It has taken me forever to get this post up on my blog! I am finally being shamed into finishing up this post after drinks, snacks, and dinner with my students last night. Why so hard to write? I think it’s because one becomes very self-conscious about writing when one is teaching about writing and thinking.
So, the scoop: I am teaching a course this semester for our PhD students called “Writing in the Organizational Sciences”. Although the title says “writing,” what it’s really about is writing and THINKING about research in the organizational sciences. And, as one of my students pointed out last night, critical thinking about research. I’d also add creative thinking about research.
This course builds off a course I had with Allan Wicker called “Conceptual Framing” and from the philosophy of my main graduate school mentor, M. Lynne Markus who believed that you aren’t actually thinking until you are actually writing.* In this class, we talk about everything involved in writing and thinking about research from incredibly mundane but fundamental parts of writing research like grammar (Barzun’s Simple and Direct) and scheduling (Pomodoro Technique) to pretty heady activities like having the students analyze their research problems using concept, process, and facet analyses, among other conceptual framing techniques.
We’ve read some classics like Davis’ essay on what make research interesting to and Sutton and Staw’s essay on “What Theory is Not, to my new favorite article by Suddaby on why construct clarity is lacking in organization science and why it is so important. Along the way, we’ve read some great papers that put creativity and thoughtfulness into writing and thinking about important research topics like Orlikowski’s article on social materialism (2007) and the brand new article by Klein et al in AMR reconceptualizing organizational commitment.
So, that’s what we did in the class. What I love is what the students became: open to sharing their research ideas and taking constructive criticism; able to see the interesting components of others’ research and coaching them on how to develop it; creative thinkers of new ideas and approaches grounded in previous research.
I’d love for this to be a course that is offered in other PhD programs. I don’t think it needs to be limited to organizational sciences; I think all social science PhD folks could get a lot out of it. We teach our PhD students a lot about research methods. I think it’s also useful to teach them how to theorize and to really think about their research.
*How bizarre to link to my mentors’ wikipedia pages!