Organizations and Markets

Wittgenstein and the PoP System

7 May 2007 at 2:20 pm Nicolai Foss 2 comments

| Nicolai Foss |

At the end of my stay in Columbia, MO where I was working with co-blogger Peter on our forthcoming book, “Organizing for Entrepreneurship: Opportunity Discovery and the Theory of the Firm” (Cambridge University Press), I borrowed Edmonds and Eidonow’s Wittgenstein’s Poker from him so as to have something to entertain me on the long flight back to Denmark.  The book is a fun and light read, in fact, so light that I also had time to peruse another book borrowed from Peter (this one). 

The book is an attempt to reconstruct the famous poker episode in 1946 where Wittgenstein allegedly threathened Popper with a poker during an Oxford University philosophy seminar, and a discussion of the inevitability of a clash between these two philosophers, given their extremely different philosophy, background, etc. At one point the authors observe that Wittgenstein would never have made it under the current tenure system; apart from the Tractatus, he apparently only published one minor paper.  Still, he was promoted to Full Professor of Philosophy almost twenty years after the publication of this slim volume, and remained a Full Professor for almost a decade more.  However, the philosopher who according to this (somewhat bizarre) poll was the third greatest philosopher ever wouldn’t have academically survived the present publish or perish system.

The Publish or Perish (PoP system has been criticized numerous times and with many arguments.  The “Wittgenstein argument” is a pretty standard one. Another example is the Danish winner of the 1997 Medicine Nobel Prize, Jens Christian Schou, who according to legend worked almost exclusively for a decade on the article that was mainly responsible for his Prize, publishing nothing else during that decade.

However, the Wittgenstein argument is fundamentally problematic because it abstracts from the endogeneity of behaviors; it neglects that the exemplary behaviors pointed to (Wittgenstein, Schou) took place under different institutional conditions.  In the specific case of the quirky, idiosyncratic and periodically extremely wealthy Wittgenstein, it may be that his behavior would not be substantially altered by different institutional conditions.  But, on the other hand, he became a Professor of Philosophy at one of the World’s leading universities; he was immersed in what was fundamentally a book culture (colleagues Russell and Moore were primarily famous on account of their books); the role one played in seminars could be more important than one’s published output; (book-based) reputation played a perhaps bigger role then than it does now; etc.  Perhaps Wittgenstein really simply adopted to these institutional constraints.  And perhaps he would also have adjusted to our current conditions. 

Entry filed under: - Foss -, Myths and Realities.