Challenges for young management scholars in Iberia and Latin America João Vieira da Cunha Nova School of Business and Economics, Lisbon, Portugal

Transcription

1 The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at YOUNG IBEROAMERICAN SCHOLARS Challenges for young in Iberia and Latin America João Vieira da Cunha Nova School of Business and Economics, Lisbon, Portugal 79 Abstract Purpose The purpose of this paper is to offer the author s view about some of the challenges young Iberoamerican face in order to build a successful research record. Design/methodology/approach This is an individual account of some of the most common barriers Iberoamerican face when starting their academic career. Findings The paper presents some of the difficulties encountered by young, such as motivation, lack of feedback, teaching load, and lack of resources and addresses these challenges in an almost intimate fashion. Originality/value The paper uses an idiosyncratic approach to the practical career obstacles faced by a young scholar outside the mainstream academic environment. Keywords Academic staff, Publishing, Career development, South America, Western Europe Paper type Viewpoint Resumen El propósito En este artículo se presenta la opinión del autor sobre algunos de los retos que enfrentan los jóvenes investigadores iberoamericanos con el fin de crear un registro de éxito de investigación. La Metodología Se trata de una revisión individual de algunos de los obstáculos más comunes que académicos iberoamericanos enfrentan al iniciar su carrera académica. Los Resultados El artículo presenta algunas de las dificultades encontradas por los investigadores jóvenes, tales como la motivación, la falta de comentarios, carga docente y la falta de recursos y se dirige a estos desafíos de manera casi íntima. La Originalidad/El Valor El artículo utiliza un enfoque idiosincrático a los obstáculos prácticos de carrera que se enfrenta un joven académico fuera del ambiente académico dominante. Palabras clave Académicos, Industría editorial, Desarollo profesional, América del Sur, Europa Occidental Tipo de artículo Opinión Resumo Propósito/Objectivo Neste artigo apresenta-se a opinião do autor sobre alguns dos desafios que os jovens investigadores iberoamericanos enfrentam, quando querem iniciar uma carreira de investigação com sucesso. Metodologia Trata-se de um relato individual acerca de alguns dos obstáculos mais comuns que os académicos iberoamericanos enfrentam ao iniciar a sua carreira académica. Resultados Algumas dificuldades encontradas pelos jovens investigadores, nomeadamente a motivação, falta de feedback, carga docente e falta de recursos, e aborda estes desafios de forma intimista. Management Research: The Journal of the Iberoamerican Academy of Management Vol. 9 No. 1, 2011 pp q Emerald Group Publishing Limited DOI /

2 MRJIAM 9,1 Originalidade/Valor Utilizar um enfoque idiossincrático face aos obstáculos práticos de carreira que enfrenta um jovem académico fora do ambiente académico dominante. Palavras-chave Académicos, indústria editorial, carreira académica Tipo de artigo Opinião 80 Introduction Iberoamerican who are fortunate enough to do their PhD in a major American university face a difficult decision as their degree draws to a close. Should they pursue an international career or should they come back to their own country? I want to share my own experience of making that decision and living with it for the first five years of my post-phd academic career. I do not seek to dispense advice or discuss successful or unsuccessful strategies. Like many other young in peripheral or central countries, my achievements can hardly be called my own. They have benefited from some help from friends and colleagues, a lot of help from reviewers and more than a bit of luck thrown in. There is not much that I can claim as successes. I have two single-authored papers based on qualitative data in the last stages of the revision process in two major scientific journals. The experience narrated below should be taken as a condensed life history of a slice of an academic career very much in progress. A data point that for some will be little more than a bundle of individual anecdotes but hopefully also a source of some insights for some and perhaps some solace for others. Biographical notes A slice of a life history requires a personal introduction. The highlight of my academic career was my PhD program at MIT Sloan under the supervision of Wanda Orlikowski. My own experience at MIT was very much one of independence. My advisor was there when needed to help and guide in academic and the occasional personal challenges that PhD students face as they transition into their academic identity. However, neither I, nor many of my colleagues at MIT Sloan at the time benefited from much handholding and most of us preferred it that way. MIT Sloan is a brilliant place to do a PhD not only because of the great students and faculty but also because of the entrepreneurial dynamics there. One truly feels at the center of the world. Unfortunately, my time at MIT coincided with one of the most trying times in recent American history: the aftermath of the September 11 tragedy. Nevertheless, my experience at MIT was otherwise positive and very valuable. Before joining MIT, I worked as a teaching assistant at NOVA, one of the leading business schools in Portugal. During that time, I completed a masters degree that first exposed me to academic research and to academic writing. I published a few theoretical papers but my most satisfying experience was collecting data on a virtual new product development team. That sealed my commitment to qualitative research and to the field of IT and organizations. My experience as a pre-phd researcher was a mixed one. My advisor in Portugal was very good at theory, but he was trained in quantitative, not qualitative data. I had to learn for myself and that compromised the quality of my data collection to some extent. However, I got something very important from my masters thesis: experience of fieldwork. When I did the fieldwork for my PhD research, I already knew some of the challenges in approaching people and collecting data. I was better prepared than some of my colleagues who had never been in the field before.

3 Luck played a significant role in my PhD because the papers that I was able to push through up to the last stages of the revise and resubmit process in top academic journals first appealed to reviewers because of the ethnographic data that I collected. My access to those data was a succession of very fortunate coincidences. I was able to negotiate access to a sales unit of a large multinational company. Two weeks after leaving Boston, I called the unit s manager to confirm my arrival date. She told me that she was pregnant and that she was going to quit her job to be a full-time mother. I panicked. I used my pre-fieldwork interviews with senior managers to get access to another sales unit in the company. It turned out that this unit was a stage for some quite interesting organizational phenomena. 81 Challenges for young in Iberia and Latin America When I talked with other PhD students in American PhD programs that contemplate coming back to their home countries in Portugal, Spain or Latin America, the conversation centered around two challenges: motivation and feedback. Low motivation Motivation is a challenge for two reasons. One is size. I only visited a few Iberoamerican schools. In most, there was only one handful of people working in the field of organization studies. This means that there is simply not enough junior faculty to promote the healthy spirit of competition that provides at least some of the motivation to write. I faced this problem very early in my academic career. When I came out of undergrad, I started my masters program. We had a number of international faculty flying into Lisbon to teach and I got a good taste of what a real academic career was like. However, at that time, I was working as a teaching assistant in a small school in Portugal. There was only one other faculty in the area of organization studies. He worked at the school part-time. All the motivation to write that I got from my classes was depleted after a couple of days in the office. At the time, I was lucky enough to move into a teaching assistant job at Nova, where there was a far more vibrant research community. When I decided to come back to Portugal, I was very much aware of this challenge. The research group in organization studies at Nova was gigantic when compared with one part-time faculty member, but it was small when compared to the organization studies at MIT/Sloan. There was healthy competition among my cohort at Sloan. When I came back to Lisbon, I stayed in touch with some of my former colleagues and kept checking the journals for publications from the others. I brought that source of motivation with me from Sloan. I did not have to look for it when I arrived. This has not been the experience of friends that had less of an integrated cohort during their PhD. Those that have been successful in staying motivated have carved their own small social network at the academy of meetings. Lack of feedback The second challenge that I discussed with others who were planning to come back to their own countries after a PhD in the USA was feedback. The rumor mill suggests that Iberian and Latin American manuscripts struggle to enter American journals because authors do not benefit from the same feedback and exposure that their peers in America have. During my time at MIT Sloan, I did witness many papers receive precious

4 MRJIAM 9,1 82 feedback during the informal talks that my department held on Friday afternoons. My own experience, however, is that this feedback is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for papers to get a revise and resubmit decision. What I found is that a solid PhD education provides enough help to take advantage of reviews to conference papers to improve them to the level necessary for submission for a leading journal. It does require far more time and commitment to revisions, however. Having other people say what is wrong with a paper is far quicker and effective. Having said that, I think there is a lot of value in having a network of people that are willing to read each other s manuscripts and comment on them as thoroughly as they can. I have been fortunate to benefit from such help once or twice. For me, developing such a network was easier than learning how to tap into it. People have specific strengths and weaknesses as reviewers. Their schedules shift throughout the academic year. There have been a few mismatches between my needs for help and others availability to provide it. Some people have been very generous and have provided detailed feedback while others have only been able to provide more cursory comments. The challenge of coming back to a school where there are very few people in the same research field and very few people with enough publication experience to mentor younger is to make do with the little feedback that can be mustered. This makes publishing difficult but not impossible. For me, it has one very big plus: the sense of accomplishment that comes from overcoming unfavorable odds on one s own. Bringing bold theory and subtle analysis through drafts, reviews and proofs. Seeing one s name in print after very much and very difficult work. Teaching Teaching is an unexpected challenge for people coming back to Iberia and to Latin American countries after a PhD in an American university. Those members of my cohort at MIT that stayed in the USA started by teaching core undergraduate courses with time tested syllabi and course materials. When I came back to Portugal, I was given a lot of freedom to prepare my own courses, even if these had been taught previously in the school. It is a very strong temptation. I invested a lot of time, perhaps more than I should in preparing my initial courses. Many of the PhD students I met, even those as fanatical about around as myself are eager to teach on their own. This, to me, was especially dangerous because when I did my job well I received instant gratification. Conversely, none of the reviewer letters for my first round revise and resubmits can be classified as gratification. It is easy to be willed away into teaching and find too many reasons and too little time to sit down and write. Sometimes, the limited size of departments in Iberoamerica contribute to this challenge. Small departments mean larger teaching loads and the occasional contribution to administrative tasks. My own school has been able to avoid both problems, but I have colleagues in Latin America and in Iberia teaching 20 hours a week. The modest salaries that most starting academic positions entail in Iberoamerica make matters worse. People need to take on executive education to make half a decent salary. Executive education is fun, challenging and profitable but it also takes a lot of time and energy. Finally, some schools require their junior faculty to be somewhat flexible about changing courses from one academic year to the next. This means more time is needed to prepare courses and less time is available to write. Teaching is dangerous quicksand. It is easy to get progressively stuck into what can be a very rewarding side

5 of an academic career. The price to pay is an ever extending procrastination while junior wait for a decent chunk of writing time that never comes. Lack of resources One challenge that I only discovered once I came back to Portugal was the lack of resources for research. I do ethnography and I only need three things to do research: paper, pen and a company. These resources are as abundant in the Iberian Peninsula and in Latin America as they are in the USA. However, during my first few years in Portugal, I realized that colleagues that worked on experimental research and large database research faced much worse conditions than they had while they were PhD students. People doing experimental research are spoilt in large American universities. They have all dedicated facilities to conduct experiments, large pools of students and often research administrators that take over some of the most burdensome tasks of setting up an experiment and collecting data. People working on large databases have access to a wide range of resources in many the American universities. In Iberia and Latin America, these resources are seldom available. In many schools, even the access to bibliographic databases is quite limited and libraries are typically less well stocked than in North American and Central European schools. Doing research under these conditions is quite difficult. The lack of resources for experimental and large database research also means that there is a lack of expertise in experimental and large database research. This means that people doing these types of research not only struggle to get feedback on manuscripts but, more importantly, they have nobody to turn for help in research design and can easily incur in mistakes that are difficult to solve down the line. The few people that I know to have been successful in carrying out this type of research in Iberia and in Latin America have kept very close ties with their advisors. Some have been able to improvise their own research labs in their new school. Others are able to tap into the resources of their PhD schools in exchange for co-authorship. They all rely on the generosity of their advisors in helping them hone their research questions, obtain the data to address them and write them up in a persuasive way. It is likely that there are other strategies available, but all need to allow researchers to tap into resources beyond those available at their school. 83 Addressing the challenges for young in Iberia and Latin America The challenges outlined above are not insurmountable, but they require careful choices and substantial commitment. Deciding on a research topic The challenges created by lack of resources for research and lack of feedback suggests that deciding on a research topic and method can have a significant impact in the transition from a PhD in an American university to a junior faculty position in a school in Portugal, Spain or Latin America. In my first few weeks at MIT, I was told that there is no such thing as research only me-search. In my interpretation, this means that there is not as much freedom in the choice of research topics and methods as one would think. Each PhD student has interests and skills that will steer her towards some topics and research methods

6 MRJIAM 9,1 84 and away from others. Some schools also have a preference for specific types of methods. Specific disciplines also shift to specific methods at specific points of their development. Nevertheless, if there is room for choice, there are options that can make the transition to Iberia and Latin America significantly easier. My own choice to do ethnographic research has made my own transition easy. I had to work very hard during my PhD program to develop my qualitative analysis skills to an acceptable level. However, once those skills were developed, I felt confident that I could analyze qualitative data on my own with little if any help. Qualitative data are also relatively easier to obtain than experimental data, large-scale databases and even questionnaires. First, Iberian and Latin American countries have subsidiaries of several multinational companies where researchers can carry out participant observation or interviews. This means that researchers can study global organizations that are household names in North American academia and, to some extent, deal with the threat of having their research setting dismissed as too exotic. Second, there are a number of qualitative studies done with online communities. These data are accessible anywhere in the world and provide a great opportunity to overcome some of the challenges of conducting research in Iberia and Latin America. A recent editorial in the Academy of Management Journal has highlighted the impact that qualitative research can have in studies (Bartunek et al., 2006). I encourage any PhD student that wants to come back to their home country to consider ethnographic research. If that is not the kind of me-search that they are more inclined to do, they need to at least consider carefully their choice of method to be sure that they are not hindering their chances of publication and tenure. Collecting great data My own choice of ethnography as a method and a bit more than my fair share of luck has allowed me to collect a very unique dataset. All of the revise and resubmit decisions that I received, and one reject and resubmit from Administrative Science Quarterly that I was granted all, without exception, mentioned my data as the reason why my paper was not rejected outright. The editor in one of the papers, I have under revision at the Academy of Management Journal wrote on his letter with his first revise and resubmit decision on my manuscript that qualitative manuscripts submitted to the journal are first evaluated on the promise of their data. Only in the second round does the editor judge the paper on its promise for a theoretical contribution. To me, this suggests that data are the most important thing that one brings from their PhD program. Good data seems to hold at least as much persuasive power as good theory over journal editors, at least for their first reject or revise decision. Doing a PhD at a place like MIT Sloan means that you have time and funds to get quality data. Quality data on American companies for those who are so inclined. A PhD program is a rite of passage and, like all rites of passage, it involves ordeals and humiliation. People that go to places such as MIT Sloan from an Iberian or Latin American country are used to be at the top of their class. Being accepted to MIT or any other similar school further boosts their ego. My own experience at MIT is that a PhD program is a very effective way of deflating all the hot air that has developed thus. In my case, it hit hard. I lost much of my confidence in my ability to craft a compelling

7 argument and put it down on paper. During those trying times, there was one anchor of reassurance. My data. I am not sure about the decision process that resulted in staying 15 months at Mega Telecom (the pseudonym for the company where I carried out my PhD research) but I am glad I did. As one reviewer for one of my manuscripts put it, it is impossible to spend 15 months in a company and not find anything interesting. Dilbert is a documentary. To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes in The Red-Headed League (Doyle, 1892), everyday life in organizations reaches far beyond the fancies of the most imaginative writers in fiction. When I was doing fieldwork, I knew that these were good data. The only thing, I had to do is to get out of the way. This was a difficult challenge and I had little belief in my ability to overcome it. However, I was positive that if I could muster the skills to do so, then I would have a good change at publishing in top journals. This belief, as foolish as it might be, gave me strength and solace during the most trying times of my PhD and my early career as an academic. If I can be as bold as to pass one piece of advice to starting PhD students who are considering coming back to Latin America or Iberia is this: invest as much as you can in data collection. It is the resource that allows people in the periphery to publish as well as those in the Ivy League. 85 Using students as research assistants Ethnographic data are very rich and can sometimes last throughout an entire career. However, there will be times when if an academic has not exhausted her data, then her data will exhaust her. The teaching load in Iberian and Latin American schools and some of the administrative duties they might impose do not allow for a lot of time for data collection. Moreover, many schools have very few PhD students. Some, like mine until a couple of years ago, have none. Together, these conditions mean that young will have very little time to collect data to fill the many stages of their research pipeline. My own solution to this challenge is similar to that adopted by a prominent faculty person at MIT: using master students and undergraduate students to collect data. I have used undergraduate students and masters students to collect qualitative data. However, there is no reason why this strategy cannot be used to collect quantitative data. In my own case, I have used students to collect data on what people do at work when they are not working, data on how salespeople s close sales and data on how salespeople deal with difficult customers. Until now I have roughly 200 interviews on each topic. The key in using students to collect these three large qualitative datasets lies in the choice of the research question. All three research questions facilitate the search for informants. Students can interview anybody they know that has a job about the first topic. The second and third topics only require that students find people that work in sales. Also, interview data provides enough insight into each of these research questions to support analysis without requiring observations on organizational context. Research questions about organizational or group dynamics are less congenial to this research design than questions about people s individual practices, which are better, but not as good as research questions that focus on meaning. However, qualitative studies of social phenomena have been slowly substituting practices for meanings as the building block of explanations of social processes. It can be both possible and profitable to use undergraduate and masters students to collect data when there is no time nor are there any PhD students available.

8 MRJIAM 9,1 86 Writing! A young faculty member in an Iberian or a Latin American country needs far more than a carefully chosen research tradition and great data, collected by her or by her students. She needs to write. There are three things that I learned about writing in my first five years in a faculty position. One is that writing is work, not inspiration. Any book on writing emphasizes this point. It is impossible to improve one s writing without doing a lot of it, all the time. Fiction authors such as Philip Pullman and, such as Mary Jo Hatch emphasize the importance of writing a set number of hours everyday. I personally have not been able to develop such a ritual. Instead, I have become obsessed with writing. I spend as much time as I can writing during the day, every single day. By doing so, I have not only seen my writing improve (although there is still very much room to do so) but also developed more effective writing habits. After I finished my PhD, I could only write with pen and paper, I could not outline to save my life and I struggled to write unless the conditions were perfect. Now, I am able to outline effectively before I write, I only write in longhand when I am too distracted or when I am editing something that I have already written, and I can write anywhere for whatever amount of time. More importantly, I began to enjoy writing. It is no longer a chore necessary to publish, not perish. The second thing that I learned about writing is that most of it is editing. Two colleagues of mine did a series of interviews with leading such as Karl Weick and James March. They found that many of the best published and cited academics in invest as much in editing their text as they do when first setting their ideas down on paper. John van Maanen once described his writing process a going through the ordeal of putting out a first draft and then enjoying the process of editing. Lotte Bailyn at MIT taught her students that the first draft is still part of the data analysis. Only after writing a first draft do people really begin to write a paper. I have learned to follow their example and now I invest at least one third of my writing time in editing. An important part of editing is improving structure and honing ideas and insights. Another very important part is editing for writing. Carefully constructed sentences, carefully chosen words, playful sounds they are all edits that not only make a paper more compelling and persuasive but also make writing a much more challenging and enjoyable exercise. It may be a difficult undertaking for researchers in Iberia and Latin America, but it is not an impossible one. My own technique is to spend an entire iteration of a paper just focused on writing. I begin by underlining problematic sentences and then I force myself to be careful with sounds and alliterations in at least one sentence in every paragraph. The third thing that I learned about writing is that it is attacked on many fronts. There are classes to prepare, exams to correct, assignments to grade and the odd service task to perform. None of these things, none at all contribute to publication and to tenure. I struggle very much to find a decent writing pace unless I discipline myself to write. For me writing is an obsession and everything is secondary to it. I have designed my courses, prepared my classes and written my exams to make sure that I am able to teach my students and obtain acceptable teaching grades without compromising my writing. I obsess about writing and there is not a single day since I started my PhD that I have not written. My focus on writing is mostly motivated because I am aware of my challenges and I know that I need to write a lot before a decent draft comes out.

9 Others may be more effective at producing high quality papers. However, if the practices and advice of the leading in the field are anything to go by, producing papers with impact is a labor-intensive, time consuming effort. Conclusion When I was accepted at MIT Sloan, my intention was to move to the USA permanently and make my academic career there. However, my experience in Boston, Massachusetts was tainted by changes in everyday life in the USA after the tragedies of September 11, I decided to accept a cut in pay to come back to my home country. When I arrived back in Lisbon I was positive that I did not have the skills to write for leading academic journals but I was positive that I had data that were publishable at the highest level. I just had to get out of the way. Once I began my job as an assistant professor, I faced many of the challenges that I expected to face. All but one. I did not feel unmotivated or cut out from my colleagues in the USA. Instead, I felt very committed to develop my writing skills so that I could publish at par with my friends at Harvard and MIT. Five years to the day after I joined my current school, I have been able to pass the first stage of that test. I have been able to put three papers through the first round of revisions in leading academic journals. My goal in this short reflection on my experience is to use this achievement as a data point that shows that it is possible to come back to Iberia and Latin America and write high-quality single-authored papers. Iberian and Latin American countries need high-quality. I hope to have shown that it is possible to contribute to improving education and research in one s own country without sacrificing one s ability to publish papers that prove to others and to oneself that returning is not a veiled admission of inferiority but instead an open commitment to excellence. 87 References Bartunek, J.M., Rynes, S.L. and Ireland, R.D. (2006), Academy of Management Journal editors forum: what makes research interesting, and why does it matter?, Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 49 No. 1, pp Doyle, A.C. (1892), The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Harper and Row, London. About the author João Vieira da Cunha is an Assistant Professor in Business Administration at Nova School of Business and Economics, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon. He has a PhD from Sloan, MIT. His research looks at the relationship between the formal/prescribed and the informal/unprescribed elements of organizations. Specifically, Joao Vieira da Cunha focuses on how people use formal and prescribed elements of their organization for informal and unprescribed processes. His research has appeared in leading international journals, such as the Academy of Management Review and Human Relations. João Vieira da Cunha can be contacted at: jvc@fe.unl.pt To purchase reprints of this article please reprints@emeraldinsight.com Or visit our web site for further details: