2018 Interview: Distinguished Scholar Award
Bottom of Form
Interview with 2018 OMT Distinguished Scholar Award winner, Alan Meyer (University of Oregon)
Interviewed by Pedro Monteiro (EMLYON Business School)
NOTE: See the longer original interview with Alan the podcast link.
Pedro: Congratulations on your award. Let’s start at the beginning of your career. What motivated you to go to grad school in California and eventually become an organizational theorist?
Alan: I’ve always had a thing about universities, I love them! I had a great time studying economics at the University of Washington as an undergrad. My MBA wasn’t quite so much fun, but it was far better than the alternative – being drafted to Vietnam. From there I got a job teaching at Alabama State University, one of the historically black universities, and that was when I figured out how much fun you can have in the classroom. So that led me to apply for PhD programs. And what could be better than studying at Berkeley in the seventies? As far as why organization theory, that grew out of chance encounters with smart and kind-hearted mentors. I had an exploratory mindset, but organizations didn’t engage me until I was well into my studies. At the University of Washington, I connected with Lee Beach, a psychologist and decision theorist, and Charles Summer, who was a pioneer in the field that’s become strategic management. When I got to Berkeley, Ray Miles and George Strauss were waiting for me, and at Wisconsin, it was Bill Starbuck. Bill approaches social science not as a cerebral pastime, but as an effectual activity. He taught me how to write and convinced me that social scientists should try to improve the world.
Pedro: You explored many different themes and approaches in your career. Is there an invisible red thread connecting them?
Alan: That’s a great question. To be candid, I was driven mostly by curiosity. But in retrospect, it’s easy to find some ‘red threads.’ Starting with my dissertation, I was interested in organizations' reactions to upheavals that were going on in their environments. You know, technological discontinuities, the doctors’ strike, regulatory changes, those sorts of jolts. I figured out early on that interesting things happen during those moments when an organization gets knocked away from its equilibrium. Along with that, I got interested in emergence and self-organizing and things like auto-catalysis. I’d say that over 90% of organization science is actually the science of organizing at equilibrium. But that other 10% is pretty interesting!
Pedro: In your talk at AOM 2018, you raised a number of interesting points. What do you hope OMT members took away from your presentation in Chicago?
Alan: Thank you. In this talk I represented and interpreted my career as the product of the social network that I’ve put together by tapping into the “Invisible College.” It turns out that my personal network consists of a set of 174 relationships with 112 different colleagues (mentors, protegees, co-authors, editors, and so forth). I found that about 90% of the people and the connections in my network have been drawn from the OMT division – and that came as a big surprise to me. To dig a little deeper, I deconstructed the three best papers I’ve written, and found that I’d leveraged my network heavily in each of them – turning to mentors for inspiration, coauthors for help and friendship, doctoral students for methods, editors for insight, colleagues for encouragement, and on and on. So one thing that I hope people took away is a deeper appreciation of why OMT matters and what it can do for them. I really think we have something powerful going on here.
So, what makes OMT special? First, social-structure-wise, OMT sits in a sweet spot. It’s serving a function that no other division in the Academy can. AOM has a hub-and-spoke structure, and OMT closes the structural hole between the micro cluster that has OB at its center, and the macro cluster made up of divisions in orbit around Strategic Management. We’re sitting right at the crossroads. Another special feature of OMT is longevity – it turns out that OMT members have longer tenure than in any of the other divisions. OMT is a good place to be, so people stay. I think one of the reasons they stay is because OMT harbors this colony of cooperators, of people who are altruistic but have integrity and high standards.
Pedro: I want to dig a bit deeper into the idea of being at the intersection. What do you think it means in practical terms? Are we the bastion of a specific kind of theorizing or questions?
Alan: I think we are sitting at a meso-level. You know, as organizations continue to dematerialize and disaggregate into global networks and supply chains, we’re uniquely positioned to drop down one level of analysis and observe the groups that are being plugged into and out of these networks, or to pop up to the next higher level of analysis and look at the changes underway in the structure of the fields and industries within which organizations are sitting. Some organizations are leveraging information technologies to create brand new business models, and others are morphing from rigid, formal bureaucracies into what Jerry Davis calls networks of contracts. But either way, in OMT we’re sitting in a pretty sweet spot to go wherever we need to go to understand organizations and management.
Pedro: I am curious about your work concerning the African Academy of Management and indigenous scholarship — both timely in light of current talks about internationalization in OMT. What was the inspiration to engage in that?
Alan: Jim Walsh was the one who spearheaded the initiative to take the AOM to Africa. We held workshops in Ghana, Rwanda, and South Africa, each attended by about twenty young African scholars from all over the continent. We led each group through a six-day boot-camp style experience. It was interactive and immersive and exhausting. This has been the best and the most gratifying teaching I’ve ever done. Never have I invested such a small amount of effort in the classroom to see such big results so soon. One night in Ghana, dead-tired after a ten-hour marathon of presentations, critiques, and tutorials, a Kenyan woman caught me heading for dinner and asked a research design question. I gave her a quick answer, escaped by telling her to check her email in ten minutes, went back up to my hotel room, emailed her a copy of Kathy Eisenhardt’s AMRpaper on building theory from case studies, and then went off to dinner. The next morning, she was waiting for me at breakfast. She’d stayed up all night, studied Kathy’s paper, and completely rewritten the introduction and methods section of her dissertation proposal. Back home, I wait for months or years to find out whether and how I’ve impacted students.
And here’s a remarkable thing – I’ve always thought of teaching PhD students as a cognitive and secular sort of activity. But in Africa, I’ve found that they don’t experience my teaching that way – they experience my cool, cognitive doses of methods or research design as hot, emotional, and sometimes transcendent. For Africans, the experience often takes on a decidedly spiritual tenor. My secular tutoring is received as a sacred gift that conveys profound insights. As I said, this feels like the best and most important teaching I’ve done.
Pedro: Let’s get back to the Invisible College. In academia, our collaborations are usually unscripted, and we work with people we are familiar with … but this can exclude minorities and people from non-traditional backgrounds. So, do you think there can be a dark side to it?
Alan: Yes, I know there is a dark side to the Invisible College. It can be self-absorbed and exclusionary. I don’t have anything to say that is close to a solution, but I honestly do feel that OMT harbors a cadre of people whose values are authentic and inclusive. I believe OMT is a place of social inclusion, more so than our more highly paradigmatic subfields, or those based on skillsets and tools that don’t encourage sensitivity to the kinds of issues that you're raising. In short, I would say, stay in OMT, and you’re less likely to be excluded. That’s the goal of OMT’s “Off-Program Program.” Marc-David Seidel, Emily Block and other OMT officers are working intentionally and diligently to figure out how to make everyone feel at home and welcome in OMT. Another positive initiative that comes to mind is one Andy Van de Ven is leading to encourage indigenous engaged scholarship. But there’s no doubt that I’ve had a privileged point of access to a sensational set of colleagues that somebody in Africa or Brazil doesn’t necessarily have.
Pedro: Thank you for this reflection, and I agree that OMT’s off-program initiatives may bring people together in a unique way and create space for ‘random’ encounters beyond one's network.
Alan: Another bright spot is that as people go through their academic careers and arrive at more senior positions, they tend to take on a service orientation. OMT and AOM provide terrific platforms for serving. I guess the action implication here is to anticipate that shift in yourself and to encourage and reward it among your colleagues. For me, it feels great to be transitioning from being more research-focused to being more service oriented and a little bit more reflective.
Pedro: You probably accumulated a lot of lessons in your career. What would you tell your younger self that might be relevant to junior OMTers?
Alan: What advice would I give my younger self? Well, there certainly are things I figured out recently that would have been great to know back then. First of all, if I could whisper into my own ear when I was 25 or 26, I’d say: ‘Hey, congratulations – you just picked the best job on the planet!’ Think about it: You get to design your job yourself; you get to study whoever and whatever you like – almost anything or anyone that arouses your curiosity. You can tackle an esoteric theoretical puzzle or promote social justice. Plus, you also get to pick your own co-workers, and that’s truly unique. Try to give me an example of another job where you get to decide who your closest colleagues are going to be! There are different ways to pick them. I’ve never been productive enough in research to build both an academic network and a separate social network, so I’ve made a practice of coauthoring with my close friends and getting friendly with the people that I'm collaborating with. And this turns out to be a tremendous work-life integration solution, because our families have grown up together and we seek each other out for fun, as well as for research.
A second piece of advice I have for myself is to avoid the rookie mistake of believing that research and scholarship are solitary pursuits. I’ve learned that scholarship and research are incredibly social. What really drove this home was deconstructing my résumé and reconstructing my network in the run-up to my distinguished scholar talk. It became crystal clear that I haven’t been flying solo. A related rookie mistake is thinking that your identity as a scholar takes shape in sort of a natural, organic way – that it’s just an agglomeration of your values, beliefs, skills. Once again, totally wrong. A young scholar has the opportunity to carve out an academic identity, and to change it. You can reconfigure your identity when an intriguing opportunity presents itself or when you just get bored – you have that kind of control. It’s a really good job.
A third lesson is to build a field research component into every study that you do. Okay, younger self – I know you’re not an extrovert, but becoming a field researcher will give you the license to go into people’s worlds, and collect data by interacting with them on their own turf, in their own jargon. If you want to keep them engaged, you’ll need to figure out what they really care deeply about. Doing this opens a window into fascinating occupational worlds – I’ve spent hours interviewing brilliant physicists, corporate venture capitalists, jazz and bluegrass musicians, Olympic track and field coaches and athletes, and emergency room doctors and nurses.
Another painfully-learned lesson is to be compulsive about craftsmanship. That means things like don’t submit your paper for publication prematurely, use your colleagues as a sounding board first. When you've got something written, volunteer to give a talk about it. Circulate your draft and persuade people that you really don’t want them to pull their punches. Then treat each and every misinterpretation of what you've written as evidence that you still haven’t figured out how to communicate it clearly.
My last tip is that you don’t have to trade off quality for quantity. Trust me – there are lots of people in our field that really do care about quality – they're looking for it, they know it when they see it, and they're prepared to reward it. So your goal shouldn’t be to get published, but to get read and get noticed and to make a compelling case for your ideas. Life’s too short to write penny-ante papers. You need to write ones that pay intrinsic rewards.
Pedro: We talked about the past and reflected a bit on your path. So, what about the future? What are the trends that you see and what do you think the future holds for research and publishing in OMT?
Alan: I think it holds some real disruption. There’s a narrative in the social sciences that’s in pretty heavy rotation: Academic publishing is in shambles. There’s all this p-hacking going on today. We’re facing the replication crisis in psychology, and there’s a surge in article retractions in our field. Meanwhile, authors are getting testy; they're complaining about editors hijacking their articles and becoming complicit co-authors, and reviewers who are forcing them to rewrite their hypotheses.
Once again, I would refer you to OMT as your first layer of protection against being infected by these nasty practices. Send your work to journals edited by OMT members. My notion of a good editor is someone who acts like authors are his or her social and intellectual peers. That may sound obvious, but it’s not. I'm thinking about editors who write comments as though they were speaking to authors personally, and respect their voices. H.G. Wells once said: “no passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.” Good editors have learned how to curb their enthusiasm for doing this.
But maybe even more important is to realize that academic publishing is sitting on the cusp of disruption. Paper journals are disappearing, authors are self-publishing on websites like SSRN and Research Gate. Alternative reputation systems are popping up on social media platforms like Mendeley and LinkedIn. This would not be a good time to invest in an academic journal. They’ve extracted surplus value from the research and publication community at too high a rate for too long. So I’d go short on academic journals right now. It’s going to be really interesting to watch the impact on university promotion and tenure review systems and elite academic journals. They have conspired to slow down open science because the status quo serves both of their interests. But times are changing.
Pedro: Thank you for this great chat! It was enlightening. I am sure the OMT community will appreciate your insights.
Alan: It’s been my pleasure.