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The ASQ years then and now through the eyes of a Euro-Brit - Administrative Science Quarterly - 40th Anniversary Issue

Administrative Science Quarterly, June, 1996 by David J. Hickson

Early Days

I was not aware of the birth of ASQ. In 1956 I had not yet myself been reborn as an academic. That began to happen a year later. But I was introduced to ASQ, by Derek Pugh, when it was a bouncing infant. It was still a sober infant, respectably turned out in sober garb, like other such were and are. Who but the wayward Bill Starbuck, when editor, could have dressed it up so dashingly, with pictures no less? This still becomes it, even in middle age.

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I was with Derek and the other first members of what later became known as the Aston Group, most notably then Bob Hinings, working on what grew into the Aston Programme of research. Aston was and is an inner-city district of the Birmingham metropolitan conurbation, in the English Midlands. At that time, the early 1960s, the college where we were had not yet turned itself into a university and taken that name, but it was about to do so. We began in an "ivory tower in a basement," as we have often called it since, below a deserted nineteenth-century office block awaiting demolition. The inside story of what happened there is currently being told both as I experienced it (Hickson, 1996) and as Derek did (Pugh, 1996).

As we began to build up ideas and then empirical results that we thought looked publishable, Derek suggested that the infant ASQ should be our goal. None of us except him had ever heard of it, but he thought it was building a reputation and seemed most appropriate in content. How right he was. It accepted the series of papers that we of the in-group knew simply as ASQ1, ASQ2, ASQ3, ASQ4, and ASQ5 (Pugh et al., 1963, 1968, 1969; Pugh, Hickson, and Hinings, 1969; Hickson, Pugh, and Pheysey, 1969), three of them in a single year, though the editorship at the time swallowed hard over the long lists of authors, which were unusual then. For us, they demonstrated the egalitarian nature of the group. Though the first four all began with Pugh, and this was well merited by intellectual contribution, this was also decided upon by all concerned because we felt that unknowns as we were needed a consistent brand name that would stick and through which we would all benefit. It was not a vainglorious Pugh.

The branding worked, as did Derek's astute regard for ASQ. That is partly why the Aston research has always achieved both greater recognition and, especially, greater acceptance on the American side of the water than on this side (Donaldson, 1985, draws together much of the controversy), a precursor of the many years of American and Euro-U.K. differences that are discussed below. It must also have been partly why I was invited to join the ASQ Editorial Board, on which I served from 1969 to 1978. To me this was an honor, as it still is in retrospect. It was also an excellent training in the reviewer's craft, from which I gained respect for American standards of critical appraisal. Paradoxically, when in 1977 a coterie of Europeans aspired to a new journal that several saw as an alternative to ASQ, they asked me to edit it! That was an even greater surprise, honor and, in this instance, challenge. So Organization Studies was conceived, in a hotel bedroom, a story told elsewhere (Hickson, 1980).

Trendy "Top of the Pops"

The handiest way of tracing what has happened through the ASQ years since those early days is to follow whose names have appeared in Writers on Organizations. This has become the longest extant public record of popular names, an organization theory equivalent to the "top of the pops" song listings. The inspired brainchild of Derek Pugh (yes, here he is again) in the early 1960s, this small book is a set of summaries of the central ideas of those "at the top" at the time (Pugh, Hickson, and Hinings, 1964, 1971, 1983; Pugh and Hickson, 1989, 1996). It neither synthesizes nor criticizes, but presents the ideas of each as briefly and plainly as possible, as first-aid for the overburdened student or manager.

Five editions across more than thirty years, translated into numerous languages, have inadvertently become a data set for trends in taste. That is because each edition drops the names that are fading from prominence and brings in those that are on the rise or have risen since the previous edition. Had we foreseen how long the book would revivify itself in this way we might have fixed the new editions at regular intervals, but we did not, so the editions are irregular, published when we felt so moved.

Who decides which names are out and which are in? We do. We sense what is upbeat on the network through our own personal contacts and teaching and research, and for the last two editions we have written to most people in the worldwide network on whom we felt we could impose and asked for their views. The principal criteria for getting in are to have said something distinctive that is widely used (when in a cynically witty mood, I have sometimes remarked that the ideal candidate for the book says one damn silly thing and says it often!). The book is therefore an accumulated informal assessment of the scene. It tries to be balanced, but there must be some bias due to its authors living on one side of the Atlantic rather than the other. Table 1 analyzes the changes over the years.

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The ASQ years then and now through the eyes of a Euro-Brit - Administrative Science Quarterly - 40th Anniversary Issue

Administrative Science Quarterly, June, 1996 by David J. Hickson

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