In Response to Lemke: Where You See a Forest, I Just See Detritus

To the Editor:

My co-authors and I¹ had collectively decided not to spend additional time addressing Kenneth Lemke’s response² to our rebuttal of his TWH editorial.³ However, I later became preoccupied with his comments during an unexpected hospitalization that followed soon after my recent planned retirement. The outcome of that time of contemplation was the decision that I need to respond. My point is simple. I do not want graduate students, young scholars, or any others to think of Lemke’s JOEM writings as exemplars of how to conduct scholarly discourse.

Although I continue to be baffled by JOEM’s publication of Lemke’s problematic editorial,³ I am encouraged by the Journal’s willingness to publish his response.² In his response to our comments, Lemke acknowledges the poor scholarship in his editorial and, in the process of doing so, continues to demonstrate his academic deficiencies.

As an anthropologist immersed in systems theory since the 1970s, I was astonished to read an editorial by an assistant professor in a department of social sciences⁴ proclaiming that the social sciences are grounded in a “Newtonian Paradigm.”³ Moreover, as research scientist, who has been involved in efforts to refine the operational definition of Total Worker Health^1,5–7 I feared that tagging of TWH with an erroneous “Newtonian label” would hamper ongoing efforts to make the types of modifications that Lemke has said are needed but about which he appears to be unaware.

In Lemke’s response to our rebuttal of his editorial, Lemke acknowledges that, yes, we were correct,² the three articles he cited did not support his assertion. However, he dismisses any harm caused by his “poor scholarly standards,”⁸ claiming that, having known that his citations did not support his claim, he was careful to use “hyphens [sic]… …to indicate that those supporting references do not refer to OSH outcomes” (the subject of the editorial) and to “deliberately” make his assertion “semantically ambiguous.”

I have not bothered to take the time to discover the institution that awarded Lemke his graduate degree. However, at the university from which I graduated as well as at the institutions where I subsequently worked and conducted research, conclusions derived from false or ambiguous evidence remain unproven. In addition, scholarly discourse, like that which Lemke has admitted to conducting, was roundly criticized.

With this having been said, I believe that even with freedom provided by retirement, I need not spend additional time belaboring the deficiencies in Lemke’s editorial and his response.