Ask Yourself Important Questions When You Want to Disseminate Your Knowledge

He has done research and published. He has taught and followed the theses of dozens of students who became managers worldwide. Now Vincenzo Perrone, Professor of Business Management at Bocconi University, is targeting high school students with the publication by Feltrinelli of Il lavoro che sarai, a book for the general public that endeavors to explain the world of work to the young. But he wants, above all, to help them develop a critical mind. "The risk," he says, "is to get lost in the Internet world. The internet answers in the same way, whether you ask what year Churchill was born, or how many legs aliens have. It really is important to distinguish between Churchill and the aliens".

Why should a university professor popularize his work?
Explaining things means, first of all, solving the problem of relevance. For whom and what good is what we do, what we study? Of all that we study, what is useful to anyone? Writing for the general public is not just answering a question in an accessible way. Before that, you have to grasp what questions matter to an audience wider than those few who are able to read scientific journals in English.

Then the economy and work are among the issues that affect the wider public?
Certainly. They are central issues in people's lives, but confidence in the specialists has plunged. In their eyes, we were unable to agree on our conclusions, make reliable predictions, or build effective solutions.

Did writing for a wider audience require a special effort?
The philosopher Pierre Bourdieu spoke of two types of intellectual. Ones that experience research as a job, with scant relation to their own lives, and others that relate their lives to what they study - researchers who are intrigued by questions that do not arise within the academy. Well, the first effort the latter group has to make is just to understand what questions people are asking themselves. Second, they need to do a good job of linguistic mediation: the sciences have jargon and a specific rhetorical setup that would make an informative text illegible. They must adapt their language to ensure that people can establish contact with the concepts, understand them and allow themselves to be changed by them so they can put them to practical use.

And what are the questions you are trying to answer in Il lavoro che sarai?
I have two teenage sons, and I see the discomfort of those who see the future not as a promise, but as a threat. I feel the anxiety of middle-class parents, worried about sending their children to English classes at an early age, plus sports, music, volunteering - all in function of future employment. This vision of the world is rather sullen and unconvincing for kids, who seem in fact apathetic and passive in their parents' eyes. So I try to show young people that work can be experienced as strength and ability to transform themselves and the world, and that it is worth it to prepare for this.

On what occasions does an academic speak to the general public?
Sometimes I wonder whether it is not wrong to place these two activities in opposition. I wonder if we could do scientific work unrelated to our field of study. Ultimately we aim to train managers and policy makers who will have to work with reality, so we absolutely must have the curiosity to hear what is being said to us and convey it to others what we know. Assuming, of course, that they continue to ask us, given the decline in confidence we have already mentioned.

So even the teaching is a form of dissemination?
There are similarities, but it all depends on how you interpret teaching. In Italy and other Latin countries, the model is almost a parody: fill them up. There is a professor, and there is a vacuum - the student. The professor writes a book, pours it into the student and receives verification that is returned without distortion through the examination. Already many years ago Derek Pugh, the English scholar of organizational development who died last year, pointed out the anachronism of the model. It was fine in the Middle Ages, when the few libraries of Europe were accessible only to some clerics, who learned notions and transmitted them to novices. Today the student already has access to the book and the teacher's role should be to push him to apply the concepts to reality, to criticize the thesis of the book with reason. Critical ability and creativity, today, are more important than memory capacity. If you do not develop them at university, how can we think that students can then be innovative in a company?

Getting back to popularizing ...
For the public, there are no full and empty, the reader is your equal and you have to win him over. Davis Murray, in a nice piece from 1971, significantly entitled That's Interesting!, explained that anything that contradicts the cliché, that manages to surprise and unsettle, is interesting. That which is interesting, in a sense, is always an attack on the status quo.

In the course of your professional experience, before this book, did you ever feel you were a popularizer?
In the last two years of university and in the first six years of working as a researcher, I taught at the civic school for adults of Don Cesare Sommariva, a working class-priest who applied the lesson of Don Milani on the outskirts of Milan. Evening middle school classes were for workers with no diploma. I had to constantly motivate them and it was done working on subjectivity: we taught math using their pay sheet, science talking about their health. Stepping out of my boundaries has been a great experience understanding our usefulness for people - and how we can measure it, except by seeking a broader public?