Sara Mahabadi (McGill) interviewing Doug Creed (U Rhode Island), Bryant Hudson (IESEG), Gerardo Okhuysen (UC Irvine), and Maureen Scully (UMass Boston), Winners of the OMT Joanne Martin Trailblazer Award, for their scholarly efforts in starting and shaping our conversation about LGBT issues, stigma, shame, taboo, and power in organizational settings
Sara Mahabadi (SM): Congratulations on winning the Joanne Martin Trailblazer award. This award recognizes scholars who have taken a leadership role in the field of OMT by opening up new lines of thinking and inquiry. So, I want to hear it from your perspective, how does this fit in with what you have been doing in your academic career so far?
Gerardo Okhuysen (GO): Before we start, I have to say that I think there are so many people in the efforts of bringing in LGBT into the Academy such as Robyn Berkeley, Robin Church and Diana Bilimoria. Ron Ophir helped organize the “Friends and Family” reception. We ran that reception for 10 years and he helped run it for nine of those 10 years.
From my perspective, it is really nice that OMT is recognizing this. But, you know, GDO did a lot of work on our behalf early on. They sponsored the Friends and Family reception as well as all the PDWs and symposia that got organized on LGBT topics. It is so nice that we are being recognized. But I just want to say that it really does take a village and a lot of people put effort and time before we came on the scene and since then. I mean a lot of people are doing really excellent work, like Michel Anteby. The way he is trying to bring a focus on LGBT issues in research is remarkable. I mean there are just a lot of people. So I just want to make sure that we can give their names because they are amazing people.
Actually, Doug and Maureen, did you ever meet Joanne Martin?
Maureen Scully (MS): Yes, Joanne was my advisor and she is over the moon for this. Joanne was such an important mentor to me and chaired my dissertation committee, and I'm still in touch with her and we had such a nice email exchange around this award.
Doug Creed (DC): That is great.
GO: I took one class with her when I was at Stanford. She is a woman that makes an impression! She worked very hard to break things in the intellectual tradition of the Academy. And I think that is also really important thing to know. I mean, she deserves recognition for having done some of the work to open up the space set so that other people could come in and inhabit it. I mean Academy today is just so different than it was 20 years ago.
DC: You know, Maureen and I had a phone call in the summer of 1995, where I shared with her the idea of doing research on domestic partner benefits and the micro politics behind that. And she had been working on the idea of what happens before legitimacy. So, and that idea of legitimacy as an accomplishment that people in the margins might have an impact on, was something that we immediately connected on. It was one of the greatest conversations that summer. So we immediately saw that our academic and political commitments could intersect in a theoretically compelling way. What do you think Maureen?
MS: Yes, definitely! That was a really important connection. And Joanne was such a renegade, and working with her really influenced my own research on the margins and figuring out how to talk about renegade topics. So, Debra Meyerson and I in the late ‘80s started working on our paper on “tempered radicalism” and how to be a change agent from the margins and from within systems rather than marching around the outside. That is the work that all of us have done. How do we change from inside systems, corporations, but also inside OMT and the Academy? And so, Joanne jokingly nicknamed the tempered radical paper as Deb's and my “paper about her!” She will tell you that the paper is “about me,” which makes sense. She very much influenced us to start thinking about how we do that. She was from the generation of the ‘60s and ‘70s, which had marched around in social movements to make change, and here we were then in the ‘80s, the very conservative “Wolf of Wall Street” ‘80s, trying to figure out, can we chip away from inside institutions? So, that has been kind of my position. My dissertation in the early ‘90s was on inequality. In 1991, that was not a phrase you wanted to be uttering on the job market. Now, every third journal has a special issue on inequality! It has been rediscovered, but it has been with us all along for centuries. And so, that is how I feel, like where I live is on the margin, you know, and I don't want to feel like I'm moving towards the center. I'm trying to figure out my next marginal thing to do!
BH: That really resonates with me, Maureen. I was somewhat of a political activist, before I started graduate school. I went to a marginal school because I did not have any grand aspirations and I liked living in Dallas and had no plans to move. I always considered myself, kind of like a second- or even third-tier player trying to combine my political orientation with the kind of topics that resonated with me. For me, the notion of legitimacy was deeply problematic from my first OT seminar. Gerardo and I had talked about doing the men's bathhouse paper. But, we had said, wait until we had tenure. Well, thank goodness we didn't, because I have never gotten tenure. So, when opportunity arose, we took it and I think maybe it was a combination of a high risk tolerance and being too stupid to know better! I just kind of did my research with people I really love to work with.
GO: And I think it takes all types of people. I do think Doug and Maureen are examples of really bringing this political commitment to the research that we do. I have to admit, I arrived into the whole situation a little bit more innocently. I graduated with a fairly standard dissertation on groups with a fairly standard set of methodologies. But one thing that I did learn in my own training was that when you look at extreme situations, you start to see things that maybe are not evident in what people might label normal, or central-tendency, situations. And that actually appeals to me personally very much, because it feeds into paying attention to marginalized communities, marginalized experiences, unusual organizations in general situations that are not as you would expect them to be. And for me, I have to say that it really is getting to know my fantastic friends and co-authors like Bryant and launching into the bathhouse study before we knew any better. And that was great. And then working with Doug on the paper on shame and then having the opportunity as a result of that to work on other things. I think that partly this is another way in which community really kind of brings up the better parts of each of us.
DC: I wanted to try to link this to a couple of other things that were happening. One which Lisa Cohen can attest to, because I think Lisa was the first person to do a qualitative dissertation in the organizational behavior department at Berkeley in over 30 years. I did not use the word inequality, but I focused on equity in my dissertation, and it was unendingly quantitative and had the words “job changing” in it, so that made it legitimate. But one of my advisors, not in the business school, a social psychologist, who denies he said this, when I went to get him to sign the dissertation, he said this is a fine dissertation. But it is not the dissertation you told me you wanted to write when you asked me to be on the committee. I want you to throw it out and do it all over again qualitatively. He said it in the kindest way. He said you didn't live up to what you wanted to do. And that made a profound difference. I never did a quantitative study again. And so, there was that. But the other thing is, I think I do appreciate some of the times that we were embedded in. I mean that you had a bunch of activisms as a consequence of HIV/AIDS. And there was a new awareness of being closeted in the workplace.
There was a book published in the early ‘90s called “Corporate Closets.” It happens that I was in an MBA program ‘87 to ‘89 at Berkeley, the Bay Area, 500 MBA students, one man out! And it wasn't me! And this was overwhelming, so I ended up writing an anonymous piece for the Biz Ad Weekly based on interview data. I tracked down people. I networked to find out who might be gay. And so, my first piece of research was out of the personal experiences, incredible isolation, in a place where you would expect that not to be the case – twelve miles from downtown San Francisco.
So, I just want to say these two things: there was that antagonism to qualitative research in the Academy of Management. And there were meaningful political issues afoot, and they needed qualitative research to get to those questions.
GO: You know I have never thought about it that way. But, you're absolutely right. My dissertation was quantitative again; it was experimental, and so on. But the training that I received from Stephen Barley, Kathleen Eisenhardt and Bob Sutton was very much on qualitative, and it was about really paying attention in that sort of rich way. And maybe there is something about when you start to pay attention to people as whole beings that keeps you from denying part of their reality, breaking them down and ignoring fundamental parts of who they are. You know, in the ‘80s people didn't have emotions; people didn't have genders in organizations and these were the people in our research! The early ‘80s were very different, and I think that cracking open the qualitative methodology – which certainly Lisa is one of the people that did it at Berkeley; but, you know, at Stanford there was already a movement afoot – probably made a lot of difference for the ways in which the four of us see the world.
BH: I was not even exposed to qualitative methods. I was trained by population ecologists, and so it really wasn't until I was past graduate school, and particularly starting to work with Gerardo, that I was exposed to the possibilities of qualitative. So yeah, it was a different time.
SM: I think these are very interesting stories and I think most of you kind of answered my second question, which was around what motivated you to take this path, like the people you met along the way and the instances and the experiences, that you all spoke to. But I also know that you are co-authors on different papers, so maybe we can talk a little bit on that. Where does your work intersect and how did you decide to collaborate on the research projects?
MS: I just wanted to add to the last conversation because I heard a couple things that were very important, Sara, for your question about how this fits into our careers broadly. We all found hooks to try to legitimate the parts of our work that were the most provocative. We found a term, a concept, an adjacent field to keep us connected to the mainstream and to get published, although I've certainly gotten not-favorable reviewer comments. Literally, one said, “this is too political.” Second thing I noticed is that in our careers we've all been peripatetic, none of us have had a mainstream or a straight line. We've moved across organizations, and none of us did wait until tenure. In fact, that was also one of the motivators in the tempered radical paper. Instead of waiting until you become full professor or president of an organization, what do you do en route to rock the boat, which we've all done. I think that is why we've loved working together, to get down to this question on the table. I think, for me, collaborating with Doug and with others just always pushes my own learning edge and pushes my accountability, as somebody who can have a voice. Even as we've worked from the margins, we're still in fine business schools which are powerful.
For me it's been also in the intersectional spaces, building on the shoulders of the anti-racism work and the anti-sexism work. And what was so different coming into the LGBTQ space for me is understanding invisible social identity. We typically, but not always, can see something about race and gender, and that informs the social identity literature. But the bravery of coming out, the bravery of being part of this movement, and for me as a straight ally to the movement, the allyship is what motivates me. You have got to use the zones where you have some power to make change. So, some of us have white privilege, some of us have business school faculty privilege or straight privilege. You have got to try to contribute to the quest for social justice; that is my driver. And I learned whenever I collaborate with people from different identities, experiences, or experience of oppression than mine, I learn. And then I testify, at least I hope I testify.
DC: I have to leap in here, because Maureen mentioned two important things. One, she described the informants as brave. I think Maureen will definitely agree that when we were conducting interviews in 1996 and got back to our B&B, we had breathtaking discussions about who we had just met that day. They were wonderful people. And they were inspiring people. So that is one of the things that can certainly hook you into this, interviews are just the most incredible things.
MS: Doug, could I interject? Yes, our participants were brave. But I actually thought you, Gerardo and Bryant were so brave, and how much I admired you! But yes, participants are pretty awesome, too.
DC: Participants are awesome. My recollection of those dinners back at the at the ranch is one of a kind enthused awe, at times, over what some of the people said and did. And I certainly experienced that again when I did the gay and lesbian ministers project. But, meeting people like that is such a privilege.
GO: You know what I think is tricky, Sara, is that we all started in the academy in the mid and late ‘90s to now. Just the situation for LGBTQ people has changed pretty dramatically, and I mean I think particularly Maureen is absolutely right. You know, when we first started, we were at the margin, like when I was interviewing for my first job I did not tell people that I was gay, I did not tell people that I had a partner. None of that was okay, and it took a number of years before it started to be okay to talk about those types of things. Now, today with all the changes that have happened, I think that we find ourselves more in certain positions where we do have privilege. We are white, we are men, you know, all three of us are tall. I mean there are all of these things, and now just reflecting on what has happened during our lifetime, our professional lifetime and looking at still the marginalized, still the injustice, still the anti-black sentiment… I mean this is definitely an internal conversation that I am having over and over, particularly this year with all of the things that we are living through, the evident social injustice. And so, there is a part of that, when Maureen talks about how we use our privilege. We may have started off at the margin, but I think that our situation has changed quite dramatically.
BH: Yeah. I think there's also a certain amount of luck and serendipity that made it possible for us to take advantage of opportunities that we didn't dig out to create but sort of presented themselves. Doug and I met in ‘94, I think.
DC: Still at Berkeley, yeah.
BH: Yeah, and we became good friends, especially working with each other to set up some of those more informal social events and gatherings we had at the Academy. We overlapped with Gerardo because his first job was at my university, it was my last year as a PhD student. So, we became friends, and we talked about different things. So just having these conversations and staying in touch and taking advantage of networking opportunities to get to meet other people and being intentional about that. As Gerardo says, it is not all academic work. A lot of it is social work as well and building that social community that makes the work possible and supportive.
MS: That's so clear. Sara, I think a theme that keeps coming through is about community and how we cherish our alliances. To me, now as we become more senior and the new generation comes along, I am constantly having students and colleagues challenging me. For instance, Queer theory is in such a different place now. I worked with doctoral students on papers using Queer theory, and it just completely has changed my thinking from where we were thinking about, as we called the “GLBT” issues in the ‘90s. It's LGBTQ+ issues now, and so our field is moving. So, I think some of us may have been the one to crack the door open. But those who have come through the door, after us, are just full of verve, insight and passion for the work that we keep learning from. This is really powerful to see.
SM: Yes, I think that's an excellent point, and it is actually one of my questions that was supposed to come later. But because you brought it up, maybe we actually can talk about it now. So, I think one of the goals of Academy of Management and OMT is building a strong community of scholars. What do you think is the role of senior scholars such as you in the process, and how can junior scholars and maybe PhD students contribute to building and extending the community?
GO: One of the reasons why the inclusion of LGBT people is important, and it is the same reason why it is important to bring in black voices and women's voices, is because our intellectual enterprise cannot be complete unless it brings everybody in. If we exclude half of the population and we exclude the margins of society, if there are parts of the social world that we are not explaining, we are not doing our intellectual work. And, you know, we talk a lot about the politics and our personal commitments. But part of what we are doing is professional, part of what we're doing is scholarly, and we're trying to advance our understanding of the social world. I think one of the things that we do is we wish to shine a particular spotlight on our particular aspect of that world. But it could be something else, and there is a need to cover all aspects of the social world.
MS: Beautifully said.
GO: Bryant just made a comment in the chat, and he's absolutely right, that we need to also thank specific senior people like Kim Elsbach, Tina Dacin and other editors that helped, facilitated and encouraged us as we were working on these projects. And members of the academy that might not have been doing the work, but they created the space for us to be able to do the work.
BH: And they cheered us on while we did it.
DC: I would add Marc Ventresca there. And in response to your question about how to create community, you have a few people like Marc, I think, inspired by the community building of Dick Scott out of Asilomar, for example, who created these gatherings of doctoral students to share works-in-progress, back in the ‘90s, late ‘90s and early 2000s, that were just phenomenal – in terms of their openness to experimentation and that kind of thing. Of course, there were some papers that were conventional. But there was always a space at those for really fringe stuff, like what we did.
MS: I would add Jerry Davis who was also part of that Stanford and Asilomar crowd and has a book on changing the corporation from inside, which is meant to be used in an MBA curriculum. He used a lot of our examples about LGBTQ insider activist efforts within the corporation. So that kind of uptake of the work and translating it for a broader readership is important.
DC: Yeah, I think that's true.
BH: I was just going to say, related to Marc, and those kind of smaller conferences, there was a certain allowance of playfulness also, playing with different ideas, trying to get our feet kind of wet and on the ground at the same time.
GO: I remember Marc encouraging Bryant and I, when Bryant and I were working on the bathhouse paper. I mean, Marc is brilliant. We were explaining what we were trying to do, and he says, well you know, I mean basically for all of eternity, a fundamental problem that people have tried to figure out is how can we have sex. Marriage is one solution and bathhouse is another solution. And I just remember just sort of like when Bryant talks about the playfulness, this is part of that ability, sort of. Yeah, that is right, there is a way in which, when you have the right community, this is also fun.
BH: Yeah.
MS: I want to come back to the comments about AOM. I think it's really important that the Academy has these different divisions, just like there are employee affinity and caucus groups that are safe havens inside corporate spaces. I think for us also having GDO, which Gerardo so nicely and all of us nodded our heads to at the beginning, as the place to be more fully ourselves. And for me, CMS is a place to be critical or kind of a launchpad for trying to bring these ideas into OMT. It is so amazing that the Joanne Martin Trailblazer awards exists and that we've been welcomed so warmly. But our springboards are kind of trying out the ideas elsewhere around the Academy, and that's fine. That's actually decent organizational design for AOM, but it keeps OMT in that broader perspective.
DC: I agree. But I think I want to echo something that Maureen said a bit earlier. And that was while we were coming at it from different directions, we were really looking for hooks, like the legitimation hook, and that allowed us to have a more political-process view of it. Maureen, what do you think? I mean there was a balance between coming from those other groups but also really finding the bridge constructs that would allow us to get unconventional stuff into mainstream viewership.
MS: Bridge construct is a good way to put it. I think that's right. I think all of us have portfolios of publications. Some things more on the fringes, some things more mainstream, and that is in fact how you make change. Sara, I think you had a question.
SM: Thank you. As I said at the beginning, I thought that this would be a conversation, and it is a conversation. So I think many of the things that I had in mind you are already addressing organically without me posing the questions, which is really great. So, one of them was, like, why and how you think Organization Theory matters in relation to social movements such as woman empowerment, Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ+ and now COVID. And so, what are the important areas related to all of these movements that still need attention and investigation?
GO: All of them.
BH: Yeah, yeah. A lot.
GO: Basically, we need to bring our tools – we have tons of tools already in the chest and that we could use them. There's this fine balance between how many new things we are going to discover and try to explain versus how we can help those who are marginal, those who are facing challenges, use the tools that we already have. The work that Maureen and Doug did early on about advocacy within organizations. Well, how is that getting implemented to try to overcome the anti-black bias within organizations, and how can people be successful allies in that process, right? So, I think there's an active conversation, a perennial active conversation within the academy between theory and practice or between rigor and relevance, there's a few labels for it. And how does this work continue to give voice to people that have not had a voice in the research process? But by the same token, it's then taking the things that we do know to help them advance their interests.
BH: Yeah, and using our tools, also then to make the broader academic community aware of that they may not encounter or may not be aware of as well.
DC: I think of a way which some phrases that I've latched on to from institutional theory are important for continuing research, and one is this idea of embedded agency. But we're now called on to think of embeddedness in such a much more critical and complex way. Years ago, in a discussion around the idea that the Western world had five mega or meta institutions of family, economy, Judeo Christian tradition, patriarchy and something else, I said, what about racism, what about heterosexism? And someone said, well, those aren't really institutions, and I was saying, actually they're the kind of black matter, from astronomy, that holds together all of these institutions. And I think that remains the case that we need to take these tools, and not have such a narrow vision about them being about organizational fields solely, but they're actually about vast systems of power as well.
GO: Yeah, I think sometimes one of the challenges within the academy, within OMT, is that we draw a circle and then drawing the circle some things stay outside. But in the same way, you know, that I was saying earlier, that people in the ‘80s didn't have emotions and didn't have gender.
BH: They didn't have sex.
GO: And they didn't have sex, right. That one of the things is that we, as scholars, need to understand that when we study social systems we don't get to pick what's in what's out; that's not actually our job. Things are just happening, and all of these concerns of the broader society – I would also bring in climate change – are important to study. You know, climate change is a super important topic.
DC: I agree, so many of our organizational notions and our strategic notions stem from an era where they didn't anticipate outrageous climate change catastrophe, and the idea of the Anthropocene. And so, it means that everything, as far as I'm concerned, needs to be reexamined in organizational theory in light of that, that inescapable truth that everything we do is unsustainable. And, that every life-support system is at risk.
GO: You just said something that I think is great, which is this inescapable truth of climate change, right? That no matter what we do that is going to show up. But then I would also couple with that sort of the common lies we tell ourselves. And the common lie for the last 50 years has been that for people on the margins, things have gotten better, that things have gotten better for black people, things have gotten better for transgender people, that things have gotten better for poor people. Right? And that is a lie. And that is a lie and that is in the same way that there's an inescapable truth we have to call out the inescapable. I don't know if it is the inescapable lie, but it is almost like the corrosive lie that allows us to ignore things that are simply not true, but it's convenient that we take them as true.
MS: I think our theory tools do help us name some of those lies. It's fascinating to me that, for example, “systemic racism” as a phrase is in the common parlance now. I mean, that's something that comes out of not strictly OMT but our sister discipline, sociology. The phrase “unconscious bias” coming out of psychology. It's always exciting to me when some of those sense-making frames that we offer the world get adopted into the discourse. But they are exposé words, they are exposing the lies or expanding on what we can see. And I think one of the most powerful things we do by being at a business school and doing OMT, rather than sociology or psychology or anthropology, where some of us might be more at home, is that we teach MBA students. We teach people who are going to go have power, and I see somewhat of a huge change in MBA students and how we can translate our theories for them and what they care about. I mean that they actually want to go, you know, form a B corporation and fight inequality and climate change, is really different than 30 years ago. And I'd like to think that some of what we do in OMT, or how we share ideas with other people who are business school professors, maybe it's a lever for change. Maybe it's not enough. I'm loving this conversation, hearing you guys all talk, it's like what a joy – we should do this weekly!
DC: I mean, it's great that we have the phrase systemic racism now, front and center with people trying to wrestle with its meaning. But I always think that actually appreciating what systemic means when it talks about marginalization, and so on, is so difficult. And I don't know what the work of OMT needs to be to actually not let the systematicness of systemic racism escape attention in the management literature or in any literature, I suppose. But I mean it's too easy perhaps to gloss the phrase systemic. As Gerardo just said that, you know, if we don't tell the full story, we're doing a disservice, and so that really means for organizational scholars to think about how systemic racism actually is – I don't know if it's the right metaphor, but from astronomy, that black matter of organizations.
SM: I want to be cognizant of time because you might have other meetings to attend. Maybe for the last question, if you were starting your research career today, what would you be studying.? Would you take the same path or a different path and, maybe explain a little bit why and why not?
BH: It wouldn’t be possible, because if we were young scholars today, we would be facing different situations and asking different questions with different life experiences that we bring into our research agendas. I am so grateful to have landed at this place in my journey, my professional journey, and all the amazing as well as really difficult things that I've experienced. I just can't imagine doing it differently. I can't imagine something different, and I certainly can't imagine redoing it starting now.
GO: I'm going to piggyback on something that Maureen said. But I would say, look at the young scholars, and look at what they're doing, and look at what they're doing that other people are not doing. I would like to think that that's what I would be doing. I would like to think, but it's impossible. Today, the world is just such a dramatically different place, particularly for gay men today, and it's just impossible to tell. I would like to think that our commitments to the marginalized would remain as strong as they have been. I wish I could have some certainty that that is what it would be. But I would look to the younger people that are graduating right now, the people that are starting their careers, they get it, they know the things that matter and we sometimes have to step by, as Maureen said with Queer theory, and sort of go okay, okay, okay, I'm trying to catch up now, I'm trying to catch up. But they're signaling this, they're signaling where it is that we need to go and where I would hope that I would be going. But yeah, I would hate to take credit.
MS: I do think that there are certainly emerging scholars doing amazing things. I think they're co-writing within marginalized populations, honoring indigenous knowledge, doing things that are community-engaged scholarship. It is a really powerful wave. But I see the cross-cutting force which is the tremendous precarity of academic jobs, and this is not just in this moment, the 2020 job market. But there is a tyranny of the ranking system, the A and B journals, the quest to get mainstream “pubs” out, to have three things published before you get on the job market, that I think mitigates against some of the people doing the really risky work getting their work published. And I see too many of the really, really dynamic provocative scholars, who are pushing the needle, choosing to leave academia, and that is going to be not just “brain drain” but, like, a “passion drain” for the Academy.
BH: And I think there are still pockets. There are still places where it's really difficult to do the kind of work that we do. Last week, I had a Skype conversation with a young PhD student at a well-respected business school. He is a gay man and he wants to study LGBT topics in organizations, and he is being told by his faculty not to. Yeah, so, I was really happy that he reached out to me, and I gave some names of other people to reach out to, including people in his own school. So, it's still not easy. It's still not easy for people in many places.
MS: Yeah, I'm glad to hear that. When Debra and I were working on the draft of the tempered radicalism paper, we were calling it the “feminist executive” paper: can you be a feminist and do things differently inside organizations, and we were cautioned over and over again, to take the “F word” out. So, there's no feminism in the title. We did listen to that strategically, to get the ideas out. But, I mean, I'm sad to hear that, 35 years later, people are being told to deny those parts of their self and their commitment, to follow the path.
DC: I certainly wouldn't want to dismiss research agendas having to do with any type of marginality based on social identity. At the same time, you know, I'm inspired by some of the directions that Dev Jennings and Andy Hoffman have suggested in terms of the Anthropocene, and that the institutional makeup of the globe is so ill-equipped to deal with the disruption and the displacement that will arise inevitably. So, you have a foreseeable trajectory of inequality, mechanisms of deeper marginalization and misery, and the need to try to address those with a failing institutional fabric, in many ways. And, so, I think that their suggesting that this is the kind of moral imperative for organizational scholars is correct, that we need to be better at helping the world deal with this kind of displacement and suffering.
SM: All great points. Just out of curiosity, a point that Bryant mentioned made me think – if junior scholars reach out to you to work on any of these topics that you have worked on what would your answer be? And would you mentor them?
MS: Yes, they do reach out. We love them. We review papers, we are Associate Editors, we try to take a really developmental approach. We are committee members, we put people in symposia and PDWs, all the things that we can think of to encourage them. And, sometimes when you're feeling like a lone person somewhere, to know that there is that community out there that has got your back, I think that's important. And I hope you'll put in an exclamation point in bold in this interview and it's printed that we are here, and we have got you!
BH: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
GO: Yeah. Tons of people have helped us. It would not be proper for us not to contribute, given how much other people have helped us.
MS: Actually, the first dissertation I chaired did have the “F word” (feminist) in it. Bravo. So, that was a step forward, and my duty was really to say, come at this mindfully, here is the choice, I'm for it. Know what will follow, and I think that's where we stand. So, we may mentor students who choose to temper, quantify, find different theory hooks or coverage for what they are doing, and that's a strategy we can support as well. It's not like we only support one approach. We support people in the multiple ways that they try to think about navigating this career, and I know we all do and will continue to.
SM: That's great. Thank you all so very much for all of your answers, comments and insight. I'm very grateful for being here today and listening to you. Great pleasure meeting you all for the first time. Thank you again.
GO: Very nice to meet you, Sara.
BH: Nice to meet you. Thank you for hosting this reunion party.
MS: Yeah, thanks Sara. You were great. Great questions. Thank you very much, everyone.
SM: Thanks, bye everyone.