This post is the second part of an interview we recently conducted with Paul Leonardi regarding the the value OCIS can provide to communications students and scholars.
Why should communication students get involved in OCIS?
I think that involvement in OCIS helps to broaden the perspective that people studying communication have. Organizational communication is a smaller field and there is often reproduction in the theoretical development and questions that org comm scholars ask. So broadening their view (what are the intellectual traditions used and other interesting theoretical and empirical questions being asked) expands their ability to develop good theory and good insights for practice and to be able to speak to broader audiences. As a direct consequence of my participation in OCIS,I have developed a better ability to speak to multiple communities. I have published papers in communication journals,IS journals and management journals and I think being around those different types of intellectual conversations and understanding how different disciplines put different spins on similar questions or how they ask different questions in general has helped me to be more precise about the questions I want to ask and to have more perspective on where reviewers are coming when they are reviewing my papers. I can head reviewers off at the pass if they are suggesting something completely out of line with my perspective by recognizing the perspective they are coming from and then clearly articulating where my perspective might be different. So communication scholars have a lot to gain by talking with OCIS members just as IS and management scholars have a lot to gain by talking with individuals in the communication field. It’s a nice interdisciplinary melting pot in the OCIS community.
What advantages might students gain from attending OCIS/AOM meetings above and beyond what communications conferences currently offer?
I think that one of the advantages of attending communication conferences is that if you are asking process based research questions,communications is very much a process-oriented discipline. They study the process of communication – how do people talk to one another,how is meaning formed,how do interpretations happen,how does information move through networks. So for people interested in these process-based studies,they can learn a lot from communication scholars. Longitudinal studies and process-based studies are increasing in publications by OCIS members and therefore the field of communications really has a lot to offer.
Also because communication is a meso-level of field,looking at people’s interactions with one another,there is a lot to offer there because it offers an area that is in between.
What advice would you give PhD students who are considering a multi-disciplinary dissertation or research stream?
I don’t know that it really behooves anybody to plan to be a multidisciplinary researcher. I fell into it because I found that the questions I was interested in answering were questions that were being asked by a number of different disciplines and they all had different ways to answer them. What I found was that no one way of answering those questions was satisfactory but there was much to learn from working across those various disciplines. So I think that if people find themselves in that situation they should always look to the phenomena that they are interested in as a good guide. If you really stick to the notion of identity or are really interested in the interaction between distributed team members or the role that technology plays in social networks,then try to interrogate that phenomenon in the most robust way you can by looking at how different people have talked about it. As you start to see similarities and differences in the ways different people have talked about it,figuring out how you can usefully import concepts from one place to another or find solutions to problems in other places is probably the best strategy for dealing with that issue. If you are good at doing that,then your work can speak to multiple communities and that is something that I have found very rewarding. It becomes a virtuous cycle. Because I can speak to the communication,management and IS communities,I am invited in equal measure to give talks at schools in each of those areas. I get asked questions that are different in those places. I get posed problems from different theoretical perspectives from each of those three places and that gives me a broader toolkit with which to interrogate the issues that I am interested in. And so it becomes easier to do over time if you are able to figure out,at least initially,what is the phenomenon that sits at the nexus of these different communities and how can you go about intelligently trying to study it.
What other advice would you give PhD students as they prepare to transition to a faculty position?
As you transition into a faculty position my big advice would be that you really want to hit the ground running. Think about,as you are finishing up your dissertation and research projects as a doctoral student,what kind of papers might these studies turn into and get a start on the draft of some of those. As you move into your faculty position,you will have some very concrete items that you can work on. You could have three drafts of papers,all of which need work,but you can focus on one,get that out,then the second,get that out,and then the third. Once you can figure out how to balance the new time pressures of teaching and service and working with students with doing papers,you’ll be in good shape and it will be more helpful if you go in with something that you can start with rather than trying to create a new paper from scratch or start on a new research project right at the beginning. It just seems cognitively overwhelming and your likelihood of failure is probably higher in that regard.
Also,just be nice. I think being nice is important. Go to conferences and just talk to people and don’t have an agenda where you feel like you need to meet this person or learn this. Be nice,talk to be people,see what they are doing and you’ll learn a lot by listening. There are tons of interesting people all over the conferences. Keep in mind that when you are first starting out,conferences can be lonely places. Because you show up and it looks like everybody knows each other and you’re like “I don’t know anybody!” You start to get to know people by just being nice and talking with people. You find out that you have this in common and that in common and you see these people at another conference or you see them the next year and very quickly you start to build a community of people that you see regularly and you start to plan dinners with them and things like that and the conference experience becomes much more fun.
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