Why Do We Continue to Use Letters of Recommendation?

Letters of recommendation, as far as I know, have been around since the dawn of man.

Why?

Why do we use letters of recommendation?

Well, the answer is not simple, but the fact that we do use them provides empirical evidence in support of some of Latour's theory.

He states:

"Who will win in an agnostic encounter between two authors and between them and all the others they need to build up a statement S? Answer: the one able to muster on the spot the largest number of well aligned and faithful allies." (1986, Drawing things together, p. 23)

The letters do the work of bringing back things, your allies, and presenting them all in one place for your audience.

Latour states:

"If you wish to go out of your way and come back heavily equipped so as to force others to go out of their ways, the main problem to solve is that of mobilization. You have to go and to come back with the "things" if your moves are not to be wasted. But the "things" have to be able to withstand the return trip without withering away. Further requirements: the "things" you gathered and displaced have to be presentable all at once to those you want to convince and who did not go there. In sum you have to invent objects which have the properties of being mobile but also immutable, presentable, readable, and combinable with one another." (1986, p. 7, Visualization and Cognition).

Thus, I say, we have the letter of recommendation. A service like interfolio.com increases both the immutability and the mobility of these letters.

Here, letters of recommendation are symmetrical to the citations on a reference page. Those citations accomplish the same results, in that they bring the "thing" back to one location, and as they appear in the reference list, have the properties of being mobile but also immutable, presentable, readable, and combinable with one another.