"You think this has nothing to do with you?"
One of the things that I like to do is situating every initiative that we take, howsoever small in scope, in the larger context of the department, division, organization, and society. I believe that there is a straight string of causation that connects what we do with the rest of the community.
We are editors. Most people look at us as either nitpickers or as intellectuals who do high-brow work. I strongly believe that the supposedly high-brow work we do also affects the common man/woman directly or indirectly.
The point being, if you’re embarking on an initiative (or even in your everyday work) do think once about how your work affects the society at large. That should inform the direction and degree of effort that you put into your work.
This was my line of explaining when I was briefing one of my senior editors on how to go about a project. Just then, the following dialogue from the movie The Devil Wears Prada came to my mind (emphases mine):
~~~
Miranda Priestly: [Miranda and some assistants are deciding between two similar belts for an outfit. Andy sniggers because she thinks they look exactly the same] Something funny?
Andy Sachs: No. No, no. Nothing's... You know, it's just that both those belts look exactly the same to me. You know, I'm still learning about all this stuff and, uh...
Miranda Priestly: 'This... stuff'? Oh. Okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select... I don't know... that lumpy blue sweater, for instance because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise. It's not lapis. It's actually cerulean. And you're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent... wasn't it who showed cerulean military jackets? I think we need a jacket here. And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it, uh, filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room from a pile of stuff. (source)
~~~
What I learned from that Miranda Priestly monologue is that we should never underestimate the impact of what we do, howsoever high-brow it may seem, on the layperson.
One way or the other, our contributions as editors affect how people receive, ingest, digest, and regurgitate knowledge. It also affects their sense of correct meaning, intelligent text, beautiful layouts, catchy blurbs, attractive jackets, and worthy scholarship. And, if we stretch that argument a bit, their sense of what a good organization stands for.
People who can’t afford our books will eventually come face to face with our work in a pamphlet, an ad, a hoarding, or a cheap paperback because someone down the line decided to copy the standard for oxford comma or apostrophe that a discerning, discriminating, critical editor used in a book that she edited.
Being in academic publishing has also imbued me with a greater sense of appreciation for the high-end, discriminating work that our scholars, researchers, and teachers do. These may not be easily accessible to the common man/woman, but now I see how the ideas imagined and tested by these super-specialists trickle down to the lowest levels of the society and significantly influence their lived reality.
Physicists to historians, mathematicians to sociologists--the complex, rarefied work they do sooner or later finds its way into our hands and hearts. From smartphones to adult franchise, from locomotives to affirmative action--all such things that we take for granted now germinated in the minds of researchers who often spoke a language that we could not understand. But now, we live in the world that they envisioned years ago.