¹Gothenburg Research Institute, Göteborg University, Gothenburg, Sweden

Correspondence: B Czarniawska, Gothenburg Research Institute, Göteborg University, Box 600, Gothenburg SE 405 30, Sweden. Tel: +46 31 773 1552; Fax: +46 31 773 5619 E-mail: barbara.czarniawska@gri.gu.se

Before composing these comments to Professor Bruno Frey's provocative article, I asked myself: 'What sources of legitimacy could I muster in order to justify my words?' I arrived at three potential sources: the fact that I have been a recipient of some awards, my history as a motivation researcher, and the prospect of offering an alternative interpretative frame.

As to the first, I admit to its weakness: I am but a sample of one. Nevertheless, my knowledge of social science permits me to see a clear historical contingency behind my awards. I was the right person in the right place at the right time. Had I been a man, were I still working in Poland, the awards would have gone to someone else. What surprised me, however, was the psychic cost I incurred in receiving those awards, which were connected to ceremonies – some at a national level. It was then that I discovered the strong psychological discomfort I experience by participating in ceremonies. If I had been able to decide the means of presentation, the awards would have come by mail. Yet it was obvious to me that my discomfort was of no importance in contrast to the affront to the community had I declined an award. This insight led me, by the way of analogy, to frame the event differently than Professor Frey did.

The daughter of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson recalled that when she and her Armenian fiancé had decided to be married, they immediately reached an agreement to have a secret and quiet wedding in order to avoid the complications of his national affiliation and her extended family relationships. Her mother opposed the idea strenuously. The couple's comforts and discomforts were irrelevant, she told them, as their wedding was not a private occasion, but a necessary and expected contribution to the community (Bateson, 1984).

Weddings and funerals are rituals that express the community's feelings about passages in life. Parties are for guests, an expression of the host's affinity for friends, and people celebrating their birthdays or anniversaries are rarely those who have the most fun at their parties. In the same vein, I would suggest, academic awards are rituals intended to express and celebrate that which the community values at any given time, with award recipients as role players in a complicated pageant. The monetary value of the award, far from being irrelevant, adds to its symbolic value, although it does not constitute its significance.

Am I suggesting that an award is of no significance to an award recipient? Certainly not. But its significance remains private and personal. I have serious doubts concerning the role of awards as incentives. Here, I need to confess that I had given up my interest in motivation theories when I understood, during my stay as post-doc at Sloan School of Management in 1981/1982, that 'motivation theories' were a euphemism for 'control theories', and I adjusted my interests accordingly. In the context of professional organizations, such as universities, the idea of external control, of being motivated by somebody else, is traditionally treated with disdain – and rightly so.

This attitude would not have to pre-empt the interest in intrinsic motivation, if the ethnomethodologists, and before them Kenneth Burke (1945, 1950), had not planted doubt about the advisability of attempts to establish people's motives. When asked about motives (even by themselves, in an internal dialogue), people tend to construct their motivation in terms appropriate to their time and place. What is more, such accounts tend to change over time, so the same person can claim, with obvious sincerity, a variety of conflicting motives for the same action at different times. Although the rhetoric of motives, or of accounts, is an interesting study topic, it does not tell us what people will do – an old ambition of motivation theorists that has never been realized.

As for the wish for social distinction (understood literally), which is widely spread among the academics, supposedly, the contemporary rhetoric of motives suggests at least two other possibilities. One is 'to be good at what one does', or, in Alasdair MacIntyre's formulation, the quest for betterment, inherent in the way people conceive of their practices. This quest is not aimed at other people, but at achieving 'those standards of excellence, which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of that form of activity' (1981: 175). Awards and their recipients are, then, embodiments of those standards.

Another interpretation would start from pointing out that the formulation 'to be better than others' suggests a wish of difference, of alterity of the self. I agree with Professor Frey that people have an innate desire to distinguish themselves. As Gabriel Tarde (1893/1999) pointed out in his early critique of the tendency to overestimate a quest for identity, they would not otherwise be aware of their own existence. Awards are rarely given to eccentrics, however, unless a community wants to celebrate eccentricity as an important value. Thus 'to be better than others' in the academic context suggests in fact a wish for identity, a similarity, a measurability on the same dimension.

Both these interpretations differ from Professor Frey's in that they point toward the community and away from individuals (even in dyadic relationships such as those between the donor and the recipient). The difference may be more far reaching than it appears: it might be a difference in the premises of Professor Frey's reasoning and mine. Such difference in the premises expresses our different understanding of the epoch in which we live and the status of 'rational discourse' within it. I agree with Bruno Latour (1993) that we have never been modern – in the sense that rituals, ceremonies, and symbolic expressions are as central to contemporary societies as they were to any of the societies that went before them. One could even venture to say that modernization proceeds by rituals, where the ritualistic enactment of the market (e.g. public tenders) has recently acquired central importance (Czarniawska, 2002). The rational discourse is but the legitimate rhetoric for accounting of our actions. March and Olsen (1989: 162)) observed that 'Having determined what action to take by logic of appropriateness, in our culture we justify the action (appropriately) by a logic of consequentiality'. In other words, there is no opposition between rationality and convention; rationality is the central convention of our time. Awards are not compensation; they are important messages to the community, and the recipients are the media.