Anyhoo, I’ve been using the word “aspirational” when I think about this class.  Aspirational is usually used in the context of Pinterest. It suggests a lifestyle that is inspirational to us and that we aspire to (e.g., a clean house, organic cleaning products, densely growing organic garden, yummy food, crafts, knitting projects, and chickens). Or maybe those are just my boards on Pinterest.

This class is  aspirational because we’ve spent the entire semester stressing the importance of in depth thinking and creativity in regards to our research.  We’ve critiqued and supported each other’s research.  We’ve plumbed the depths of the meanings of their constructs and played with all sorts of thought analyses of their research problems. The students have been validated in the importance of their approach to their research.  We’ve read editors from top journals discuss the importance of developmental reviews and why 13 pages of single space comments from a journal editor and three reviewers is a Good Thing.  I feel like every student has expanded their capacity to Think About  Research.  That’s pretty cool, and it goes way, way, way beyond looking for ways to “fill a gap in the research” when making a research contribution.

That’s the good part.  The reason I worry that what I’ve taught them is aspirational and not always “real life”  is that sometimes the pressure to get a publication out the door  interferes with thinking.  Sometimes it’s easier to just claim you’re filling in a hole in the research instead of re-conceptualizing previously problematic constructs  (affective organizational commitment, I am looking at you).  Sometimes reviewers don’t take a developmental approach and just say “this paper needs more theorizing” in a one paragraph journal submission review.

But that’s ok.  To continue the Pinterest analogy, if they have pinned to their Good Research Board ways to think, conceptualize, critique, and review research that is better than they would have done otherwise, how is that bad?  The thing about Pinterest (for me) is that occasionally, I do go back and pick out a craft or recipe I’d like to try or a chicken hint I’d forgotten about and I do it.  Maybe there will be a ripple effect for these students and for other academics who read these articles, so that eventually it becomes the norm and not the cutting edge. Crafts and foods show up in my life that I’ve seen get passed around on Pinterest.  I think the more attention we pay to creativity and clarity in thinking and research, the more likely we will to see projects we recognize as reflecting this principles start showing up to review or read in journals, too.

I hope.

But right now I have to go grade those (brilliantly written and conceptualized!) papers.  And then summer can start.

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!

First, who knew how many people would be searching the web to try to find out why Dooce is getting divorced? According to my site stats, about 700 have stopped by this site after conducting a web search looking for some more understanding about why Dooce/Heather Armstrong has separated and appears to be divorcing Jon.

I couldn’t have asked for more obvious data to land in my lap to support my argument that people want to understand what is going on.  And even though Dooce gets 100,000 readers a day, most of the 311,000,000  inhabitants of the US do not read her blog.  So what happens when you need someone to discuss her separation with? There are probably not enough people in your face-to-face world to figure it out with. I don’t think any of the people who ended up on my blog read the news and then immediately googled for information about Dooce.

Instead, I think her readers pondered her situation, worried about health, and were curious about why.  I would say it caused enough internal tension that that folks said “What the heck?” and googled.  Did they think they’d find an answer?  No.  Does Dooce or Jon keep a secret blog they could find and read?  No!  But did they think they might find someone else discussing what is going on?  Yes. 700 folks, and that is not counting the 1000 or so hits I got from Slate and Sheknows.  Wow.

I have no data to support my google-as-sensemaking argument, but it’s a plausible explanation.  Your plausible explanations are welcome, too, including the tendency to seek information from the same medium by which we are used to receiving it.   (And I need to blog about the “hate readers” because it suggests to me a couple of  a really interesting study should some psychologist or comm scholar want to study it)

I planned on blogging about this two weeks ago, soon after my last post.  But then my son got sick–apparently, really sick–and had to be hospitalized.  That has relevance here because of the socio-emotional and material support I received through posting about it on Facebook.  I hate to self-cite, but that article I wrote with Tom Horan ages ago proposed that online groups can increase social capital (through networks, norms, and trust) when online networks overlap with face-to-face networks.

That paper did not anticipate social networking technologies like Facebook, and the egocentric communities that develop from them, like Barry Wellman did.   But I think our paper did anticipate how online interactions move offline and provide real, material support–like the meals, snacks and activities quietly delivered to our house and our hospital room.  That was important to us and similar to the sorts of support Rheingold first talked about on the WELL.

I think, however, our paper underestimated the importance of the online support to folks in a needy state.  Hampton et al’s (2012) new report says that people get more than they give on Facebook.  A “like” is a pretty simple button to click on someone’s status update.  But when 45 people like my status update that we are getting out of the hospital?  That has real and significant meaning to me.  I think there are plenty of research opportunities out there for us to figure out why that is so powerful.

And I don’t think anyone has fully theorized or studied about when those offline and online communication media start to overlap.  When a colleague says “Thank you for status updates.  I really wanted to know how it was going and it was important to me.”  And when multiple friends say “HEY! That idea for a bar in a hospital? You are definitely on to something!”  The conversation seems to start up quickly and get deep in my experiences when the offline and online overlap.  It would be worth seeing how online/offline communication processes merge and when they don’t.

Lots of studies I can see here.  Lots of sense to be made.  Lots of gratitude and connection to be felt.

I need to preface this by referencing some of my previous research on Julie Powell’s blog The Julie/Julia Project (which became the movie Julie & Julia starring Meryl Streep).  My Julie//Julia research started because there was a call for  research on blogs and I wanted to study her blog, which I really  liked reading.  I decided to study sense of virtual community on it because although I liked it very much, I did not believe it was an actual community.  Imagine my surprise when I found that a small group of people on this blog actually did experience a “real” feeling of community on it. The quantitative results are linked above and my recent analysis of the qualitative data, which examines the differences between those who feel community and those who “merely” like it a whole lot is looking for a publication outlet.  This experience has informed much of my research on other groupings in that I should never assume that I know what is going on for people in their online experiences (a assumption that has prompted me in some of my current research on Facebook).

So back to Dooce.  I was honestly so shocked about her announcement that I immediately posted her news to Facebook.  (If you didn’t see that announcement, it means you are on my professional FB list instead of my personal list.  Should you like to see more status updates about personal things, mostly my children, let me know; if you’d like to know less personal info, let me know that, too!)  I needed to understand if my other friends who read Dooce were as shocked as I.  I don’t usually talk about Dooce to my real life friends, although I had a funny experience in which a colleague and I were shopping and noticed a pretty light fixture.  My colleague told me that a friend of hers had recently bought a similar fixture, but she couldn’t remember who.  We both paused for a minute, thinking.  I mentioned that Dooce had recently bought one like that and my friend replied, “Oh, yeah.  That’s who it was.”   We laughed, albeit a bit uncomfortably.

So two things occur to me here:  1) Dooce is stored in the “friend” section in the conceptual map of our social networks, even though we don’t know her.  2) When something unusual happens to her, at least some of us feel the need to sensemake about her experience with “real life” others.

Even more surprising was that Dooce’s separation was covered in mainstream media.  For those of you who don’t know Dooce (and if don’t, you aren’t following Mommy blogs–or even personal blogs–are you?), she gets over 100,000 readers a day, was featured on Oprah and makes $40,000 a MONTH blogging*.  And if you click on those links, you’ll see that that information was posted on the Salt Lake City Tribune and Jezebel.com, only some of the mainstream newspapers (the Globe and Mail) and web sites (HuffPo, Parenting.com) as well as a boatload of other personal and syndicated blogs talking about Dooce’s separation.  Television is even covering it (ABCNews and Dooce’s own local TV Station).  As we say in south, and I mean this will all sincerity and not as a put down: Bless her heart.

So this is a surprisingly big deal that people wan to talk about.  Why?  Is she  like Kim Kardashian or some other reality TV star that we’ve been sucked into following?  That suggestion has gone around and it doesn’t ring true to me.  It may for you, but it doesn’t for me.  Why?  I (like other mothers who are strong willed, earning a living, and potentially difficult to live with) identify with her.  I found this to be very important in Julie Powell’s blog fan base and I think it’s important  here.  But people (whom I don’t know) identify with Kim Kardashian, too. Right?  I think the bigger issue is how mediated Dooce’s blog is compared with Reality TV.  Yes, they are both edited:  all communication is edited.  I am editing right now.  I edit my thoughts when I talk. I think Dooce is a good writer because she edits her posts for truth and clarity. But Reality TV is heavily edited,  for a truth I think that comes from the producers and not the “star.”

Dooce reveals a lot about her mental illness and her  personal disposition that do not put her in a flattering light even if it puts her in a truthful light.  That’s why I’m surprised about the reality TV comparison.  Yes, a blog is a computer mediated technology, but if you can trust that the blog author is being honest, it’s a very personal, intimate form of communication.  (It’s one of the reasons I think CEO Blogs are quite popular with their employees.)

So why is this post here and not my personal blog?  Clearly, there is some overlap.  I am surprised and concerned about her breakup, a reaction that is not “independent and objective” as we psychologists are theoretically supposed to be in our research.  (I don’t believe that is true, but many psychologists do.)  I think it’s interesting that someone’s personal blog is having this much affect outside of her readership.  I think it’s interesting that even in this day and age, we still don’t agree on what a blog is, which I think has to do more with what computer mediated communication (CMC) or information and communication technologies (ICT) someone reads and the purpose they read them for than what the communicators actually experience on any one site.  I think this provides more evidence (do we really need it?) that mediated communication has real effects on people who are distant from each other.  I’m not sure this experience calls for more research on blogs, although I do think much of the research I’ve seen has not fully dealt with   case studies like Dooce (popular, highly personal, and providing a living through multi-media endeavors).  I think it echoes back to my previous research on the Julie/Julia project: I can’t fully anticipate what others feel about her blog and her breakup announcement.  For some, maybe this is reality TV.  For others, a  ”friend” we identify is going through a break up.

I’m interested in these outcomes and differences in interpretations. From an organizational science perspective, how does this sort of communication and identity move over to employees, organizations, and professions?  From a social psychology perspective, how does such an experience become integrated into our personal and social lives, when we don’t really have others to make sense about it?  Or just personally, why do I find this so interesting when others find it so remote?  Of course, this is why I like doing what I’m doing.  It’s fun.  I get to think.  And I get to talk about it.

*Should you want to sponsor this or any of my other blogs for even a fraction of that amount, let me know.

Case in point:  Public versus private interactions.  Online, people will reveal information that is quite personal or intimate, which we could consider “private” but is available for everyone to see–on a newsgroup, on a listserv, even  on a Facebook status update.  Do they confuse their public/private boundaries or locations?

I have spent a great deal of time working at coffeehouses during my sabbatical.  I find them fantastic ways to keep myself focused on my work while still stimulated enough to not get distracted (another topic for another blog).  In the past few weeks, with the remodel of my favorite coffeehouse, I have changed where I have been sitting.  In this new location, I notice that every weekday morning when I am here, there is a group that meets and discusses “issues” for about an hour or so before they go to work or back to their home.  There are a couple of interesting things about this group:  it seems to either be a support group for a middle aged woman (the youngest member of the group) or she simply dominates the entire conversation with issues about her co-workers, church or health problems.  Should I be the gossiping type and If I took notes, I could tell you where she works, what she does, her plans for leaving her Sunday school responsibilities and what medical practice she frequents for one of her ongoing medical issues.

That is actually not what interests me.  What interests me is that this group is clearly having a private conversation in a public location–one that the rest of us at the coffeehouse know is a public location but which this particular group is  enacting what I could consider private behaviors. Many people have meetings at this location and most of them are able to hold their conversations at a level that is quiet enough to still be “private” in public.

I think previously we would just interpret this as being an issue with someone who speaks too loudly for the location (and if *I* am calling someone loud…).  However, I wonder if the more interesting issue is the permeability of psychological boundaries that people create around their FtF groups.  It is obvious in online groups how permeable  these boundaries are, especially when researchers or media expose their contents.  Some online groups make the boundaries less permeable by requiring membership and not allowing the content to show up on google searches.  But they are still completely permeable due to our options to cut and paste content.  For the most part though, however, we let people enact their online public behavior as private.

Just like people are “letting” the groups in this coffeehouse believe they are private and just like the people interacting in these groups believe they are private, when in fact, I could be transcribing everything they are saying.  Of course, I  would be gossiping and eavesdropping should I be doing in to the FtF groups, while just “reading” should I be doing it in an online group.

Perhaps, however, we all create psychological boundaries of privacy in public spaces, boundaries that are highly permeable in both FtF and online environments. Of course, online, the communication is permanent, but FtF it’s no less observable and it’s not less private.

Same behavior, different explanations.  The issue of Public vs. Private conversations are not isolated to online groups.  Perhaps we (or I?) just haven’t thought about it the same way in FtF groups.

Semi-deep thoughts while I try to figure out what the heck the purpose of this group is and why they meet here every morning, which I admit is idle curiosity and not related at all to any research.

• “Here is what I am doing mid-sabbatical.”
•  ”Here is what I am doing late sabbatical.”
• “Here are all the great thoughts the tax payers helped with with this semester!”

While I would really like to post about the latter, I’ll wait until they come out in press and then talk about them.

That said, this sabbatical–the last 6 months really–has been the best time of my life.  I’ve fallen back in love with my research and with my life.  It helps that the twins are older and a bit more self sufficient.  But it has been the time to pause and think and focus at a relaxed pace that really made my perception about my life sparkle.

Weirder, I was concerned at the beginning of my leave that all my projects were due during the first week of January.  I was concerned that I’d be too leisurely during the leave and then be crunched at the end.  While, I certainly spent the last two weeks working hard, the writing was a lot easier than I thought it would be because I’d spent the previous 4 months working out conceptual and data issues.  If all my writing could be like that, publications would be shooting out of my ears.

In any case, it’s nice to fall back in love with one’s research and one’s life.  I’m still feeling all warm and fuzzy about it.

However as a colleague warned:

Colleague:   Welcome back!

Me:  I’m *glad* to be back!

((pause))

Colleague:  That’ll pass.

I’m not.

I am “doing research” which means spending all day writing, reading articles, and analyzing data.  It’s actually a lot of fun.  Ok, that’s bullshite.  It’s not a lot of fun.  But it’s a lot less stressful than trying to do all this while I am teaching and doing my university service.  Still, it’s been  both easier and harder than I thought.

The easier part is doing this all day long.  I thought I would be bored, but I’m not.  I have a four main projects I’m working on and they are interesting.  I’m also working in coffee shops nearly exclusively.  One of our Organization Science PhD students is doing a study on where people work and as I was filling out the survey, I had a “testing effect” moment–I realized that I REALLY, REALLY like working in public, particularly coffee shops, and I REALLY, REALLY hate working in isolated environments by myself.  Since then, I’ve worked nearly exclusively out and about in the coffee houses around Charlotte (Dilworth Coffee Company, Amelie’s, and, rarely, Starbucks).

I have also found time to exercise during the day.  Don’t let the media fool you, that east coast earthquake was caused by me running for the first time in years.

The harder parts is how much work I still have to do!  I thought I’d have leisurely days to sit and think deep thoughts about my research.  While I do feel like I am able to relax and get deeper conceptually and methodologically into my research than what I can do when I’m teaching, I’m not finding that I have free time during the work day in any way, shape, or form.  I’m booked on my projects from the time I drop the twins off at daycare to when I pick my older son up at the bus stop.  I thought it would be easier to update this blog weekly because I’d have All This Free Time.  HA!

I feel a strong need to all up the NC legislature (or some other state’s government if they are interested) and encourage them to watch me work for a week while I’m “on leave.”  We have ambitions in our state to grow our universities to become more research intensive.  To do that, we need to support our faculty more so they can do more research (i.e., regular leaves/sabbaticals for research faculty).  And a raise more frequently than once every five years wouldn’t hurt either.

First, though, what do YOU think of when you think of social media?  A couple of years ago, I gave a talk to the Carolina Girl Geeks Dinner group on social media.  Imagine my surprise when we had somewhat different definitions of social media or even web 2.0.  Actually, I was not surprised at all.  Much of my research has started with an explicit definition of what technology I’m talking about so that the reader can figure out where to place it in his or her own conceptualizations (e.g., what is a virtual community and what is not).

So I do NOT include blogs or YouTube in my definitions of social media.  For me, the definition of social media includes an explicit connection between users of the technology.  Facebook friends, twitter followers, and Google+ circles all have explicit connections between users that one can objectively see.  (I love that these media make explicit the social connections/social networks that we’ve all had forever on FACE-TO-FACE interactions).  Some people may have groups that interact on blogs and/or YouTube, but they are not social media per my definition.  Your definition may include them, which is why you should always state what it is.

ANYWHO, companies are starting to exploit those connections and one interesting (disturbing?) company ranks you on your “influence” on twitter and Facebook.  Actually, there are three companies doing it, apparently:  Klout, PeerIndex, and Twitter Grader.  What is bizarre is that according to this NY Times article, people who have a high klout index can get perks at hotels.  According to the developers, this makes our society more level because we are no longer depending on the amount of wealth or beauty someone has to make them more influential.  I would have imagined that “leveling the playing field” means everyone gets the upgrade, but that’s just me, apparently!

I honestly cannot imagine that these technologies are going to create a social media caste system (as the article claims) of people who get perks (a la Paris Hilton, currently) and those who don’t (like me, the vast majority of the time).  But I make no claim to predicting the future of technology:  I was the one who said that no one would ever use the World Wide Web because we already had FTP and Gopher.  Use Gopher much these days?  Yeah, me either.

Danah presents her arguments well and I don’t want to rehash them.  What I find interesting is the sociomateriality (as Orlikowski calls it) or the sociomaterialism (as I’ve been calling it) that is inherent in the differences between twitter, Facebook and now Google+.  The sociomaterialism argument, as I understand and apply it, for understanding how these three social media are being used involves not only the technological differences between them–character limits on updates (or not), the possibility to “like” or retweet or +1 a status update (and what those differences semantically mean), and reciprocal viewing of updates like when you friend someone on FB (or not like twitter or G+). But also the cultural, normative, and individual use differences between these three systems which makes it impossible to say FACEBOOK IS LIKE THIS.  TWITTER IS LIKE THAT.  and GOOGLE + WILL BE LIKE THIS OTHER THING.

Yes, there are differences in use and culture between the three—FB started on a college campus with younger users.  For me, it is a personal social medium to keep in touch with friends and friendly colleagues.  I hide the posts of people who only post their business info and all the game updates/requests/annoyances that my friends post.  Obviously, though, other people use it for business purposes and for gaming purposes or I wouldn’t have to hide them.  That’s the individual use part that fits into an acceptable normative use for those people.  And the technological options make a difference (liking a business, liking an update or status, writing a note vs. a status update) but the use in practice (who you friend, what business you like, who you hide or not, how often you read, how often you post, what you want out of your use of FB) is emergent with the technology and the social (and personal) expectations.  It is NOT an interaction in the classic sense (more technology and more social desires lead to more satisfaction).  It *is* an emergent process of use that can be understood by watching and inquiring about individual developmental processes, preferred technologies and group influences.  I do believe we can understand FB in a generalizable way for particular interests and uses; but I don’t think we can ever say FACEBOOK IS LIKE THIS.

I think understanding twitter takes the same sort of efforts and conceptual approach.  I first approached twitter as if it was a new social media in which I could follow the blog authors and FB friends.  I did not find it interesting that way at all.  After about a year, I came back to twitter and began to use it as more of a professional networking tool, but even then, it took a while and a few role models to figure out what I wanted to use twitter for.  My use of twitter is mostly professional and keeping in touch with professionals in my research community. But that is certainly not how other people use it. (Thank goodness)  And indeed the best uses I’ve ever had with Twitter have involved real time conversations on time delimited events with groups of others using a # whom I may not have known beforehand.  I can’t even think of how to explain that without an emergent process. And sociomaterialism seems like an apt theoretical lens to use.

At this point, Google + is understood as developing after Facebook and Twitter.  It’s norms are set (or trying to be set) not from the ground up, but apparently as a reaction to what has already gone on with FB and Twitter.  No one is naive on this technology–neither the users nor the developers.  It’s certainly more professional than personal for me, even though I have circles for both.  But it is  best understood in context and in comparison with FB and twitter, at least now.  It may develop in ways we cannot anticipate as its culture and norms further develop (the whole point here!), but right now, at the beginning, I don’t think it’s possible to understand it outside of FB or twitter.

In any case, I hope this essay helps explain why I think sociomaterialism is such and interesting and useful theoretical approach to understanding the use and development of these social media.  Orlikowski actually argues that we should use it to understand not only uses of other technologies but also behavior in organizations–paying much more attention to the physical environment of the place of work like we do the technological features of the media on which we interact.  I completely agree with her.  But I’m starting on something a bit more manageable.

First, I think it’s incorrect to talk of the “rise” of the virtual office.  It’s been rising for quite a while.  It has well risen.  If we were making bread, it’s past time to put this thing in the oven and bake it.  I think the best way of thinking of how pervasive the “virtual” is in our work is that there is no such comparison as a virtual to a face-to-face team.  ALL TEAMS ARE VIRTUAL–even those who interact regularly face-to-face.  You can count on team members to also communicate through email, text, and POT (plain old telephone).  Thus,  all teams are virtual teams now–just on a continuum from low (same location, but still use email) to high virtuality (international).

Second, although the article starts by discussing that virtual organizations remain “organizations” with strict hierarchies (a highly debatable statement) and the human need for social interaction at work (I agree completely), it then spends the rest of the time discussing  the importance of technology in virtual offices.  I know that it is my bias as a psychologist who studies people communicating over technology (and the journal is Technology Review–not People Using Technology Review).  But without people, technology is nothing.  And yes, security is important, but the virtual office without the virtual workers is not an office at all.

In any case, maybe it is time for a People Using Technology Review journal.  (Although some marketing guru could come up with a better name than that)  Managers and other practitioners as well as researchers who follow the current trends in technology should also know about the current trends in research–like Wanda Orlikowski’s new sociomaterial theoretical approach to understanding how technology affects the structure of work and the health and productivity of its employees.  Actually, her approach is so comprehensive, she is arguing that we have neglected the physical (as well as technological) components of  work in *all* of our research, and our organizational theories have significant problems because of it.  Indeed, statements like that make me want to arrange a conference call between her and Dan Stokols and say, “You two need to talk.”

So here is where I backtrack.  I hate criticizing other people’s work.  Even when I write a  review for a paper that is absolutely awful, I always include something supportive and positive (“Nice font!”) to them and then say something a bit more caustic to the editor (“UGH!!!”).  And yesterday’s article is the start of a month long discussion of technology at work.  So you have to start somewhere!  I also went back to Technology Review to see if I misread something about the original article.  Today’s article is on securing the virtual office, so perhaps they were using yesterday’s article to set up the importance for today’s article.

Nonetheless, it seems like a good idea to walk across campus to Dr. Orlikowski’s office and see what she has to say about the virtual office. Technology is exciting.  Technology can do some really cool things.  But without serving or being used by people, it doesn’t exist (cf Google +). Ok, maybe that’s too broad of a  statement, but I hope it makes you think.