using his students as subjects without their knowledge would be considered ethically dubious today. Graves's assertions regarding neurobiology lack direct evidence, and are in need of validation by experts in that field. In his review of The Never Ending Quest, Allan Combs notes that the timeline of the emergence of the levels, while "at home with modern scholarship on the history of consciousness," is speculative beyond what Graves's data could support. While some variations of Spiral Dynamics have been criticized for producing cult-like communities of practice, several people who level that criticism note that it does not apply to Graves's work itself. In an examination of Graves's work in the June 2018 issue of the Journal of Conscious Evolution, however, Nicholas Reitter connects this phenomenon with Graves having not fully published his ideas during his lifetime. He observes that Graves's ideas are "more often cited, used in conversation, or otherwise recognized tangentially, than they are examined straightforwardly and thus subjected to deliberate acceptance, refutation, or criticism," and that furthermore by "leaving his legacy in not-quite-finished form, and in cultivating followers who have elaborated his ideas leaving them essentially unquestioned, [Graves] appears to have succeeded in leaving us a provocative and important theory, while so far avoiding anything like a debate about its merits." Influence E-C theory has primarily been influential in the field of business management, having first been published to a broad audience in the Harvard Business Review after Graves encountered difficulty finding a psychology theory-oriented journal interested in publishing his work. Other researchers in this field built on Graves's work during his lifetime, and his work continues to be cited in journals regarding business-related topics such as change management, cross-cultural management, marketing, sustainability, hiring of workers with disabilities, and the neurology of decision-making. Additionally, Graves's work has formed the basis of several non-academic books on business strategy and change. Gravesian theory has also been applied in the field of education. While sometimes referenced in the context of academic publications on psychology, or cited alongside other developmental psychologists such as Jane Loevinger or Lawrence Kohlberg, Graves's ideas are not broadly influential in mainstream psychology or philosophy academia. However, Graves is neither entirely unknown nor entirely dismissed among mainstream developmental psychologists. For example, Loevinger cited his observations on relative developmental levels of managers and employees while of defending her concept of ego development as the "master trait" in response to