Complexity, reflexivity and changeability

Academic community, like most professional communities of practice (if not belief) is periodically shaken by the discovery of a low level of reflexivity. Once this happens, we usually perform some public ¿mea culpa¿ atonement rituals. For instance, we write that the institution of a university breaks down and we are practically working in ruins (Readings, 1996). We may also try to search for a more specific cure ¿ if we diagnose the misinformed and misfiring program of resuscitating managerial sciences pinpointing, let us say, the 1955 Ford Foundation Project of having more PhD¿s among business school teachers and saturating curriculum of a school of management with quantitative methodologies and behavioral sciences (as did Khurana, 2007). We may even go for a sociological study of decision-making bodies in peer-controlled promotion and tenure commissions, editorial offices, admission committees, and the like, concluding that we begin to know how standards of fairness are being negotiated and emerge from the chaos of clashes, power struggles, ideological confrontations, and personal campaigns (Lamont, 2009). All of this does not prevent the successive waves of critique based on a discovery of far too low level of self-reflection and reflexivity in general ¿ because institutions have to generate routines in order to survive and serve our purposes and because we have to preserve a distance from what we are doing when we do what we are paid for.