A litotes of what you fancy: some thoughts on Stanley Hollander's writing style

The Authors

Stephen Brown, Department of Marketing, Entrepreneurship and Strategy, University of Ulster, Jordanstown, UK

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to investigate the writing style of Stanley C. Hollander, in order to better understand the power of his prose.

Design/methodology/approach – A line-by-line literary analysis of Hollander's publications, with a view to detecting his stylistic “signature” or “fingerprint”.

Findings – Four key elements are integral to Hollander's writing style – interrogatives, inventories, iconoclasm and irony. His single most characteristic literary device is litotes, a mode of ironic understatement.

Research limitations/implications – Literary analysis is inherently idiosyncratic and tends to reflect the perspective of the interpreter. Another analyst is sure to find different features in Hollander's corpus (though this is less a methodological shortcoming than a testament to the richness of Hollander's writings).

Originality/value – All academics are writers and, by better understanding the technique of a much admired stylist, everyone's publications can be improved.

Article Type:

Literature review

Keyword(s):

Historical research; Creative writing; Literary forms.

Journal:

Journal of Historical Research in Marketing

Volume:

Number:

Year:

2009

pp:

74-92

Copyright ©

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

ISSN:

1755-750X

History needs no justification. We do not have to treat it as a deadly grim and earnest burden (Hollander, 1983, p. 36).

How to write about articles you have not read

Published in Paris to considerable acclaim, Boyard's (2008) How to Talk about Books you Haven't Read deals with a dilemma that assails many of us. Namely, discussing the latest literary sensation – or analogous cultural artefacts – without revealing that we have not actually read the wretched thing. Perused the reviews, yes; poured over the flap copy, possibly; purchased the much-vaunted volume, even. But reading it? In full? For pleasure? Do not be absurd! Have not the time. Not enough hours in the day. The pile of unread books on my bedside table is already a health hazard …

I suspect many feel the same way about academic articles. So torrential is the downpour of scholarly publications; so many and varied are the marketing journals nowadays; so incessant are the pressures to produce, produce, produce – since our careers, our reputations, our impact factors depend on our output – that keeping up with the literature is an increasingly Sisyphean task, Augean almost. So overwhelmed are we by the tsunami of reading material that a marketing version of Boyard's book might sell very well indeed. No one would read it, of course, but that's only to be expected, given the book's basic premise.

If anything, this oversupply problem is much worse in marketing academia than it is in popular culture generally, because the majority of our published articles are not worth reading in the first place. As many commentators on marketing scholarship point out (Crosier, 2004; Lutz, 1990; Mick, 2005; Winer, 1998), our writing is tedious at best and tendentious at worst. According to Bauerly et al. (2005), what is more, marketers' prose is getting worser and worser (our grammar isn't improving, either). Little wonder that many marketing practitioners want nothing to do with our less than luminous learned insights (Tapp, 2005), much less leap to implement our alleged “managerial implications”[1].

The foregoing remarks may strike some readers as unnecessarily nugatory, not to say unspeakably cynical. But in a world where writing is what we do and publication, if not quite everything, is pretty close to everything for ambitious marketing academics, it is salutary to cast a critical eye on our collective written accomplishments. This critical eye reveals that, although the bulk of published marketing output lies somewhere between dreary and dreadful, there are pockets of undeniable excellence (Mick, 2005). The marketing discipline is blessed with several quite brilliant writers, writers whose articles are worth reading regardless of the topic, writers whose style, flair and sparkling turns of phrase function as best practice benchmarks for the rest of us. Most would agree, for example, that the late great Ted Levitt was a wonderful writer, someone whose way with words was second to none (Brown, 2004). Morris Holbrook, similarly, is often cited as a literary stylist of singular ability, a writer whose titles alone are in a league of their own (Brown, 1999). Elizabeth Hirschman, Linda Scott, John Sherry, Sid Levy, Dennis Rook, Russell Belk, Philip Kotler, Nigel Piercy, Lisa O'Malley and several significant others are also liberally endowed with the write stuff, as are past masters like Ernest Dichter, Paul Lazarsfeld and Theodore Beckman (Brown, 2005).

Marketing, then, may be a sea of literary mediocrity, but there are islands of academic excellence, places where panache, dash, élan and, above all, readability run wild and free. One of these blessed isles is Stanley C. Hollander. Although he is rightly renowned for his copious contributions to marketing scholarship – on everything from surrogate shoppers to the antecedents of consumerism – Hollander is a writer of rare ability. He is a joy to read. Irrespective of the subject matter, Stan can be read for pleasure. Stanley Hollander may have gone to the great library stack in the sky, but his body of work will be read, relished and revered for as long as there are retail marketing students with an eye for the wry, an ear for the offbeat, and a taste for times past[2].

While most would agree that Stan's articles are never less than scintillating, such communal concordances do not get us very far. They fail to answer the all-important question: how does he do it? What is the secret of Stan's striking style? Are there writing devices, literary tricks or semantic acrobatics that he uses to good effect and that we too can deploy successfully? The short answer is yes, though imitation is best avoided, since the single most important thing to note about great writers is that their style is unique, different and idiosyncratic. Indeed, the study of stylistics rests on this very premise (Bradford, 1997; Williams, 1995). Literary style is defined as “the characteristic manner in which an author expresses him- or her-self” (Gray, 1995, p. 277). And few marketing writers, as this paper will attempt to demonstrate, are blessed with a more characteristic manner than Hollander.

Pressing the Flesch

Prize-winning papers, according to Sawyer et al.'s (2008) recent study of scholarly writing styles, are better written than run-of-the-mill marketing articles. This may well be the case, but their definition of what constitutes “good writing” is somewhat restrictive. Short sentences, simple words, straight talking and an absence of extravagant language – the kind of prose that scores well on the Flesch index of readability – are the sine qua non of fine writing, apparently. In this regard, Sawyer and Co. concur with most “how to write well” manuals. As Williams (1995) stresses, the Strunk and Whites of this world typically consist of boilerplate platitudes like “Omit needless words,” “Be clear,” “Be specific,” “Simple is superior” et cetera. Many, moreover, quote Orwell (1962, p. 156) with approval:

[…] (i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print; (ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do; (iii) If it is possible to cut out a word, always cut it out; (iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active; (v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

There are significant difficulties with such much-repeated truisms, though. In the first instance, the keep it simple, stupid style is not the only option on offer, nor is it the one true way to literary excellence. About 60 years ago, an Anglo-Irish critic called Connolly (1938) identified two basic modes of fine writing: a baroque, high flown, extra-extravagant style and a plain, unpretentious, no-nonsense tone of voice. The former he termed Mandarin, the latter Vernacular. The history of English literature, Connolly further contended, exhibits a contrapuntal pattern, where the contrasting modes enjoy periods of ascendancy and unpopularity, respectively. Thus, the Mandarin of Alexander Pope gave way to the Vernacular of Daniel Dafoe, which was superseded, after several long cycles, by the Mandarin of Henry James and the Vernacular of John Steinbeck.

Shades of “The wheel of retailing” aside, this pattern of literary rise and fall is less pertinent for our present purposes than the basic distinction itself. Vernacular may be the mode that is recommended in how-to-write handbooks – and reiterated by the majority of marketing commentators – however, it is not the only way of writing well. The merest glance at modern literary classics like Ulysses, As I Lay Dying, Slaughterhouse Five or Infinite Jest reveals that Mandarin writing does not mean bad writing, despite what the Flesch pressers proclaim. As the immortal H.L. Mencken rightly observed:

With precious few exceptions, all the books on style in English are by writers quite unable to write. The subject, indeed, seems to exercise a special and dreadful fascination over school ma'ams, bucolic college professors and other such pseudoliterates … Their central aim, of course, is to reduce the whole thing to a series of simple rules – the overmastering passion of their melancholy order, at all times and everywhere (quoted in Williams, 1995, p. 14).

Equally troublesome for the wielders of Strunk and White is the blindingly obvious fact that many of marketing's foremost writers fail to adhere to the Simple-is-Superior stylebook. On the contrary, some of our very best writers, such as Ted Levitt, Morris Holbrook and John Sherry, write in a way that is not only the antithesis of how-to-do-it handbooks but a recipe for rotating George Orwell in his place of eternal rest. Short sentences, simple words, straight talking and an absence of extravagant language are the very last things that Levittonians bring to the marketing party. They adhere, rather, to the four P's of Mandarin marketing – pleonasm, paronomasia, periphrasis and purpureus pannus. Pleonasm is a polite word for verbiage, such as Sherry's (2003, p. 314) by no means atypical, “as world systems recollide, reconfigure, and recombine, they are wrapped in a polysemous package of public paranoia”. Paronomasia is the rhetorical term for a pun and when it comes to punning Russell Belk is marketing's paronomasiast par excellence (Highways and Buyways, “May the farce be with you,”, etc.). Periphrasis is a roundabout way of writing and, as those who get around to reading Morris Holbrook will readily testify, his prose is not so much round as rotund, nay obese[3]. Purpureus pannus, meanwhile, may be a no-no for the how-to-write contingent – it is better-known name is “purple patch” – but whatever else he achieved Levitt (1992, p. 40) cannot be accused of forgoing the indigo:

In Brazil thousands of eager migrants from the preindustrial Bahian wilderness swarm daily into the exploding coastal cities, quickly to install television sets in crowded corrugated-iron huts before which, next to battered Volkswagens, they make sacrificial candlelight offerings of fruit and fresh-killed chickens to the Macumban spirits.

The art of readable writing

Stanley C. Hollander is a fascinating exception to this hyperbolic norm. For all his undoubted writing talent, his prose is not characterised by the four P's posturing that is such a distinctive feature of our discipline's leading literati. If anything, Stan's style is closer to Vernacular than Mandarin. Hollander (1995) not only openly acknowledges his indebtedness to a how-to-primer – aptly, The Art of Readable Writing by Rudolph Flesch – but also his sentences are ordinarily fairly short, his vocabulary is comparatively straightforward, his phraseology is workmanlike, down-to-earth, almost flat; he often begins papers with those profoundly unimaginative words, “This article”; and he usually eschews alliterative-cum-assonant extravagances that mark (mar and many maintain) the publications of Belk, Levitt and the like:

The history of retail development seems to demonstrate an accordion pattern. Domination by general line, wide-assortment retailers alternates with domination by specialized, narrow line merchants (Hollander, 1966, p. 29).

This paper will look at two extremely difficult and elusive topics: (1) the influences that various socio-economic environments have exerted upon retailing at various points in time and space, and (2) the influences that retailing, in turn, has exerted on its environments. The relative strength of these two influences, environment upon retailing and retailing upon environment, will then be evaluated (Hollander, 1963a, p. 220).

The imperfect competition and excess capacity hypotheses also appear highly plausible. Considerably more investigation is needed before their validity can be appraised properly. The wheel pattern developed very slowly, and very recently in the department store field. Yet market imperfections in that field probably were greater before the automobile gave the consumer shopping mobility (Hollander, 1960, p. 42).

On reading such passages, it would be easy to infer that Hollander's writing languishes somewhere between humdrum and ho-hum. Closer inspection, though, reveals that what Stan's style lacks in flash it more than compensates in finesse. It reminds us that one does not have to be a show-off in order to be a writer of the first rank. Stanley Hollander, like all great writers, is sui generis. As historiographers similarly record about the giants of their discipline (de Certeau, 1988; Gay, 1988; Iggers, 1997; Warren, 1998), Hollander is blessed with a unique literary style. It is a style that can be summarised under the four I's of interrogative, inventory, iconoclasm, ironic.

Interrogative

The interrogative, as everyone assuredly knows (do not they?), is a case, clause or construction that conveys, contains or communicates a question. And a questioning style is very much part of Hollander's literary armoury. It is made manifest in the titles of many articles (Who does the work of retailing?, The one price system: fact or fiction?, Is there a generic demand for services? and If small is beautiful, is a very small sample even prettier?), as well as books, reports, chapters, commentaries and section headings (Henry Ford, Inventor of the Supermarket?, Who Are the International Retailers?, What Does it All Mean?, Is That Going to Be On the Exam? and Was There a Pepsi Generation Before Pepsi Invented It?). His abstracts, footnotes, forewords, acknowledgements and suchlike are also riddled with quizzical squiggles (Hollander, 1964a; Hollander and Rassuli, 1993; Rassuli and Hollander, 1986). He often starts articles with a rhetorical question or two and is never reluctant to conclude with a head-scratcher or several (Hollander, 1953, 1956, 1961; Rassuli and Hollander, 1987). His serial queries, in fact, are frequently bunched together like an artillery barrage of interrogatives:

The new marketing history does not yet, and may never be completely able to, answer such questions as: “Is marketing change evolutionary or revolutionary?”; “Is it logical and predictable or is it random?”; “How marked has change been over how long a period of time?”; “To what extent is marketing change a function of, or a cause of, environmental change?”; “Are there observable patterns in the marketing change process and, if so, how do they relate to accepted theories of innovation, diffusion, and paradigmatic shift, and so on?”; “What has been the relative role of individual marketers in effecting change?”; “How have marketing practitioners, academics, consultants, and commentators, critics and regulators related to each other and to marketing within whatever change process has occurred?”; and “What has the economy or society gained or lost by virtue of the change process?” (Hollander and Rassuli, 1993, p. xix).

Hollander, moreover, is particularly partial to meta-interrogatives. That is to say, he routinely raises the question of questions, often by means of a question. Take the following extracts, which not only comprise a concatenation of inquiries but also incorporate comments on the additional inquiries that need asking:

What are the roots of this culture of consumption? How, when and why did it evolve? What has been and what will be the role and impact of marketing? The notion that these questions are of great historical import is beginning to be recognized by a wide variety of historians, including intellectual and social historians as well as economic, anthropological, and communications scholars with historical orientations. The answers to such questions help to explain modern society. The same questions are also of great relevance to marketers at both a macro and micro level because they contribute to the evaluation of marketing and to the prediction of its future role. Indeed, marketers and consumer behaviourists must ask whether the desire for more goods and services is induced, innate, and/or insatiable (Rassuli and Hollander, 1986, p. 4).

The list of areas for fruitful research could be expanded ad infinitum. But they can be summarized in the observation that many questions which should interest merchants should also interest economists: The problem is not one of finding questions but rather one of framing the most useful questions and of proceeding though efficient means to satisfactory answers. While more studies and more data are needed, they are not enough (Hollander, 1957, pp. 264-5).

Any review of past or comparative phenomena is likely to lead to the question: What implications does it have for the here and now? Such a question is not necessarily part of historical study. Such work need not deliver a lesson, any more than a symphony need deliver one […] [Nevertheless, the] question of current implications will almost always arise when the past is examined in the context of an applied discipline (Hollander, 1984, p. 13).

So characteristic is this interrogative inclination that it could easily qualify as Stan's signature stylistic device. Granted, every self-respecting academic asks questions – they would not be academics otherwise – but this probing propensity is particularly prevalent in Hollander. If anything, in fact, he is more of a question poser than an answer provider, which is something of a relief in a world where everyone else is shilling a me-too model or passing-off a pet theory.

Be that as it may, Stan's quizzical bent is nowhere better illustrated than in the paper for which he is best known, “The wheel of retailing” (Hollander, 1960). The entire paper is a root and branch critique of McNair's (1958) infamous hypothesis that retail institutions commence as cut-price, low-cost operations and gradually trade up, thereby making themselves vulnerable to a new generation of price-cutters. He queries the universality of the phenomenon, evaluates the factors that might give rise to it, notes the exceptions that disprove the rule and, generally, raises so many points of academic order that the paper should really be titled “The wheel of retailing?”

An even better example of this propensity is “Retailing: cause or effect?” (Hollander, 1963a). Apart from the interrogative title, the body of the paper is a relentless inquiry into the age-old debate: does retailing reflect the socio-economic environment, affect the socio-economic environment, or both? The effect argument is given the third degree, the cause contention is ruthlessly cross-examined and the both position is weighed in the scales of scholarly justice and found wanting:

To sum up, does this grabbag of heterogeneous retailing situations prove anything? Maybe it merely substantiates one observation that anthropology is a historical science designed to expose those who are foolish enough to expect general laws of behaviour (Hollander, 1963a, p. 230).

Yet, for all the fireworks in “Cause and effect,” the most telling literary evidence is often found in out of the way places, in unguarded remarks that the stylist lets slip, so to speak. In Hollander's case, the most compelling proof of his inquisitorial proclivity comes in a tiny aside about textbooks. Although, he frequently despaired of the barbarities and outright historical inaccuracies found in most student texts, he specifically absolves Agnew and Houghton's Marketing Policies. The reason? It “contained a questioning element absent from the rest” (Hollander, 1998, p. 115). QED.

Inventory

Alongside incessant interrogatives, Stanley Hollander's writing style is characterised by inventorisation (if there is such a word). His papers are largely made up of lists, long lists, lists that are sometimes numbered, sometimes alphabetised, sometimes bullet pointed, sometimes replete with resplendent Roman numerals and sometimes presented in a manner that looks like plain and simple prose but is actually an inventory in disguise:

The article is divided into eight sections: (1) introduction, (2) definition of ITBs, (3) discussion of typical barrier life patterns, including a brief outline of relevant economic regulatory theory, (4) review of selected aspects of US and (some) Canadian experience, (5) summary of that experience as it relates to the pattern described in Section 3, (6) implications for the EC, (7) implication for marketing thought, management, research and public policy and (8) conclusions (Hollander and LaFrancis, 1994, p. 121).

Three forces finally eliminated the licensing requirements. One was merchant opposition to the legislation. This came from the small storekeepers who wanted salesmen as a source of supply and, to an increasing degree, from wholesalers and others who wanted to send their own salesmen on the road. The second force was composed of salesmen's associations, while the third, and probably most effective was the United States Supreme Court (Hollander, 1964b, p. 493).

Stan's articles, not to put too fine a point on it, are congeries of inventories. They are nested lists, no less. Typically, a series of bullet-points forms part of an alphabetised inventory which is only one of four fundamental points laid out in the first paragraph. Several his publications are structured like Russian dolls – Matriouska Marketing Scholarship, if you will – and many titles are mini tallies in and of themselves (Desire – induced, innate, insatiable?, Oddities, nostalgia, wheels and other patterns in retail evolution, and Chain store developments and their political, strategic, and social interdependencies). He is also partial to parallelism, a literary device that involves constant repetition of syntactic units and gives an incantatory, near-enough Whitmanesque, tone to the prose:

Some carry stocks, others do not. Some have conventional store facilities, whereas others operate in office buildings, lofts, and warehouses. Some feature electrical appliances and hard goods, while others emphasize soft goods. Some pose as wholesalers, and others are practically indistinguishable from all other popular priced retailers in their fields (Hollander, 1960, p. 39).

Suffice it to say that at least some studies of retail prices and sales seem to indicate that at least some consumers will switch from high-priced gasoline stations to low-priced ones, that at least some consumers seem to be able to evaluate, fairly realistically, the variations in services and prices between full price and discount retailers; “that [at least some] consumers are interested in price relationships between competing commodities and very likely will shift part of their patronage from items whose price is unchanged to those offered at a bargain”; and that at least some high-income consumers will retain the same interest in supermarket convenience and economy manifested by lower income consumers (Hollander, 1957, p. 254)[4].

Incantations aside, there are two interesting aspects of Hollander's litany-like idiolect. The first is that it is less frequent in his early work. Or, to be more precise, his early articles are not set out in a tabular manner, unlike the bulk of his later papers[5]. It is tempting to interpret this tendency as an adaptation to the scientific style of prose that the marketing discipline demanded in the aftermath of the Ford and Carnegie reports, if only because bullet-pointed prose looks more scientific than essayistic sentences, paragraphs and so forth. However, the historical reality is that Hollander was always archive minded. He was fond of assembling bibliographies, never reluctant to write short articles for dictionaries and handbooks, had a thing about the trials and tribulations of taxonomy and, according to his own testimony, loved nothing more than rummaging through back issues of trade journals or Sears catalogues. If not exactly a professorial pack-rat (Pollay, 1987), he was definitely an academic truffle hound:

Reference works can be useful teaching and research tools. Many students have little idea of the complexity and degree of specialization existing in an advanced economic system. I have been pleased with class presentations that used lists of subject headings from metropolitan area classified telephone directories […] Similarly, the old-fashioned general mail-order “wish book” catalogues were perfect for demonstrating many merchandising, pricing and promotional policies (Hollander, 1998, p. 118).

The second thing to note about Hollander's inventoristic inclinations – apart from his fondness for first-, second- and third-type syntactic constructions – is that his lists often appear in absentia. In other words, he frequently resorts to expressions like “out of the many that could be cited”, “space does not permit”, “this is not the place”, “examples could be multiplied” and suchlike. He's implying, in effect, that there is a lot more where that comes from, that the list in his first draft is actually much longer, that if it were not for the page limitation factor he could keep going and going-and-going with more of the same. Regardless of whether Hollander had plenty more material to spare, this surrogate list (as it were) is a compelling rhetorical device, since it overpowers and thus convinces the reader:

These citations are but a few out of many indicating that discount houses, two-price retailers, “curbstone brokers”, buying clubs, “backdoor wholesalers”, and similar discount manifestations have been with us for some time (Hollander, 1953, p. 59).

In Hollander's case, of course, he usually does have more where that comes from. His phantom inventories are more than rhetorical sleight of hand. Take the landmark 1970 volume, Multinational Retailing. The book is a shopping list writ large. It is nothing less than an enormous annotated index of retail organisations with a cross-border presence. Chapters II and III in particular consist of page after page of catalogue-alike content:

A brief list of multinational dealers in luxury goods, taken in great part from advertisements in such magazines as The New Yorker and The Connoisseur is heavily weighted toward jewelers and art dealers. Art and antique dealers with multicountry facilities include Wildenstein & Co. (New York, London, and Buenos Aires), Christie's (London, New York, and Geneva), Sotheby's (London, with representatives in New York, Beverly Hills, and Paris, an affiliation with Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, and plans for a leased department in Simpons's, Toronto), The Antique Company of New York – Antique Porcelain Company (London) affiliation, Galleria Kreisler (Madrid and New York), The Broadway Art Gallery (Madrid and Worcester, England), Otto Zenke (London and Palm Beach), Perez (carpeting and tapestries, London, Bristol, and Amsterdam), S.J. Shrubsole (New York and London), London Graphics (London, New York, and Detroit) and M.K. Knoedler (New York, London, and Paris) (Hollander, 1970, p. 17).

Lest this comes across as condemnation with faint praise, it must be stressed that it is extremely difficult to make inventories interesting. Such is the calibre of Hollander's basic writing ability, however, that he somehow manages to hold the reader's attention with content that is better suited to a trade directory or a sales brochure. Only, the very best writers can turn eye-glazing gazetteers into eye-popping page turners. Even his apologias are adroit:

Several salient aspects of this list of luxury retailers may be noted. As it stands it is quite short, but even much more exhaustive research would not expand it beyond a small fraction of total international retail trade, so long as luxuries are defined in middle-class American terms. Second, it is characterized by what might well be called the “New York, Paris, and London” syndrome. Again, more comprehensive research might add some stores in other European capitals and resorts, but the list would still retain its metropolitan character. The international retail trade in luxuries has not been directed toward the provinces (Hollander, 1970, pp. 19-20).

Iconoclasm

If Stanley C. Hollander's entire oeuvre had to be summed up in a single word that word would probably be iconoclastic. Iconoclasm, what Bloom (1982) calls the breaking of the vessels, is the act or habit of destroying accepted ideas or conventions, often in a shocking manner (Gray, 1995). As a self-confessed sceptic, someone with a penchant for extreme revisionism, Hollander is never reluctant to puncture the platitudes, deflate the falsehoods and impale the outright idiocies of established marketing thought. He rides roughshod over received wisdom, refuses to accept the generally accepted and regards standard student textbooks as tissues of trite travesties that “require an addiction to platitudes and rose-tinted glasses” (Hollander, 1995, p. 98)[6].

The upshot of this attitude is that the overall tone of Hollander's writing lies somewhere between laconic and sardonic, where impertinence and impiety meet:

Perhaps, the best and only definition of luxury is “anything that someone thinks someone else can do without” (Hollander, 1970, p. 15).

Few older Americans seem to resent being called seniors when that status is accompanied by a special senior price or discount (Hollander and Germain, 1992, p. 112).

Of course, the enthusiasm of tenured professors in public institutions for free and unfettered competition has always seemed a little bit paradoxical (Hollander, 1995, p. 90).

In a modest and self-deprecatory interview, actress and fashion industry figure Cheryl Tiegs recently said, “Just because you are beautiful why shouldn't you have brains?” Putting aside the question of whether an implied double negative really does equal a positive, that statement would be a good slogan for a workshop in marketing history (Hollander and Savitt, 1983, p. iv).

Stan's iconoclasm is not confined to whip-smart cracks or razor-sharp sallies, however[7]. At the very start of his academic career, for example, he set out to demonstrate that the post-war fad for off-price offerings was actually a long established sales technique. So entrenched was discounting, that he dryly wondered why so little heed was paid to something that was near-enough the norm rather than the exception:

It is interesting to speculate on the reasons for this lack of attention to retailers of the “I can get it for you wholesale” variety. Perhaps, it is because the subject has seemed not quite respectable. More likely, it is because retailers offering discounts have found it advisable to avoid attracting too much attention, academic or otherwise. Semi-secretive operations seem to provide some protection against prosecution in the case of fair trade violations, and the same secrecy impresses the customer with the value of the discount (Hollander, 1953, p. 57).

Indeed, this heretical take on marketing matters is a rhetorical constant throughout Hollander's corpus. It is made manifest in his critiques of consumerism, relationship marketing, youth segmentation, standard chronologies, established taxonomies, scrambled merchandising, the marketing concept, the retail life cycle, deductive reasoning, economic man and many more besides. Hollander's (1986, p. 22) outspoken story is that there is always an unspoken story – a back story, no less – an historical trail that can be followed by those who refuse to fall for progressive, ever-upward platitudes and unfailingly fatuous periodisation schemes:

The idea of the marketing concept has been popularized within the academic community through introductory textbooks and within the business community through trade press articles and after-dinner speeches. Many publishers, authors, and speakers believe that these media call for easily remembered, absolutist presentations, with little subtlety or reservation. One modern view of good historical pedagogy calls for very distinctive labelling of discrete time periods organized around easily remembered dates, such as the decennial years. This does produce the best results on machine-graded examinations.

In this regard, it can conceivably be argued that, for all his acclaim, Hollander was more of a critic than a contributor. He preferred to unpack the positions of others rather than putting forward concepts, models and generalisations of his own. Some might regard this as a harsh assessment, since the retail accordion alone warrants inclusion in the pantheon of significant scholarly contributions, as does Stan's eponymous classic, Hollander's Law (see below). A postmodernist, meanwhile, might counter that critics perform a function that is just as valuable – arguably more valuable – than so-called creative types who hammer the square peg of historical data into the round hole of their me-too model. If it were not for Hollander and people like him, the notorious three-era theory of marketing history would still be alive and well and corrupting the student body …[8].

Nevertheless, there is no denying that the tone of Hollander's writing is often quite captious. This was especially the case in his younger days, when he was ready willing and able to let fly at the supposedly great and good. Consider his scurrilous squelch of the fashion cycle, which cheekily challenges the learned contributions of a fashion industry luminary, Dwight E. Robinson. Citing the case of the then popular sack dress – a chemise type garment that looms large in the Hollanderiad – Stan notes how the trickle down theories of the esteemed Professor Robinson do not hold water:

Very few students of the subject would dispute the pre-eminence that Professor Robinson attributes to Balenciaga and, to a lesser degree, to the house of Dior. Some probably would want to credit Hubert de Givenchy with almost equal authority. However, a mistaken impression may result if one uses the conventional “trickle down” model of fashion behavior to interpret the “domination” and “rule” of these designers […] one can easily obtain an erroneous picture of consumers responding to the fashion dictators much as a marching band responds to the drum major's signals. The rear ranks, according to this picture, may not execute a given maneuver until some time after the marchers in the front rows have turned or wheeled, but all obey the same whistle (Hollander, 1963b, p. 448).

The esteemed professor responded virulently to this attack by an uppity marketing academic – the stiletto-like line about “Hubert de Givenchy” is particularly lethal, since it subtly insinuates that Robinson does not know his Gallic garment onions – and he responded robustly, shall we say. However, his condescending attacks on the marketing whippersnapper only served to make the éminence grise look foolish. Game, set and match to the iconoclast:

In disputing the “trickle-down” theory, Professor Hollander challenges a view that almost all qualified writers on fashion, from antiquity to the present, have found indispensable. If Professor Hollander can find its defects, more power to him. But I do feel constrained to say that if he hopes to succeed he will have to dig a good deal deeper than he gives any indication of having done in his present note (Robinson, 1963, p. 453).

Irony

Perhaps, the most marvellous thing about Hollander's constant iconoclasm – some might consider it ironic – is that he is iconoclastic about his iconoclasm. He never takes himself too seriously. As Cunningham and Cunningham (1988, p. 6) rightly record, “Stanley Hollander is that very rare academic: a serious scholar who is sophisticated enough not to treat his subject – or himself – with disproportionate seriousness.” His ironic iconoclasm even stretches to the “Wheel of retailing” theory, which occupies a curiously ambivalent position in Hollander's oeuvre. He made his name criticising the concept, but defended it over rival constructs on numerous occasions and always seemed to be torn over its scholarly respectability. As an idiographically-inclined historian, he had little time for overarching theories, but as a generalisation-susceptible marketer he recognised that a lot of retail institutions adhered to the wheel pattern. What is more, although he attributed the theory to McNair, it was Hollander who first used the words “Wheel of retailing” (and, in so doing, ironically elevated something he was subverting into a full-blown marketing “theory”)[9]. Doubly ironically, McNair later appropriated Hollander's terminology and claimed ownership of the concept (McNair and May, 1978), though he (p)repaid the debt by anticipating the idea that later became the retail accordion (McNair, 1931)!

Above-and-beyond, these wheels within wheels, as it were, there is one constant in Hollander's writing that many commentators remark upon. His humour. So prevalent in fact, is Hollander's unfailingly wry, frequently flippant, incessantly ironic, perpetually tongue-in-cheek propensity that it is tempting to let his words speak for themselves:

Truly sophisticated studies of commodity marketing may help provide an answer to the old, and perhaps fruitless, question: Is marketing a science, an art, or a gamble? (Hollander, 1956, p. 277).

Nevertheless, retailers use many implicit theories […] They believe that people who slink around the store in warm weather wearing loose, bulky coats with many inner pockets are up to no good; that gift sales will peak before Christmas; and that impulse goods should be displayed in high traffic locations (Hollander, 1981, p. 84).

Just as one knows that he or she is in a planned regional shopping center upon seeing a fountain surrounded by four shoe stores, so too will the historic development always contain an ice cream parlor with wire backed chairs and expensive sundaes. The development is on the way down when a tee shirt stand appears (Hollander, 1980, p. 83).

Sight-seeing guides touring San Francisco's courthouse district used to (perhaps still do) point to a bar called The Library. The point was that the name permitted legal secretaries to tell telephone callers truthfully that their bosses were ‘in the library.’ (Hollander, 1998, p. 114).

Reading marketing journals is like eating olives, an acquired taste, but you cannot dip the articles in martini cocktails to improve their flavour (Hollander and Rassuli, 1993, p. xxiii).

Needless to say, there are many more wise-cracks where those come from. Still, the remarkable thing about such jocosity is not simply the fact that it exists – academic writing is not exactly renowned for thigh-slapping, side-splitters, much less gales of silent laughter – but that it is evident from the start to the finish of his long career. A lightening of the intellectual mood is understandable as eminent academics age and slip into their anecdotage. However, Hollander was incorporating one-liners from his very earliest publications and, bold as burnished brass, he was not intimidated by the prestige of the journal that conveyed them. Even the Business History Review, a leading learned organ that Stan long longed to appear in Hollander (1995), was not safe from his delicious drolleries about disingenuous drummers determined to avoid paying duty:

If neither evasion nor attempted bribery availed, the final tactic was to attempt to avoid the penalties through argument, bluff, or cheating. When Hayes was arrested, he persuaded the officials to accept a draft on his firm, then quickly skipped town and wired the home office to dishonour the draft. The major disadvantage of this tactic was that he was thereafter unable to return to Richmond. Edward P. Briggs was arrested in Memphis on a charge that would gladden any sales manager's heart, that of “suspicion of offering to sell”. Tried the next day, he successfully challenged the prosecution to prove that he had made any sales in the establishment where he was arrested, and was released. Fortunately for him, both the prosecution and the judge were unaware that the bail money he had posted for his overnight freedom while awaiting trial came out of an advance that he had received against a sale to another Memphis house earlier in the day (Hollander, 1964b, pp. 491-2).

Hollander may have been that rarest of beasts, a genuinely amusing academician, but the thing to note about humour is that it comes in many forms. These include puns, witticisms, wisecracks, pratfalls, repartee, ribaldry, slapstick, smut, knock knock, I say I say, etc., etc. Hollander's humour undoubtedly mellowed with the passage of time – he could be quite cutting early on and was delightfully self-deprecating in later years – nevertheless there is one stylistic feature that remained constant throughout his bon mot disbursing ascendancy. Litotes – it is the technical term for ironic understatement, as found for example in expressions that negate the contrary, such as “not bad” (meaning good), “not the best” (meaning bad), “not the brightest” (meaning stupid), “we are not amused” (most people's reaction to my publications) and the “so not whatever” argot that is so much a part of today's adolescent vernacular (Heinrichs, 2008). Litotes is not only not uncommon in Hollander's writing, but also litotes-like lines are not infrequent either. It is his recourse to litotes that gives Hollander's prose its sublimely ironic, almost world-weary, para-P.G. Wodehousian spirit. Litotes literally litter his writing:

If its authors are correct, eating a double cheeseburger is no insignificant event (Hollander, 1981, p. 87).

Some members of this group, such as the railroads, are not usually praised for market acumen (Hollander, 1986, p. 12).

Even the Soviets, who have not been outspoken admirers of our marketing system, are beginning to pay us the compliment of imitation (Hollander, 1963b, p. 25).

One commentator felt that the wholesalers would not boggle at the inconsistency of demanding protection in their own community while fighting it elsewhere (Hollander, 1964b, p. 494).

No excess personal modesty is needed to indicate that the analysis will be neither exhaustive, precise, nor definitive (Hollander, 1963a, p. 220).

Countless examples of Hollander's litotic leanings could be cited – “not devoid”, “not disproven”, “not unlimited”, “not intolerable”, “not outrageous”, “not unreasonable”, “not synonymous”, “not exactly a shrinking violet”, “all was not sweetness and light” – but his overall ethos of ironic understatement is encapsulated in the lengthy biographical article, “My life on Mount Olympus” (Hollander, 1995; reprinted in this issue). The title itself is decidedly deadpan, since academics hardly qualify as god-like Olympians, and each of the subheadings is less than deadly serious (How I became a Herr Doktor professor; Great oaks and other nutty things from little acorns grow; and A straight line is the shortest distance between two points only when you know where you are and where you want to go). The paper commences with an anecdote about an elderly lady passing judgement on our out-to-pasture professor; throws in a bunch of wonderfully off-beat observations (Monographs are academically neither fish, nor fowl, nor good red herring; and Academic life in a research university provides a home for people who liked to write term papers when they were at school), sprinkles many sentences with a light dusting of laconic litotic remarks (Its Styrofoam-cupped coffee would not be served at the round table in the Algonquin Hotel), pauses to explicate Hollander's Law (the degree of satisfaction with a cultural tour is directly proportional to the quantity of wine loaded on the bus) and concludes with a homily about academic article overproduction that Pierre “How to read books” Boyard would doubtless endorse wholeheartedly:

One also wonders whether the sheer volume of output today interferes with quality and communication optimization. But the antitrust experience shows that established participants in the market always urge the younger competitors to show more restraint (Hollander, 1995, p. 102).

There may be a few chuckle-challenged readers, those who have undergone a humour-ectomy or a funny-bone bypass, who are appalled by Hollander's obvious lack of academic decorum and shake their heads ruefully on behalf of marketing science. But most of us, I suspect, set the Olympian article down with a “what a guy” sigh of unqualified admiration. Would that we could write like that.

Restraint is the better part of wisdom?

Interrogatives, inventories, iconoclasm and irony are not unusual literary devices, let alone stylistic idiosyncrasies. We all use them to a greater or lesser degree, albeit most of us employ euphemisms like “contributing to the debate” when referring to eyeballs-out iconoclasm. The essential point, though, is that Hollander's prose is characterised by all four literary traits. Stan's four I's are treated in isolation for the purposes of this overview but, as the excerpts below illustrate, they are often found in combination:

2 Retailers are ubiquitous. No unincarcerated economist is likely to be far from some retail establishments. The pattern of retailing and retail pricing may differ between small towns and metropolitan areas, but both have patterns that can be studied (Hollander, 1957, pp. 256-7).

When did marketing begin? When were the first criticisms of marketing voiced? We do not know the answer to either question, but we can be certain of two things. One is that the function of marketing, that is, trade and exchange, has been part of the human economic system for many thousands of years. The other is that criticisms and defenses of trading activities are almost as old as trade itself (Hollander, 1961, p. 17).

9 Some unavoidable retail activities, including bad-debt collection and attempts to curb shoplifting, tend to engender ill will. Sometimes some of this ill will is transferred to a collection agency, a private detective service, or some other outside scapegoat (Hollander, 1964a, p. 22).

Not every Stan fan would agree with the foregoing four-I analysis, or consider the above excerpts particularly typical. That is the beauty of literary criticism. Classic texts, such as “The wheel of retailing” or Was There a Pepsi Generation can be studied from all sorts of lit-crit perspectives. Another eager reader might be struck by Hollander's frequent use of the I-word, the supposedly unscientific first person pronoun, which is now a commonplace thanks to the interpretive research revolution but was fairly rare back in the bad old days of science-or-bust marketing[10]. Other enthusiasts may be smitten by his innate inclusiveness, an ability to engage the readership through disarming expressions that imply companionship, togetherness, boon friendship[11]. Yet others might be bowled over by his brilliant incidentals, the erudite classical allusions that pepper his prose or the rip-snorting footnotes that give great pleasure to the few, presumably, who peruse them[12]. Many, one further imagines, might draw attention to Hollander's exceptionally adroit handling of imagery. He was a master of extended metaphors, such as the superb passage about marching bands quoted earlier, or indeed the much-admired moment in “Notes on the retail accordion” where he expands the musical metaphor:

Instead of comparing retailing to an accordion, we might picture it as an orchestra or band of accordion players. At any one moment some of the players are compressing the music boxes while others are extending them. Moreover, at any time, some players (including those with compressed and those with extended accordions) are retiring from the orchestra, while still others (mainly with compressed instruments) are joining the band (Hollander, 1966, p. 31).

Granted, Stan Hollander is not an out-and-out simile-slinger like Morris Holbrook or Ted Levitt, whose frantic figuration almost overwhelms the reader, but his ability to sustain a metaphor is quite literally unsurpassed[13].

Irrespective of which set of four I's we look through, it is important to stress that the purpose of the present paper is not to suggest that Stanley Hollander was all style, no content. As the many and varied articles in this special issue of the Journal of Historical Research in Marketing make abundantly clear, Hollander made major contributions to many areas of marketing endeavour, comparative and historical research in particular. His classic papers have often been anthologised and reprinted, not only on account of their inherent readability, but also because they say something worth knowing. Hollander never lost sight of the need for a takeaway or two. Unlike many academics, though, Stan's takeaways were always worth taking away. They were wrapped in such seductive lexical packaging that only the most churlish party-pooper could fail to succumb to his articles' insidious appeal. When it appeared on a table of contents, Stan's name instantly raised the spirits and ensured that there would be at least one article worth reading in the journal concerned. How many of our names do the same?

Why study the worst when the best is available[14]

The aim of the present essay has been to identify some aspects of Stanley Hollander's singular style. Although his prose was often utilitarian to the point of legalistic – compared that is to the stylistic fireworks of, say, Sherry or Belk – Stan had a natural flair for certain literary devices, litotes especially, that lifted him above the thundering herd. Again, this does not mean that ironic understatement was the only string to his stylistic bow. Like most creative writers, Hollander was inclined to rely on a repertoire of favourite words (warrant, caveat, myriad and rubric); his syntax is marked by a fondness for parenthesised qualifiers or asides (as many of our quoted excepts illustrate); and he could coin quasi-poetic, well-nigh aphoristic phrases when they suited his rhetorical purposes (concatenation of causal factors, a tawdry tourist semi-attraction, ride on the wings of fad and fashion and sumptuary legislation is a very weak reed indeed).

All things considered, though, Stan's style is closer to George Orwell than Saul Bellow, John Steinbeck than Jack Kerouac, Tom Wolfe than Hunter S. Thompson, Amis “Lucky Jim” père than Amis “London Fields” fils. In my view, for what it's worth, Stanley Hollander is the Edward Gibbon of marketing history, which is no mean accolade. Like Gibbon, he was characterised by “discriminating disenchantment” (Gay, 1988, p. 31). Like Gibbon, he was partial to patterns of rise and fall. Like Gibbon, he had a knack for coining telling turns of phrase. Like Gibbon, he was irony incarnate, a litotic choleric. Like Gibbon, he was a master of the laugh out loud footnote. Like Gibbon, he loved nothing more than the little historical details that truly spoke volumes. Like Edward Gibbon, Stanley Hollander will still be read long after the rest of us are forgotten. Not remembered, rather[15].

References

Bauerly, R.J., Johnson, D.T., Singh, M. (2005), "Readability and the impact of marketing", Journal of Marketing, Vol. 69 pp.19-20.