Dear Moira,

Thank you for your feedback on my manuscript.  Some of the issues you mention are easy to deal with, such as grammatical errors, and it is also helpful to get some advice on improving the readability by trying to reduce the number of compounded nouns and other issues that you mention.  I have already corrected the errors you identify.  By the way, I didn’t know that literature-review was spelled with a hyphen.  When searching the internet, I get the impression that most people spell it as two separate words, but I suppose that only means that I am not alone in making this mistake.  It is now corrected.  You also mention that all titles, both for tables and figures, go underneath not above.  Are you certain about this?  In the EJOLTS template I used, figures were titled underneath but tables above.

However, before engaging more with your feedback regarding the readability of the paper, it is perhaps better that I start with your comments on what you describe as the paper’s “cohesion as an original and creative contribution to research into Living Theory as a social movement”.  I am happy to see that you see the paper as having the potential to be overtly original and creative in its contributions to dialogues about, and research into, Living Theory, but I need to understand why you think it has not yet lived up to that potential.

As you state in the beginning of your main review, the title of the manuscript suggests making a connection between two big ideas, and how you expected the paper to clarify this connection.  You do not explicitly say what these two ideas are, but I assume you are talking about “Living Theory as Social Movement” on the one hand and “Use of Pac-Man video game models in TQM research” on the other.  You then comment on the abstract and introduction not being sufficiently helpful for understanding the paper.

I value these comments.  I changed the title for the manuscript after the discussions on the Community Space as Jack said that he would recommend the paper for review provided I did some small changes in the abstract and conclusion.  Actually, I did some more changes that that, including renaming the paper, but perhaps the new title does not capture the essence of the paper properly.  It was Jack who saw this connection with Living Theory as a Social Movement, and I was very pleased when he told me so, but the original intent of the study was much narrower than that.  I was simply interested in how to translate insights from one Living Theory account (Jack’s 1993 account) into another (my own Living Theory account on implementing TQM in a public sector setting) by use of the Pac-Man video game as a translation tool.  That was the original intent of the research, and that is why the paper is essentially concerned with the issue of learning how to play Pac-Man.

So far I have gotten surprisingly little comment on the relevance of the problem I try to solve with this paper.  I don’t understand why.  When I read a Living Theory account, like your recent EJOLTS paper, I can see that you struggle with issues and that you develop an improved understanding of how you think about people like Kieran and how easily people like him could end up on the beach like the on the famous picture we know from the migration crisis, but I am not certain what this paper tells me about how to deal with implementing TQM in the public sector.  Do you see what I mean?  As a reader, I can engage and sympathise with you as a writer of your reflective biography, but for me to make this study relevant for me there has to be more than an emotional connection.  I need to translate your diagnosis of the problem you are struggling with into something that fits with my problem, and I need to translate your solution strategy into a solution strategy that would work in my case.

This is what my paper is about.  In the introduction I refer to Pam Lomax’s book on Living Theory TQM for the Educational Sector, and Jack Whitehead’s 1993 biography, and I explain how I want to understand the situation Jack was in and what he did to deal with that situation.  I introduce the Pac-Man game for that purpose because that makes it possible for me to focus more precisely on what I see as his diagnosis of the problem and his solution strategy.  By doing this it becomes much more obvious what my situation looks like and what I might do in response to this. However, all of this is just motivation.  The aim of the research, as you also identify, is to investigate the WikiHow strategy as a means for becoming competent at Pac-Man and thus be able to translate Living Theory studies of TQM implementation from one context to another.

Before I start rewriting the title, abstract and introduction, do you think it would be possible for you to comment on the motivation for the research?  Have you shared the same experience as me in reading a fascinating Living Theory account that has grabbed you emotionally, and you feel that the text is trying to say something profoundly important to you, but are still incapable of articulating what the insights from this account would translate into your world?  Please remember that I am not an educator.  I live in a different world.  I try to implement TQM in the public sector, but I am fascinated by reading some of these Living Theory accounts from educators like Jack because his problems are similar to mine and I want to learn from his strategies for developing my own.  Is this a completely irrelevant?  Why is there so little interest in this question?  To me it is the most fundamental question of all.  One thing is to communicate clearly, making the EJOLTS readers understand the story, but communication also includes mental activity from the person listing to or reading a story.  He needs something that makes it possible to structure what he hears into something that makes sense in his own case.  He needs to recognise the meaning of the Living Theory story from the basis of his own theories and experiences.   This is why I introduce the Pac-Man model, and this is why I write about the challenges of learning how to master the Pac-Man game.

I will now try to rewrite the title, abstract and introduction for the paper.  I look forward to continuing the dialogue and making the research presented in the paper more understandable for the EJOLTS readership.

Best regards

Petter

Dear Moira,

In your review of my manuscript you made some comments that I felt were highly useful for improving the paper, both in terms of content and readability.  As I now submit a new version of the manuscript, let me comment on how I have addressed the points you make.

Moira: The title of your article is clearly about making connections between two big ideas, and so as a reader I was expecting to find links throughout about them both, which would finally lead to conclusions about your findings. And I imagined the connections you would be making would constitute a genuine and original contribution to Living Theory research. Certainly I’ve read nothing of this kind in a Living Theory context before, so I was eagerly anticipating the chance to review something of overt originality and creativity.

In terms of setting off on my reading-journey, I was expecting from the title that some description and analyses would be required in terms of familiarising the reader with the Pac-Man game (as most readers would come to this journal as Living Theorists or people with an interest in Living Theory).

Petter: The title you refer to is “Towards Living Theory as a Social Movement: On the use of Pac-Man video game models in TQM research”. When Jack read an earlier version of the paper, called “Using the Pac-Man game for translating living theories on total quality management from educational institutions to government agency”, he found it interesting in terms of how it could be seen as a contribution to the development of Living Theory into a social movement.  To me this was exciting because my aim was originally only to communicate the idea of how video games like Pac-Man could be used for extracting insights from Living Theory accounts without necessarily seeing the larger picture about the social movement.  Nevertheless, by making it easier to interpret Living Theories through game theory structures, it would certainly become easier to communicate insights from accounts across widely different fields, so I agree that seeing this in the context of the making of a social movement is indeed a tremendously important point. 

However, I then made the mistake of changing the title of the paper from “Using the Pac-Man game for translating living theories on total quality management from educational institutions to government agency” into “Towards Living Theory as a Social Movement: On the use of Pac-Man video game models in TQM research”.  While the original title explains what the paper was all about, the new title was about the implications of the paper.  As I see by reading your comments, this was a fundamental mistake as it gives the reader a totally wrong impression on what to expect.

I have now chosen a new title “Evaluation of the Pac-Man game as a tool for extracting structural insights from Living Theory accounts” to emphasise that the “two big ideas” that I want to explore are (1) the readability of Living Theory accounts and (2) the Pac-Man game as a translation tool.

On the other hand, when it comes to your expectations for the reading-journey, I agree.  The intent was indeed that the paper was written for an audience that is familiar with Living Theories but less familiar with Pac-Man.  It was written with the intent of having people with background in Living Theory research ask themselves what can be gained from game theory, educational game studies and in particular what I say about the Pac-Man model.

Moira: The Abstract, however, apart from the final sentence, doesn’t offer an overview of the paper, but argues through some complex ideas instead. It’s important, I feel, to offer the reader a framework into which the ideas can become more articulate through their explicit structuring. 

Petter: I would not agree that the abstract does not offer an overview of the paper, as the argument is indeed a summary of the paper.  However, I agree that it perhaps got unnecessary complex due to the way I spend too much of the abstract on the motivational part (about social movement) and too little on the essence of the paper which has to do with the experiment on how to develop necessary Pac-Man skills for translating Living Theory accounts.  Inspired by your quote from Oliver Wendel Holmes about reaching simplicy on the other side of complexity, I have now rewritten the abstract from scratch.

Moira: In the Introduction, similarly, I couldn’t see the signposting that would help me to navigate through your text. At a simple level I was expecting something similar to: ‘first I will do this, and then I will do this and from this point I will’…’and this will show etc.. Then you make an assumption which I believe isn’t sufficiently argued or substantiated and that is about the equation – as you present it – between TQM and Living Theory, as if such a connection already exists sufficiently to be theorised about. I am not sure this is the case and it needs qualifying in some way so that it’s clearer.

In addition, you don’t state the intentions of the paper until p. 3 when you write:

The aim of the study is to investigate this WikiHow strategy as a means for becoming competent at Pac-Man and thus be able to translate Living Theory studies of TQM implementation from one context to another.

Perhaps this needed to be placed right at the beginning in order for the reader to be able to follow the purposes and processes of the text.

Petter: I think the introduction became too complex when I tried to make use of Living Theory as Social Movement as a motivational factor.  I have now rewritten this chapter completely.  The introduction now follows a sequence of three steps, as follows:

First the paper is motivated by the belief that TQM Living Theory could be used for solving the problem that about 80% of all TQM efforts fail, if it had not been for the fact that it can be difficult to understand how a TQM living theory account from one domain can or should be understood in the context of a different domain.

Secondly, I point out that game scholars have suggested using video games as a way of translating skill-oriented insights from one domain to another, and I suggest how I could test this idea in the context of Living Theories by trying to extract insights from Whitehead’s Living Theory account in my own account by way of how I have previously written about Pac-Man.  I then explain the Pac-Man idea for the Living Theory audience.

Thirdly, I point out that making use of video game models requires skills at playing, so what I want to find out is how much time and effort is needed in order to develop this level of skill by following a learning strategy like the WikiHow strategy.  This exposition leads to the “aim of the study” sentence you refer to above, and I conclude the introduction by giving a structural overview of the paper.

Moira: In the main body of the text there is are too many pages given over to the description of the Pac-Man video game and your own specific attempts both to master the skills and see the connections. However, I feel that much of this description of how the game works would have been better off in an Appendix, with your description and explanation for the mastery of the game and consequent connections to be made with LT presented as a process of living-theory itself as the whole purpose of your paper. Pip mentioned this in her reviews on the Community Space and you responded by suggesting you were going to look at her – and Jack’s – responses and then submit your paper for review. It doesn’t seem to me that you’ve done this sufficiently at all in terms of the sheer length of your descriptions. At the moment, Living Theory – and particularly Living Theory as a social movement - seems to come second to your absorption in the Pac-Man video game.

And I think this over-writing of the descriptions without making overt connections to their relevance to your title (which is about looking at Living Theory as a social movement through a new lens) is a major imbalance within the paper.

This would need to be ironed out before I would be willing to recommend it for publication in EJOLTS.

Petter: It is true that Pip suggested that the main part of the paper could be slimmed down by moving much into an appendix (Friday, 30 October 2015), but my response was not that I agreed to this being a good idea.  On the contrary, my response (Monday, 2 November 2015) was that I was getting the impression that she was reading my paper as a “LET account”, which it was clearly NOT, and I was indeed very reluctant to make the kind of changes she suggested as that would destroy the paper.  She then responded to that it a very nice manner (Wednesday, 4 November 2015), and after further discussion with her and Jack, I was told (Monday, 9 November 2015) that the only thing that needed to be updated before they could recommend it for review process was a reference to social movement in the abstract and some specific comments in the final part of the conclusions that I have added exactly as suggested.

Please remember that this is not a “LET account”. It is a study of using the WikiHow strategy for becoming sufficiently skilled at Pac-Man for the purpose of using the video game to translate between LET accounts.  This is something Pip and I discussed a lot on the Community Space; the difference between “LET account” and “LET research”.  In retrospect I wonder if it had been easier to set the kind of expectations I had been hoping for if I had submitted the paper as a “theoretical paper”.  In a sense it is a strictly theoretical paper concerning itself with methods of extracting insights for LET accounts and categorising them.  But, it is not really a theoretical paper.  It is an empirical paper aiming to suggest how much time and effort is needed for becoming sufficiently proficient at Pac-Man for making use of the model as a translation tool between LET accounts.

When I apply the method of action research as means of researching “how can I improve my practice as a Pac-Man player”, this is more like a simulation study than Living Theory action research.  It is not based on any value judgements beyond my need for developing a sufficient level of skill and it is evaluated by numerical measurements rather than by some group of critical colleagues.  There is no need for having a validation group or anybody making subjective comments on how I am developing as a Pac-Man player as the necessary feedback is provided by the time chart that is investigated through the use of logarithmic regression.

All of this is described in detail, trying to follow Einstein’s “everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”.  However, I can understand your reaction as this is technical writing that is necessary for the purpose of testing the WikiHow strategy rather than a biographical story about somebody making efforts to live out his values of love, cooperation, justice and so on.  The Pac-Man self-improvement study is not emotional or biographical like that at all.  It is a technical study of learning how to play Pac-Man with the intent of using the Pac-Man model as a tool for translating insights from these kind of fascinating biographies, from one context into the other, like how I see similarities between Jack’s experiences in the educational institutions and my own in the government agency.

The only way I can think of to “iron out” the relationship between the title of the research paper and the content of the paper, as I see it, is by way of admitting that the title was poorly chosen. 

Moira: There is another imbalance is also discernible in some of your use of language such as on p. 30 completely out of place in EJOLTS. You write:

“The autobiographical story told by Øgland (2013) is similar to Whitehead’s story in many ways. Like Whitehead he is trying to help a group of people to develop as responsible professionals by living according to his ideals of care, trust and workplace democracy while observing how such ideals are often difficult to follow when they are inconsistent with the values expressed by the institution itself. He consequently tells a story about implementing TQM through the use of critical theory for the purpose of aiding members of the organisation against institutional oppression.”

Whether or not your intention is conscious, this kind of writing (putting ‘the researcher’ instead of ‘I’) goes way beyond the merely linguistic. The researcher in such an account is ‘out there, distant, not personally identified with’. ‘I’, on the other hand, as the narrator of the action and reflection, takes responsibility for the words on the page and the living meanings behind them. This is a fundamental problem with this paper, to my mind. It is also something that Pip commented on in her responses to your earlier submission.

Why do I see this as such a problem? Your use of the third person places a writer’s view of knowledge and theorising as remote from the author’s, i.e. from yours. Yet you are central to this whole process. This is your paper, your processes, your ideas, your originality and creativity, throughout. The way you’re writing about it is as something ungrounded in living relationships and values and developing over time (Laidlaw, 1996). Yet you have an intention: to make connections in order to facilitate deeper learning, not only in others, but also in yourself. Using the apparently safe, and objective title of ‘the researcher’, you miss out on a closer analysis and synthesis that would have been possible if you had included as central your own processes of learning.

Petter: The use of ‘the researcher’ rather than ‘I’ is something I discussed with Pip on the Community Space, and the point is the same that I have been trying to make over and over again.  In a paper like this, when I focus on making theoretical or methodological contributions to Living Theory practice, the aim of the study is not to develop Living Theory about my own practice.  The aim of the study is to investigate the WikiHow strategy for learning how to play Pac-Man at a level where it becomes possible to use the video game model as a tool for extracting structural insights from a LET account to be used in another account.  When I refer to ‘the researcher’ rather than ‘I’ in this context, it is exactly because I want to place myself in the background as something ‘out there, distant, no personally identified with’, as you say, while the Pac-Man model as a research tool occupies the central place of attention.

If I had submitted a paper called “A living theory account of trying to implement total quality management by mean of critical systems thinking”, and then kept on referring to myself as ‘the researcher’ rather than ‘I’, then I would agree with you that this would be problematic.  However, that would be a completely different type of paper.  Actually, I have also been working on a paper using that particular title, but that is a paper that will build on the ideas presented in this paper, so I need to get this paper published first.  In the case of this paper, I find it highly problematic to refer to myself as ‘I’ as I feel that would imply that I was writing about something that had to do with living relationships, values and developing over time, which is precisely what it is not. 

The very point of the paper is to use a mathematical model (the Pac-Man game) to address LET accounts in an objective manner without living relationships, values and time because I want to use the model for connecting LET accounts that express different living relationships, different values and different developments over time.  In order to discuss values and variation we have to have standards for comparing.  The Pac-Man model is such a standard.  It is just a video game.  It is a thing.  It does not have values, relationships and evolution over time.  The purpose of my paper is to argue that standards like these are important communication standards that we can use for extracting structural insights from reading LET accounts by people we did not expect to have anything in common with and suddenly realise that we may have very much in common indeed. 

This is how I felt when I read Jack Whitehead’s book “The growth of educational knowledge” (1993), and that is how I feel with some of the EJOLTS artices and LET videos I watch on YouTube.  I live in a different world from these people, but still I get touched by their LET accounts, and I want to translate those insights into something that gives meaning to me.  The Pac-Man model is a tool for making such translations, but it comes at a cost, and the purpose of this paper is to investigate this cost.

Moira: I have a rather sweeping suggestion, Petter. I’m proposing you couch the whole paper as your own Living Theory enquiry, i.e. setting up what you wanted to do from your 2009 insights to the present day in terms of your findings about Pac-Man acting as a useful tool in seeing the dimensions of Living Theory as a social movement, with its personal and developmental value to you in terms of making connections both intellectual and experiential. In this account, whose main middle section already has the shape of an action-reflection cycle (McNiff, 2013), you could show the development of growing insights (captured in the title to the paper) about the usefulness to Living Theory of making connections between the learning enabled by engaging in the processes of the Pac-Man video game and Living Theory as a social movement. In this way it could become an original and creative contribution to Living Theory research itself. I also think it would facilitate the readers’ orientation to your stimulating ideas. As it stands your writing sits awkwardly, in my opinion, between an analysis of the Pac-Man game and connections to be made with Living Theory as a social movement. As a result, I am left at the end of the paper not really fully understanding what the paper is for.

Petter: As I mentioned, I am considering a follow-up on the current paper with a paper that is for the present called “A living theory account of trying to implement total quality management by mean of critical systems thinking”, and one way of focusing this paper could be by means of how I focused on the Pac-Man model as a strictly conceptual model in 2009 while I know think of it as a “living model” (i.e. that it is not sufficient only to know what it is but we also need to be skilled at playing it), and tell about my journey from there to here.  However, batching these two ideas together would in my opinion make one bad paper rather than two potentially good ones.

Why is it so important to me to have this paper published in EJOLTS the way it is?  What is the paper for, as you say?  The purpose of the paper is to propose a solution to the problem of how we can translate insights from one LET account into another.  Is this a relevant problem for the EJOLTS community?  I don’t know, but for me it is a relevant problem.  I have read Jack’s 1993 account where he tells stories about how he was fighting institutional oppression and dealing with all kinds of challenges and problems, and I found it an extremely important book because he captured so many of the emotional experiences I have had in my work-life.  Usually we don’t hear the stories of alarmists and people who dare to speak up against authorities, and when we hear such stories it is usually in the shape of how they had to pay the price of loosing the jobs, families, and all sorts of sad consequences.  Jack’s story, however, is different.  It is extremely positive because, as far as I can see, he is one of the few people who got out in the other end of the tunnel as a celebrated hero and the father of a new way of thinking about action research.

I think it would be sad if only those “brainwashed” into the way of doing Living Theory research by means of writing Living Theory accounts were to prevent the rest of the social research community from sharing from these immensely important stories, and thus be prevented from getting enrolled in the Living Theory community where they could help the community evolve into a social movement.  I find it almost paradoxical that some of us almost have to fight getting published in EJOLTS in a similar way as Jack was fighting to get published and have is work recognised in more traditional scientific outlets.

However, I was touched by how Jack responded to my paper on the Community Space, and I see that each and every person I have met at EJOLTS mean well and try to help.  To me it is important to get the current paper published in EJOLTS without having it destroyed in attempts to make it fit into formats that are incompatible with the research question and research method.  What is the paper for, you ask.  The paper is written for EJOLTS with the intent of raising debate about models like the Pac-Man game for extracting structural knowledge from individual LET accounts and to improve communication and understanding.

Moira: In conclusion, there are three areas that need to be reworked before I can recommend publication. Both are concerned with originality and creativity, and readability:

1)     Making your description and explanation of the Pac-Man game as a helpful metaphor for Living Theory as a social movement more overt and clearly spelled out for the reader. This would entail changing the lens through which you’re currently writing – from someone distancing himself from what he is doing, to someone immersing himself in the process and becoming one with it. This would give you insights that an outsider-perspective cannot. Living Theory is created through immersion, not distance, through living rather than theorising about it separately afterwards.

2)   Connected with this would be the judicious pruning of descriptions about the game to an appendix. This would enable deliberations about the significance of the game’s processes as a way of seeing Living Theory as a social movement to take place more upfront. At the moment they appear to be almost afterthoughts.

3)   You need an overt structure by which the reader can navigate their way through your text. You need to let them know the significance of what they’re going to read, what they’re reading and what they’ve read. This isn’t about talking down to your reader, Petter, but helping your reader to cope with some very complex and intricate ideas.

Connected to the overall readability are some examples of technical weaknesses that you need to look at.

Petter: When it comes to your three areas in need of rework, my impression is that they reflect the idea that the body of the paper should be changed to match what you saw as the intent of the title.  As I have said above, I think the title was wrong in the sense that it gave the EJOLTS reader wrong expectations.  When I have now changed the title, change the abstract, change the introduction, changed the conclusion, and made effort in trying to improve some language issues in the rest of the paper, I hope it will be possible to find a path forwards towards publications without having to destroy the paper as it is now.

Concerning the details of your three points, in the first point you describe the Pac-Man model as a metaphor.  This is not what the paper is about.  In my 2009 paper I used the Pac-Man model as a metaphor, but that was not sufficient when we want to learn skills.  The central point of the educational game scholarship is that playing games is learning by simulation.  It is not sufficient just to think of a political scenario as thought it were a Pac-Man game, we also need a certain level of skill at Pac-Man to be able to understand what that means in practice.  An aeroplane pilot needs to spend time with flight simulators before he can be allowed to experiment with real planes.  A flight simulator is not a metaphor.  It is a video game.  In other words, in such a context my research question would be along the lines of how much time and effort does it take to learn how to operate a flight simulator in order to become sufficiently skilled to be able to understand the practice of real flying.  I understand you mean well with your suggestions on how to change the writing style by going from distancing towards immersion, but as I have explained in previous paragraphs, I think this would be the wrong approach considering the nature of this particular type of LET research I describe.

Your second point has to do with moving the technical aspects of the Pac-Man theory and experiments towards an appendix in order to make it easier to understand the study as a LET account.  As I have explained above, my LET research is not a LET account, and I cannot see how moving any aspects of the central part of the paper into an appendix could do anything but reducing the quality of the paper and ultimately destroy it with respect to what it is trying to communicate.

Your third point is that I need an overt structure that makes it easier for the reader to navigate through the text.  To me this comment explains the previous two comments.  As you point out in the beginning of your review, the title gave the reader certain expectations of what the paper was about, and the abstract and introduction were not sufficiently helpful for making the paper easy to read.  As a consequence of this, I have change the title, rewritten the abstract and rewritten the introduction in a manner that I believe should improve make the paper easier to understand.

Included is a revised version of the manuscript.  I feel I have something important to contribute to the EJOLTS community with this paper, and my hope is that the conversation we are having as part of the review process will gradually help to convince you, Moira, and the rest of the review team that the paper has been written with a particular style and structured in a particular manner for the purpose of presenting the ideas and results it contains in an effective manner.  My hope is that the paper can be recommended for publication without making the adjustments described in your summary points 1 and 2, as I feel the rationale behind those adjustments are based on a misunderstanding of what the paper aims to do, and that we can reach agreement that the current style and structure is the type of style and structure that is most useful for this kind of LET research (summary point 3).

This is a paper I have spent almost two years writing for the single purpose of having it published in EJOLTS, as I believe it makes an important contribution to Living Theory methodology, so if it were to be rejected (heaven forbid!!!) I would like to have it rejected on grounds of there being no interest in the problem of translating LET accounts, or that my suggested solution of using game theory for addressing this problem being unacceptable for some I reason I can understand, but I would be extremely disappointed if I were told that this was interesting and important “LET research” but unfortunately unpublishable as it was not presented in the format of a traditional “LET account”.

Best regards,

Petter