Dear Editor,
Thank you for submitting your rejection editorial decision for our consideration. I asked my two co-authors (who are experts in the area) to review the reviewers’ comments, and I also gave them an independent read.
Unfortunately, my co-authors find several fatal flaws with the reviewers’ comments, and I’m afraid that I agree with their assessments. As a result, I regret to inform you that I cannot accept your editorial decision in its current form.
I can, however, envision a path forward that would make your editorial decision more acceptable, and so I invite you to revise and resubmit your editorial decision.
Thank you again for submitting your editorial decision for our consideration. I look forward to receiving your revision. Good luck in your future rejection efforts.
Corresponding Author
Dave Piercey shared this letter at his recent Cornell workshop. Tongue-in-cheek, naturally, and kind of specific to academia journals. But it’s not hard to imagine similar satires–students grading teachers, players berating coaches, citizens indicting prosecutors, and….but hold on. These things actually do happen! Well, not exactly. But students evaluate teachers. Players complain about coaches and threaten to join another team. Citizens vote prosecutors out of office. And while a letter like Dave’s might be fun to write, it’s not nearly as powerful a tool as submitting your best work to competing journals.
Almost every time party A is in a position to hold party B accountable, party B is in a position to hold party A accountable. This power is often quite imbalanced, but we can’t understand an accountability system without looking at the complete accountability network. For example, here’s a simple diagram (from my monograph on Moral Accounting) for a classroom with students S1, S2, S3…, taught by teacher T, who works in a school run by by Dean D. Arrows point toward the one being held accountable, with heavier arrows indicating more power.
Yes, the teacher holds the students accountable, primarily with their power to assign grades. But the students hold the teacher accountable, often with evaluations but sometimes with an email to the Dean, who has more direct power to hold the teacher accountable. The relation between the Dean and teacher goes both ways for similar reasons.
In the business world, accountability relations go both ways for another reason. Boss B holds worker W accountable because B is held accountable for W’s performance. W can therefore hold B accountable by withholding performance, and let B suffer whatever consequences CEO C deems appropriate!
We’re still not done with the image, because the students hold one another accountable as well. They might do so in ways that help the teacher, like rewarding those who work hard on group projects and punishing free riders, or reporting honor code infractions. But they might retaliate against “tattle-tales”, or encourage everyone to slack off because grades are curved.
As always, our goal in moral accounting is not to judge, but to advise, and understand how it can live up more fully to the MAP of moral accountability principles. If many students in a class are cheating, or performing poorly, we need to understand all of the elements that contribute to the problem, which requires looking at the entire network.