Ron Savitt

 My first academic 'exchange' came courtesy of the distinguished  marketing historian, Ron Savitt. He was a referee on one of my  early Wheel of Retailing papers. His highly critical comments ran to  ten pages or so and, after I had responded to every point, the  editor decided to run the paper and allowed the referee to pass  comment. I didn't have a problem with this, until I discovered that  the editor of the journal ran Savitt's comment alongside the original  piece, but saved my rejoinder for a subsequent issue.

To this day, I  don't know whether this dreadful breach of academic protocol - the  'rule' is that the comment and rejoinder appear together, in a  separate issue from the original piece - was a deliberate snub on  the editor's part or an oversight caused by pagination problems (or  whatever). In the circumstances, you can understand why the tone  of my rejoinder was somewhat tart, shall we say. Savitt still takes  pot-shots at me from time to time, though he never mentions me  by name. Sadly, the postmodern turn in historiography hasn't  penetrated the more-positivist-that-Popper sub-discipline that is  Marketing History. I doubt if it ever will.