Do you Read These?

Earlier this year I co-presented at the Academy of Human Resource Development (AHRD) annual conference in Washington, DC.  The AHRD is professional, research-driven organization made up of Human Resources academics and a few 'reflective practitioners'.

At that time I also became a member of the AHRD and almost immediately began Some light readingreceiving a regular series of journals and publications from the academy.  Titles like:  Human Resource Development Quarterly, HRD Review, and Advances in Developing Human Resources.

These are pretty heavy titles, full of some excellent research pieces written (mostly) by Professors of Human Resources from the USA and many other countries. Articles like 'Meaningfulness, Commitment, and Engagement: The Intersection of a Deeper Level of Intrinsic Motivation' have some great information and can be very valuable for academics and practitioners alike. They are not 500-word blog posts, but if you can wrestle your way though them, you can usually pull out some great insights.

But some other pieces incredibly arcane and narrow in focus and quite honestly seems to exist to support University tenure requirements for publishing. An article like 'The trend of blended learning in Taiwan' fits pretty squarely in this category. By their nature they have limited use and a small potential audience.

Currently, I am in the (long) process of writing an article for one of the aforementioned journals, and since this is the first (and likely only) time I will ever write for an academic journal I have some observations on the process and on the academic journals themselves.

1. It takes an incedibly long time to write one of these articles. 

You generally submit an abstract or basic idea for a piece to the editors, wait months to hear if your idea is accepted, then submit a 'expanded' abstract, wait for another few months for feedback, submit a revised expanded abstract, wait, submit a first draft, wait, submit a final draft, wait, and eventually (for me this will be over a year later), see the article published. Oh yeah, actually writing the content takes a really long time too, more details on why that is to follow.

2. Style is (almost) as important as substance

There are often incredibly detailed and precise requirements for the format and structure of each different submission.  Length, section titles, headings, and of course strict adherence to the citation formats are so stressed and emphasized that it actually is a bit frustrating and annoying. Does anyone really notice if an article uses APA citation format 5 or format 6?  Does anyone even care? This part of the 'writing' process often involves grad student (free) labor.  The idea seems to be to recruit a grad student that is good with research to help find references and compile the bibliography in exchange for a credit on the article's eventual byline.

3. What other people have written is more important as what you write

In this kind of writing for academic journals there is a heavy emphasis on citations.  It is not unusual to see a 12 page article with over 100 citations.  In some of these pieces, nary a paragraph goes by without some external source cited (almost always another academic journal article). I get this to some extent, my (or anyone's) opinions on a topic do carry more weight if it can be shown that other author's have agreed, or drawn similar conclusions; and certainly any statistics or factual statements should show the real source of the data. But many times reading one of these pieces, with so many citations, you wonder why the article was even needed at all.  The academic journal citation is probably the earliest form of the blog link or the retweet.  Too many of those, and you wonder if the author actually has anything useful to add to the discourse.

4. I am pretty sure hardly anyone will read the article

I keep up with at least 100 other HR blogs, have attended plenty of events, watched dozens of webcasts, and hosted and listened to scores of talk showson HR and recruiting this year.  I have never heard anyone, in any context, mention the AHRD, talk about any of the journals they publish, or cite any of the journal articles in a blog post, presentation, or in any other forum.  My unscientific observation is that the only people that will ever read my article are the editors of the journal, and a very small percentage of the folks that actually get the journal.  And perhaps once in a great while someone doing an academic database keyword search will stumble upon my article for possible use as a (gasp) citation for an article or assignment. This citation (if it ever does happen) will also hardly be seen by anyone outside of this tiny circle of journal editors and academics.

Frankly, I am at the end of the post and I am not really sure what my conclustion is.

Could it be the process, form, and ultimate outcome of the academic publishing process is kind of ridiculous and largely unappealing?

Maybe it is a call for more 'mainsteam' HR practitioners and industry bloggers to take note of the excellent work (if you look hard enough) that can be found in these academic journals?

Could it be that instead of working on my first draft that is due soon, I found it easier and more satisfying to bang out a 900+ word blog post on  the whole thing?

I will end with this, does anyone reading this post actually read any Human Resources Academic journals?

What's old is new again

Over the past weekend I caught up on some reading I had been meaning to get to for some time, mostly research papers and some Academy of Human Resource Development journals for an upcoming article I am helping to write.  After making my way though an article or two, and checking some citations to dig deeper into some areas I found myself really amazed on the dates of publication on some of the most seminal works in the areas of what today would be considered 'social networking'.

Some examples:

The Strength of Weak Ties - Mark Granovetter's theory of how 'weak' or more casual relationships in a network are more effective at diffusing or spreading information across the entire organization, enterprise or society, the theory that essentially underpins much of the design philosophies of community building, corporate social networking, and social network analysis today was originally published in 1973.

In that work, while asserting that in making important personal decisions most people do not rely on or act on recommendations delivered via forms of mass communication, unless these 'mass-media' recommendations are also reinforced by personal contacts, Granovetter cites the title Personal Influence by Katz and Lazarsfeld, published in 1955.

Some of the positions advanced first in by Katz and Lazarsfeld in 1955 are often echoed in current articles and thinking around social media and social networking.  Engage customers on their terms, build a community for your fans and supporters, stop broadcasting your message in an impersonal format, people don't trust corporate marketing speak, etc. all have some basis in theory from Personal Influence.

Lastly, in the past few weeks I noticed several excellent blog posts discussing 'Trust'. A few bloggers explored trust in the workplace and the importance of fostering trusting environments. See HR Bartender, the Compensation Cafe, and HR Observations, for some recent examinations on Trust in the workplace.

After reading those posts, I thought about offering my take on how trust might impact knowledge sharing; particularly in the context of online collaboration and knowledge management tools. As more organizations seek to adopt these platforms, to take advantage of and to try to enhance the organizational social network, the idea of trust is critically important. 

In this research, I stumbled upon an incredible source for better understanding of social networks and social capital formation, a title from 1983 called Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy by Robert D. Putnam.

What does a text on the political structure and institutions in Italy have to do with corporate social networking, collaboration, or workplace trust? Actually quite a bit. Chapter 6 of Making Democracy Work titled 'Social Capital and Institutional Success' focuses on the essential elements necessary for the development of social capital in organizations, trust, norms, and networks. On the idea of trust, Putnam strongly asserts the link between trust and the end goals of many of these new technology-based initiatives, 'Trust lubricates collaboration'. Putnam further explores the fundamental conditions needed to build trust in networks, like reciprocity and the virtuous cycle effect.

The point of all of this?

I think that at times many of us that participate, advocate, and attempt to implement tools and technologies for social networking, collaboration, and knowledge management think that we are truly in uncharted waters.  We can at times, get beguiled by the notion of 'newness'.  Since Twitter, Facebook, wikis, blogs, etc. are all relatively recent inventions, it is easy to think that the scholars and researchers of the past don't have much to offer us today. My experience with just the three works I mentioned above (three out of potentially thousands) tells me that ignoring or dismissing these works as irrelevant just because the 'tools' are new would be a mistake.

My recommendation to you - take the half hour you may have spent reading more 'How to be more effective on Twitter' posts and read the Strength of Weak Ties this week. Press the pause button on 'Personal Branding' for an evening and read Chapter 6 of Putnam. I guarantee you will find something in there that will help you today, tomorrow, next week, next year.

I would love your comments and recommendations on other 'classic' works that you swear by.