Divergence: A Source of Creative Thinking The outstanding job
accomplished by Bernard, Gary, and Gilles is really praiseworthy: not
only did they succeed in completing within a remark- ably short span of
time the editing of the contributions to the conference that marked the
20th Anniversary of the European Institute for Ad- vanced Studies in
Management; they have also managed to elicit numerous insightful
comments from a host of dashing young scholars as well as from the
fortunate few established authorities whose findings have long be- come
leading articles in the best academic journals, who now chair those
journals' editorial boards, and after whom great scientific awards have
been named. In so doing, our dedicated triumvirate has blended together
pieces of diverse research traditions-some of them quite puzzling-and
mixed significantly differentiated styles of expression. The
controversial display of self-confidence by some distinguished
colleagues, the amazingly emo- tional "good old" memories revived by
their peers, the scapegoat-finding and moralizing confessions produced
by some of their disciples together with the detached systematic
rigidity of some others all combine to pro- duce a multivarious
patchwork that may well prove the existence of a marketing scholar
lifecycle. This cartoon-like four-class typology might even make it
worth the reader's while to indulge in some guesswork to discover the
sequence of the four stages as an exercise and then partition the author
population accordingly.