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Organization Studies
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The online version of this article can be found at:

DOI: 10.1177/017084069101200407
1991 12: 602 Organization Studies
Henry Mintzberg
A Letter to Marta Cals and Linda Smircich

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602
A Letter to Marta Calás and Linda Smircich
Dear Marta and
Linda,
.
I must thank
you
for
providing
me with such delectable entertainment
(and putting
me into such
good company)
and
congratulate you
for
managing
to
parody
all that is
pretentious
about academe in such a short
text. For
example,
Rather than
sublimating
desire,
where the immoral
and
illegal
act is overcome
by
the seriousness of
morality
and
legality
and
where the heroic act of
denying
instinct allows for the
triumph
of ration-
ality, leadership
works because it embodies
desire,
while
covering
its
traces with the
sign
of truth. Brilliant!
I
thought
the
very
least I could do would be to react a bit in
kind,
since
your game
can,
in
fact,
be
played
in two
ways.
First:
FOLLOWING
pursuit, pursuing, undressing
with
eyes,
i.e. intention to
seduce,
also reference
to the
tail,
hence the
penis
FROM
-
elimination, withdrawal,
i.e.
completion
of seduction
THE
may
have no reference to seduction
ABOVE
being
on
top,
i.e.
domineering,
mount-
ing, penetrating,
i.e. the act of seduc-
tion itself
I could
easily go
on - those are
only
the first four words of
your
text
(and
I dare not even entertain
EPIGRAPHS,
the
fifth)
but
you
must
surely get
my point, just
as I
get yours,
subtle
though
both
may
be. For we have
both set out to seduce our
readers,
have we
not,
in fact in a
way
that
puts
almost all mortal leaders to shame.
Second: I must also
point
out that some of
your writing
is
impregnable,
in
places
inconceivable,
and sometimes even unbearable. That is unfortu-
nate,
because some of the issues raised are
truly
seminal
(I
mean all
this).
What undermines the
argument,
however,
is a
methodology
that in
your
hands
proves impotent. (I
mean this
too,
quite figuratively.)
One sexual
joke,
if
you
will
permit
me,
in an
attempt
to
capture
it all:
Its about this man who
goes
to a
psychiatrist
and
responds
to
every
Rorschach he is
shown,
with - that is two
people (let
us
say)
forni-
cating.
After several of
these,
the
psychiatrist stops
and
says
You are
the most
sexually
obsessed
person
I have ever come across!
Sexually
obsessed? Me? Its
you
who
keeps showing
those
dirty pictures!
I
guess
we should conclude that Linda or/and Marta has had
per
se.
Yours,
in the hot
kitchen,
Henry Mintzberg