The case for office pettiness

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

The other week, an economist at the University of Chicago named Chris Blattman posted 10 pieces of advice on X about how to email a professor or another senior member of the professional classes.

A greeting consisting of, “Hi!” is inadvisable, he said, as are emojis, emoticons and an abundance of exclamation marks. I especially liked his tip to use capital letters and punctuation, “otherwise we will lol at yr sad attempts”. Quite so.

But another thing about his guidance that got my attention was the response it sparked from another professor about how arcane professional email etiquette can be.

“I got yelled at multiple times at Cravath for not listing the partners’ names in order of seniority on emails,” wrote Berkeley Law School’s Andrew Baker. “Gotta know the rules.” 

This sounded quite something, even for a place as redoubtable as Cravath, which has represented some of the best known names in US business in its illustrious 205-year history.

When I called Baker to investigate further he said he was not technically yelled at while working as a summer associate at Cravath about eight years ago. 

But senior associates had made it clear that, when emailing multiple attorneys at the firm, it was “a bad look” not to list their names in order of seniority. 

I asked Cravath if this message was ever formally conveyed to new joiners at the firm and whether it was still in place, but sadly heard nothing back.

Still, Baker is not the only person to report being admonished for not taking seniority into account when emailing legal firm colleagues.

This strikes me as a low point in corporate life. It is hard to imagine why such fussy hierarchic protocols make any sort of sense.

Saying that, I am inclined to defend other forms of office pettiness about name ordering on the grounds that a lot of white collar office work is poorly measured and recognised.

In the absence of quantitative signs of performance, the urge for recognition can make people obsess about what appear to be deeply trivial signs of success.

I say this as someone who has witnessed blistering quarrels, and the occasional tears, about the order of bylines on stories written by multiple journalists.

Readers may not give a fig who has written what, let alone the order in which names appear. But reporters and their bosses know the first byline generally goes to whoever is deemed to have done the most work, which means the order of names is far from piffling.

Journalism is by no means the only occupation where such things matter.

The order of authors’ names on academic papers is so critical that entire academic papers have been devoted to the topic.

Economists pay a lot of attention to this because, unlike those in other fields, their names traditionally appear in alphabetical order.

The research shows that people with second names starting with a letter early in the alphabet are likely to get more citations than those whose names come later, as well as fancier jobs.

One 2006 paper that analysed data from the top 35 US economics departments said having an earlier surname meant you were more likely to get tenure at a top 10 department, become a fellow of the Econometric Society and receive a Nobel Prize. It also boosted your chances of receiving the John Bates Clark Medal awarded to an American economist under the age of 40 — and named after a man I note has two enviably early-alphabet names.

No wonder there’s a fightback against alphabetical discrimination.

Two North American economists, Debraj Ray and Arthur Robson, argued in a 2017 paper that it would be fairer to choose name order randomly, perhaps by flipping a coin, and make it clear this has been done by inserting the symbol ⓡ between authors’ names.

Ray tells me several journals have published papers using the symbol and the influential American Economic Association of professional economists has a page explaining random name ordering on its website, with a link to a tool authors can use to do the randomising.

Ray says use of the symbol is growing, especially among younger authors who work in larger teams.

That makes sense in a world where global collaboration is increasingly common and while the ethos may never catch on in upscale law firm email practices, I suspect it probably should.