So I’m teaching my Writing And Thinking in the Organizational Sciences graduate class again. (Wow! My academic blog is two years old. I really need to post more often) This is a course that I took with Allan Wicker many years ago and is based upon Allan’s (1985) paper on getting out of one’s conceptual ruts. The gist of this course is to help the students think deeply and creatively about their research topics while also discussing issues of writing and working effectively.
I have to be honest: it’s an amazing class (if I do say so myself). I can see the intellectual growth among the students. In this last exercise, in which the students conducted a analysis of their major concepts, I could actually see the wheels turning and the Deep Thoughts Being Thunk.
Here’s the other things that is quite exciting to me: Allan was quite prescient in his Conceptual Ruts paper. It took 30 years or so, but some of the A level journals (specifically Academy of Management Journal and Academy of Management Review among others) are starting to advocate some of the exercises to their authors, even though they neglect the origins of these ideas in Allan’s paper.
I also realize that I might be able to better publicize this class–and what we’re doing in it–as “theorizing.” That’s certainly the approach that AMJ and AMR are taking.
I would love to turn this course into a book for other social science graduate programs to use to help their PhD students develop and apply theory to their research. ((I’m waiting for the next sentence to jump into my head and out of my fingers to conclude this essay. I’ve been waiting a long time.))
So let’s just finish it here by adding that the other parts of the class are on WRITING and secrets to PRODUCTIVITY. Because all the great thoughts (and book ideas) don’t add up to diddly squat until we get our booties in the chair and put the words down on paper. And then edit them. And re-edit them. And edit them again. And have a few friendly (or not) reviewers tell us where our thoughts and writing don’t make sense.