I ran into a couple-three things tonight, pretty much by accident as I was googling around.

The first was a footnote referencing my Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices in Kellogg on Branding: The Marketing Faculty of The Kellogg School of Management. It's in a chapter called "Brand Meaning" (PDF) by one John F. Sherry, Jr., evidently the Raymond W. & Kenneth G. Herrick Professor of Marketing and Department Chair at Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business. He also wrote -- among many other things it seems -- "Comedy of the Commons: Nomadic Spirituality at Burning Man" (PDF).

Back when I was more... earnest than I am now, I wrote about something I called, quite seriously, "business criticism." You've never heard of it, because it doesn't actually exist.

A review at a site called strategy+business says...

Christopher Locke's "The Case for Business Criticism" argues that although there is substantial criticism focused on art, music, literature, and media, there is a "glaring gap" in our understanding of business in society. Locke believes there should be more commentary in which business is placed in a broader historical and social context.

And this bookbytes page says...

Why is it that the business world has not developed its own form of rigorous business criticism? It "has become toxic, a dysfunctional complex of neurotic behaviors and primitive defense mechanisms." Locke urges us to establish a new genre of business writing, one "that recognizes the profound connections between commerce and culture..."

The actual article is in Business: The Ultimate Resource (first edition; not sure about the 2nd), but sadly the type is too small to enable reading it using Amazon's "Search Inside" feature -- unless your eyes are a good deal better than mine.

And I'll be damned. Seems I'm also included in Best Practice: Ideas And Insights From The World's Foremost Business Thinkers -- with an introduction by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, no less. But it's the same recycled thing about "business criticism." I did find a quote from it, however, on something called BizBook Nuggets (I've long since lost the original file)...

Business and society often seem worlds apart, each operating under a separate set of principles that have little to do with the interests of the other. As business becomes more global in scope, and global networks underscore its world-spanning effects, the results of this radical disintegration are approaching a critical pass.

I was always good at sounding as if I knew WTF I was talking about. I wonder what I meant by all that.