African-American, Hispanic-American, and Native-American
Information Systems Doctoral Students Association Conference, sponsored by KPMG Peat Marwick Foundation

December 13, 1997 - Atlanta, Georgia

panel:

Strategies for
Researching and Networking

panel presentation by Allen S. Lee:

Researching Is Networking:
Three Stories about
How to Do Research

[Note: the following is the text of the remarks prepared by Allen Lee for his panel presentation. The remarks are purposely intended to be colloquial. The intended audience for the remarks consists of PhD students and assistant professors.]

It has been 20 years since I started in my own PhD program and 15 years since I graduated with the PhD degree.  In that amount of time, I have learned a lot about research – what research is, what it isn’t, how to do research, how not to do it – and I’ve learned these lessons sometimes from making mistakes, sometimes from dumb luck, sometimes from advice from really good people, and sometimes even from my own hard work.  I would like to share these lessons with all of you, so that perhaps you can learn quickly from my experience instead of having to re-invent the wheel for yourselves.  At the same time, I know that sometimes these lessons really don’t make sense unless you learn them and experience them for yourself – but even if that’s the case, my three stories should still serve the purpose of making sure, in the future, that you’ll know that you aren’t alone, and that you have a network of colleagues that you can turn to for support.

My three stories are: “The Substantive-Intellectual Side of Research versus the Community Side of Research”; “Hard Work versus Getting Rewarded for Hard Work”; and “Applying the Porter Model to Create a Competitive Research Strategy.”

My first story: the Substantive-Intellectual Side of Research versus the Community Side of Research

I do an awful lot of traveling, where I give talks at conferences and at university research seminars.  In one recent seminar that I gave at a university, I had a chance to speak with one of the untenured, assistant professors there, who was obviously quite bright and, because I’m friends with the person who was his dissertation advisor, I know that he’s more than competent on the substantive and intellectual side of how to do research – things like experimental design, multiple research methods, what a researchable question is, and so forth.  In this story, I’ll change a few facts and embellish some others to disguise the person, and to emphasize my points.

Mark is an assistant professor of MIS at a university where there are no senior MIS professors to give him guidance or mentoring, but luckily for him, there are senior professors in other areas who support him and they are really trying to help him out in his research.  So, in a one-on-one conversation with Mark, I asked him what research he’s working on now.  He told me that he’s working with Sam, a strategy professor who is tenured, on a joint research project where they are looking at electronic commerce and family-run businesses.  I asked Mark what theory or theoretical perspective they are using in the paper.  Mark said “actor-anticipation theory.”  I had never heard of “actor-anticipation theory” before, so I asked him some questions about it.  Mark said he found “actor-anticipation theory” in the research literature in psychology, and that there were some published articles in MIS that used it in the early 1980’s.

Then I asked Mark some questions and I made some comments that I always make in this sort of situation.

My first comment was, “When you and Sam finish writing up research that uses this theory that is, for all intensive purposes, really unknown right now in the MIS research community, and you send it to an MIS journal – then the editor will have to find some MIS reviewers who are qualified to evaluate your manuscript.  Who do you think the editor would send your manuscript to?  Who do you think the editor would already know that’s qualified to review MIS research that uses this ‘actor-anticipation theory,’ which is really unknown in our MIS field right now?  In fact, can you give me the names of some MIS researchers who you think are qualified to review research that uses this theory?” Mark didn’t have an answer for me, but I could tell that he was thinking.

My second comment was, “There is already a growing MIS literature in electronic commerce, where scholars in our very own MIS research community are developing theories and explanations in your chosen topic area of electronic commerce.  And in this growing body of MIS research on electronic commerce, there are apparently some things that MIS researchers can explain well, but other things that they cannot explain well at all.  Do you at least have a hunch as to what it is that our current MIS research doesn’t explain well, but that your proposed new theory would?”  Mark said that he hadn’t thought about it.  I said, “If you don’t at least have a hunch, now, as to what it is that the current MIS research doesn’t explain well and that your own research could explain better, then I would dare say that you wouldn’t be making a contribution to the work of our MIS research community at all.”

My third comment was that, “I believe that, on the substantive and intellectual side of how you and Sam, your senior-level colleague, are going about in doing your research, is just fine: your experimental design is good, you are using valid and reliable measures, you have a random sample, and so forth. But right now, I’m not just  talking about the substantive and intellectual side of your research.  In addition, I’m talking about the community side of your research. The theory and findings that you’re presenting won’t have some sort of independent existence unto themselves, but your theory and findings will have to make sense to members of your audience on their own terms – and this audience is made up of members of our MIS research community.  Will your theory and findings be relevant to the research that they are already doing?  Or will they see your theory and findings as if you were speaking a completely foreign language to them?  Are you making it hard for them to understand and appreciate your research, or are you going to take where they are now as the your starting point so as to accommodate them?  In other words, I’m not talking about the substantive and intellectual merits of your research; I’m talking about how well your research will fit certain social and political requirements of our research community.”

Of course, when I was saying these things to Mark, I was really talking about my own experience.  As some of you know, I am one among a handful of people here in North America who have been proponents of qualitative research in MIS, which means that I have spent a lot of time and energy trying to introduce very new things to North American MIS research – and these things have been so new and foreign to my audience that, very often, my audience has often thought that I’ve been speaking a foreign language.  The moral of the story, of course, is not that I should have avoided introducing something new and innovative to MIS research – not at all.  Instead, the moral of the story is that, if I had a chance to do it all over again, I still would – but I would have paid an equal amount of attention to thinking about how I could present my research to my audience so that, from the start, they would have heard me speaking their language and they would have seen, right from the start, how my research is directly relevant to and contributes to theirs.  In other words, the community side of research is no less important than the substantive and intellectual side of research.

My second story: Hard Work versus Getting Rewarded for Hard Work

I have some colleagues who believe that if you work hard, you will be rewarded.  Well, I have seen many people work harder than I have, and they do research better than I do – but despite this, some of them still get turned down for tenure.  Well, hard work should be rewarded, but it is not necessarily true that hard work is rewarded.  Doing good teaching and research is important, but it’s not enough.  The reward for hard work is not automatic.

When I was an assistant professor at Northeastern University, and I was worried about how to get rewarded for the work I was doing, I got some good advice from another assistant professor that I’ll never forget.  He said: “A good inside strategy is to have a good outside strategy.”  He and I both had doubts about whether or not our hard work in teaching and research at Northeastern would pay off by our someday getting tenure there.  He said that if we became valuable to the outside – if other universities were to come to value us, especially for our research publications, and if Northeastern knew, at tenure time, that other schools would want to hire us – then we would be valuable to the inside, too.  In other words, being valuable to the outside makes you valuable to the inside.

I took my friend’s advice to heart.  I did my best to present at a conference at least once a year – whether I presented a research paper or sat on a panel.  And whenever I did present, I prepared like hell to make sure that my presentation would be good.  I realized that every time I spoke in front of a group – like at ICIS, the Academy of Management, DSI, and so forth – every conference presentation I was doing was really the equivalent of a job interview.  After all, I realized that, some day, it would be entirely possible that I would be contacting someone in that audience for a job; or someone in that audience, with a job to fill, would be contacting me.  For me, every presentation at a conference or as an invited guest at a university research seminar – I treated every such presentation as if it were a job interview, where I had to impress someone.  And of course, this was part of my plan of making myself valuable to the outside, so that I would be valuable to the inside – so that, eventually, I would get tenure.

And, as an aside, I also learned that, for this strategy, it did not make that much of a difference as to whether I was presenting a research paper or sitting on a panel.  After all, 20 minutes of “face time” in front an audience is still 20 minutes of “face time” – whether it’s a paper presentation or a panel discussion.  This is important because, as I quickly learned, it’s a lot easier to put together a panel proposal than to write up a research paper if I wanted to present at a conference.

Over the years, I found that my presenting at conferences really paid off.  I found that there were some senior level researchers who were genuinely interested in what I had to say.  And guess what – they opened up doors for me.  They asked me to give research seminars at their own universities.  They asked me to be a member of panels that they were organizing for this or that conference.  And most important of all, they started to ask me to review manuscripts for them, and as a form of networking, let me say that reviewing manuscripts can be extremely effective.

When I had my first opportunities to review for top journals like MIS Quarterly and ISR, at first I asked myself, why I should do this?  It takes a lot of time, and because it’s a blind review, I’ll never get any credit from the author.  However, I realized that even though the blindness of the review meant that my identify would never be known to the author -- still, my identity was fully known to the associate editor and the senior editor.  So, when I started writing up reviews for major journals, I wrote up the reviews not just for the author as my audience, but also as a way for me to impress the associate editor and the senior editor who, I realized, were also a real part of my audience; and it was important for me to show the associate editor and the senior editor what I really knew about research.  So I came to see every invitation to review a manuscript not as an imposition on my time, but as a fortuitous opportunity to impress this or that influential editor.  And in time, I found that I was asked to be an associate editor myself, and then a senior editor, for MIS Quarterly.

Mind you, this strategy of networking to make ourselves valuable to the outside can work, only if we really have something to show to the outside.  There is no substitute for hard work.  But remember – hard work is not enough; hard work is not automatically rewarded; doing the hard work is only half the job; the other half is networking to make sure that our hard work is recognized and rewarded.

My third story: Applying the Porter Model to Create a Competitive Research Strategy

I told this story last year at the doctoral consortium, but I like it so much that I’ll tell it again.  The Porter model of competitive strategy is good for analyzing a company’s business strategy: how competitive is the industry? …how easily can another firm enter the industry? …what relationship does the company have with its suppliers? …and with its customers? …and finally, what substitute products might there be to threaten the company’s product?  Well, research strategy is analogous to business strategy: how much competition is there in your particular research specialty? …what relationship do you, the researcher, have with your research suppliers (which would be things like funding sources, access to the right coursework, and access to field sites)? …what relationship do you, the researcher, have with your research customers (who would be people such as your dissertation committee, your tenure committee, the reviewers at a journal, and journal editors)? …and finally, what substitute research studies might there be to threaten your study?  In other words, just as it’s not enough for a company to manufacture a good product, the company must also formulate and follow through with a business strategy – well, it’s the same for us researchers: it’s not enough for a researcher to work hard and do good research, the researcher must also formulate and follow through with a research strategy.

Summary

To wrap up my part of this panel, let me say that just about everything that I’ve just talked about – I learned after I got my PhD. Of course, this is the sort of thing that I should have learned during my PhD.  That’s what doctoral education is supposed to be about.  As a PhD student, I should have learned…

…that there is also the community side of research, not just the substantive-intellectual side of research...

…that doing hard work, alone, just isn’t enough…

…and that researchers need a research strategy, in exactly the same way that businesses need a business strategy.

Hopefully, because I’m sharing these lessons with you, you won’t have to stumble along as assistant professors and re-invent the wheel by re-learning these for yourselves.  At the same time, I know that sometimes lessons, like the ones I’ve told you, really don’t make sense unless you learn them and experience them for yourself – but even if that’s the case, at this point, you’ll know that you aren’t alone, and that you have a network of colleagues that you can turn to for support.