...you have to be aware that this business with the sealed envelopes and stuff that exists in the anglo-american cultural sphere is not practiced throughout the world.

One day, I asked my prof for a letter of recommendation when applying to a scholarship by an Austrian funding agency which asked for the recommendation to be written in cleartext, readable by anyone handling the application form, including the actual applicant. I had explained this to her, but I guess that by the time she got home she had already forgotten.

She handed me the letter of recommendation in a sealed envelope. I opened it to transfer the text into the form. When I saw the way she was writing, A LOT of things started to become clear to me with regard to past application processes that carried letters of recommendation from her. She wasn't trying to be mean or anything, but it was just so obvious that she regarded this as a tedious duty. She didn't put the slightest bit of effort into trying to remember any of the achievements of mine that she had been witness to and could have mentioned, and was being exceedingly British in the way she was tempering her style, and basically only mentioned things that were objectively provably true (so that I was mentioning them elsewhere myself anyway without any questions around credibility if they were coming from me). When a letter of recommendation tries to say something negative, it will mostly say it by way of omission, and the omissions in her writing were huge and gaping.

So, let me try to rephrase my initial premise in a less unethical way: If I were a Professor, I would make a point of showing the recommendation letter to the student, and go "This is the letter I'm going to write, let me know if you want me to submit it."

In some places there will just be an esprit de corps mentality: People handing positive recommendations to each other whenever requested, unconditionally, and everybody benefits. -- It's just a competition where any cluster of persons with low ethics end up creating an advantage for themselves. So, game theoretically, the only rational course of action is to throw overboard all considerations of ethics.

In that sense, I like the Austrian system a lot better because it doesn't create the pretense that the letter of recommendation is not the result of careful selection, when the Ango-American system creates the pretense of ruling out selection when this can actually not be guaranteed.

The whole thing also carries a very negative flavour with me for another reason: It always conjures up in my mind a picture of victorian-age London and its caste system. I imagine some rich families employing domestic servants. And I imagine some poor people who have to work as servants. The system entailed that when a servant wanted to leave the service of one family and go to work for another, then the new employer would ask for a letter of recommendation from the previous employer. The idea was that if a person was caught stealing or anything, then a letter saying that this person is a thief would follow that person around and make them unemployable. It is easy to imagine how this serves to cement the caste system and prevent social mobility.

I can't think of a single one of my fellow PhD students who didn't have a very complicated relationship with their supervisor, and I think it's a pretty horrible system if the deficiencies in your relationship with your previous employer follow you around to your next. -- It's actually one of the reasons why I dropped out of academia.