholly new ways as I have seen them from the inside. They enhanced the journal’s presence in a visible way through creation of the ROLSI website, complete with photos and bio-sketches of the editorial board as well as a discussion forum for its readers (take a look if you aren’t yet familiar with it, rolsi.uiowa.edu) They also expanded and systematized the journal’s database of reviewers in a way that integrated it with the manuscript tracking system, something that has made the life of editors to come far easier than theirs had to have been in the early days. Don and Lars, my deepest gratitude for handing on such a smoothly running operation, and one so widely recognized as one of the best in the profession. ROLSI was the 10th most cited communication journal in Journal Citation Reports Social Science Edition, well ahead of many journals thought of more readily as household names. I will try to do the same for my successor.
The category of event into which an editorial transition seems to fall (to speak in ethnographic terms), or the slot opened by such a change (to speak in conversational terms) seems somehow larger than that. If there are no changes to the publication procedures, mission, or scope of the journal to announce – all will remain largely as described in the call for papers handed down from previous generations – what substantive issue, if any, could be put forth here? The first six months of learning to be an editor have been an excursion behind the scenes of a different, yet related arena of scholarship than the ones I described in the Handbook of language and social interaction . Editorship in its early phases has provided another view of how knowledge takes shape that has already been surprisingly rich. Because the process is, from this angle, profoundly infused with many of the complexities that characterize social interaction in the sense that the scholarship of this journal documents and theorizes, I will describe some of what I have observed so far. This is an arrival scene, while the world looks new and different and everything seems remarkable. My hope is that a glance behind the scenes of this arena of LSI scholarship calls attention to the interactive nature of editorial processes and by doing so, expresses some of my own awe and appreciation for the efforts the participants put into it.
The most obvious level on which any scholarly journal is part of an interaction is that the readers of the journal (particularly the editorial board, as presumably more directly implicated stakeholders in its profile) are the intended audience for the published essays. My predecessors told me that, as exposed as authors feel when it’s their work going out into the public realm for praise or attack, the editor can also expect to hear from those stakeholders. That next turn has not yet happened, the first opportunity to do so being provided by the appearance of this issue. I welcome and look forward to those reactions, whether directed to me, to authors or to the discussion forum on the ROLSI website. To the extent essays published here begin or extend conversations, clearly we are all enriched by their appearance.
That much is relatively public. This glance behind the scenes primarily involves the review process, beginning from the moment when authors submit their work to ROLSI rather than other places they might have sent it. Both the quantity and the quality of the submissions so far have made these first few months a delight. Sometimes as I skim a manuscript and then look to the reviewer database to send it out, I can imagine the authors and the reviewers talking through the data or the issues over dinner. Sometimes the voices are raised, sometimes there is laughter; always there is keen interest and intense commitment to consideration of what can be learned about the social world in the particulars set before them.
When reviews come in, they most often show that interest and commitment in responses that reveal a significant investment of time and energy.
I know much more deeply now from observation than I did from experience as an author the labor of love it is for a scholar engaged in his or her own work (always holding out the promise to bring forth reward of a much more direct kind) to devote scarce, precious time to doing a magnificent job on a review. It is sinfully easy to skim a paper, have a visceral reaction of “I like it” or “I hate it,” and simply say “reject,” “accept,” or “this needs a lot of work on focus and data analysis,” without specifying what that work is or how it could proceed. It is so much more difficult – not just difficult to find time and energy, but intellectually difficult – to walk an author through a detailed set of steps that can lead to that clearer focus and more rigorous analysis that the success of the piece depends on. The frequency with which reviewers actually do the latter when they could have quite reasonably done the former is strong evidence of their commitment to the interactive nature of the process. One review I read recently, although the verdict amounted to “this might never work for this journal,” led the author through an astonishing level of ontological and epistemological context for that decision. There was even praise for the effort, enough to keep the most insecure author from being too discouraged to continue. I wished there could be a new category on CV’s where people list those magnificent, time-consuming, thought-demanding texts for credit at evaluation times. I would argue that those texts are even more precious because there is no such category: This interactional work takes place completely behind the scenes, and in a cost-benefit analysis of time use, would often have to count as a loss. The importance of thorough reviewers, and the debt of gratitude owed them by authors and editors alike, has been the most striking element of this new perspective.
I do not mean to plead for investing more time than necessary into clearly lost causes, nor to ask for reviews to be more heavily larded with face-saving. Clearly neither of those does the enterprise of LSI scholarship any good. My point is simply to notice these exchanges among authors, reviewers and editors as both interaction of a particularly complex kind, and as comprising a significant, though unseen and unsung, part of the actual work we think of as scholarship.
Institutional practices recognize the importance of reviewing by drawing a sharp distinction between scholarship published by way of this behind-the-scenes interaction – the peer-reviewed kind – and that which comes about through on-the-table kinds of interaction – invited work [1]. That distinction is usually thought of as simply one of evaluation. A peer-reviewed article is one that has been judged sufficiently noteworthy and persuasive to be given a hearing – immortality, really, in the only form most of us are sure of – in the intellectual conversation of the day. Invitations to contribute work are, by contrast, assumed to come about on the basis of topical relevance of the piece and/or the reputation of the author(s) based on previous, presumably evaluated work. If the only difference were evaluation, however, wouldn’t we stop with the lengthy reviews and the carefully crafted editors’ letters, and simply check “accept” or “reject” or at most, “fix up the data and focus and accept if that comes off?”
I think – based now on some months of observation – that editorial review processes serve at least two functions far more important than merely separating the wheat from the chaff. Reviewers and editors are, for young scholars, secondary mentors, taking up where the graduate advisor and committee members have had to leave off. The better the student, the more surely there comes a time when, having been assiduous in their learning, their advisor is of no further use to them. If they have been too assiduous, as children famously are when imitating their parents, they may have picked up the advisor’s, or committee members’, limitations of thought and other bad habits LIKE TOO MANY “SCARE QUOTES!” Secondary mentorship is far more diffuse and unpredictable. Instead of an advisor generally chosen by the student, who is paid to instruct students and gets to bask in any reflected glow they may someday produce, the work of responding is assigned to reviewers by a quite fallible human being on editor duty. That work usually comes in on top of the reviewer’s advising their own students, analyzing their own data, writing their own essays, and so forth; and the glow-basking comes in the form of “thanks to extraordinarily helpful anonymous reviewers.”
Beyond being secondary mentors, reviewers can be important colleagues for more senior scholars, again in an anonymous and thus invisible way. Even when someone is fortunate enough to have colleagues physically present or easily reachable, the imposition involved in asking them to read and respond to your work is significant enough to make many of us hesitate to do it very often. The best situation life has to offer is, of course, a mutual exchange in which each person reads the other’s work often enough that the imposition is truly minimal, both because the reading is relevant enough to be a contribution and because the reciprocation is well-established. I don’t know how rare or common such arrangements are, but for those not fortunate enough to have them in place, journal reviewers are the most committed audience one is likely to find. Certainly not all reviews turn out to be helpful to the author, however diligently and knowledgeably they are done. The useful ones provide ways for even the most seasoned veterans to hear perspectives on their work that reveal the biases they have become deaf to (“You don’t think culture is monolithic but here’s the passage that makes it sound that way” “You can’t assume people will take this statement at face value; it’s an argument that has to be made, not an assertion to toss out and proceed from there”) and that challenge or enrich deeply cherished ideas. Again, there is a kind of real growth that happens in comments like these that is both crucial to scholarly progress, and is ordinarily invisible to the readers of finished essays.
The opportunity to observe and learn from a type of interaction I never knew
was so complicated and important is an unexpected benefit of taking on this
role. The responsibilities that come with it are, of course, both immense
and humbling. Once again, I thank Don and Lars – and their predecessors,
Karen Tracy, Bob Sanders and Stuart Sigman – for creating and nourishing
this lively and highly regarded arena for scholarly interaction. To the extent
I can pass it on to the next editor in similarly fine shape, I will owe a
great debt of gratitude to all of those who chime in.
[1] Naturally, as I wrote this editorial comment I was acutely aware that if it were published, it would not necessarily have gone through either kind of interaction: I invited myself to write it, and I accepted my invitation. Believing firmly in the necessity of interaction for – well, most everything worth doing – I did run it past two of my predecessors and asked for their responses. For better or worse – as usual, I take full responsibility for all the faults herein contained – this piece changed significantly in light of their comments.
