Dear Colleague,
This is the fourth and final part of Phil Agre's Networking on the Net.
It contains these sections:
12 Positive Leadership
Appendix: Some References on Networking
Acknowledgements
Ken Friedman
12 Positive Leadership
The last section points toward the ambivalent nature of the research
world, and as you become well-connected you will start to face the
moral issues that the professional world inevitably brings. Before
talking about those moral issues, I want to make sure that the bad
dynamics I've been describing haven't tempted you to cast off the
optimistic and constructive tone of my advice in favor of the
negative stereotypes about networking that prevail in the culture.
Don't become a cynic. It will make you a bad person and a bad
influence on others. You really must believe this: if you think that
the whole universe is evil then you are evil yourself. I do realize
that some people are out there selling their souls. And the expanding
universe of an emerging discipline will always attract opportunists
who are gung-ho about networking and whose research is simply a
shallow excuse to keep their hand in the network-building game. That
is not the way of life that I am recommending for you, and I want to
make sure that you distinguish between this negative approach to
networking and the positive and constructive approach that I have
been describing. The main purpose of this section is to make the
distinction between the negative and positive approaches to
networking as clear as possible, in order to help you develop a clear
ethical sense in an unfamiliar professional world.
Research institutions
Let us start with an aerial view. Imagine yourself in the sky looking
down on the millions of researchers, in every field, all continually
building their networks, organizing their conferences, editing their
journals, interviewing for jobs, and so on. I have described the
process by which these people institutionalize their emerging fields,
but the idea of an institution has a more fundamental meaning as
well. Think, for example, of the institution of a journal. No laws
anywhere explain how journals ought to run. Each journal sets its own
rules, based on the sensibilities of the people involved and the
precedents that are available from existing journals that the people
are already familiar with. A journal editor might introduce small
innovations such as double-blind refereeing (where the referees are
not told who wrote the papers they review) or a department of the
journal for short papers. A really energetic journal editor might
even organize a more radical change, such as a shift to online
publication. Nonetheless, the journal as an institution does not
change much, for the simple reason that it is held steady in a force
field of the intersecting incentives that other institutions create.
The academic promotion process, for example, demands peer review as a
formal method of evaluating a candidate's research, and so few
researchers will submit their research papers to a journal whose
procedures do not fit that model. A journal establishes its identity
and credibility in large part through the list of prominent
researchers who are willing to be identified with it, and so every
journal will have a list of prominent people on its title page,
whether an "editorial committee", "advisory board", or what-have-you.
Authors expect one another to give credit where it is due, and peer
review gives these expectations teeth, so the articles in journals
are festooned with scholarly apparatus. Because these converging
forces remain much the same over time, the institution of the
research journal remains much the same as well.
The same goes for the other institutions that organize life in the
research community, such as the conference, the job interview, the
grant proposal, the advisor-student relationship, and so on. Over
time, the participants in every institution accumulate and pass down
a body of knowledge about how to pursue individual and collective
goals within the framework that the institution provides, and the
whole purpose of this article is to explain this body of knowledge in
very explicit terms, so that you don't have to learn it by trial and
error. Everybody in the research community, or at least the vast
majority of people who are successful in it, learn and practice this
knowledge to the point that it becomes second nature. If you look
down on them from your aerial perspective, you will see them building
networks that you could easily imagine mapping -- and that some
scholars actually do map as part of their own research. As
publications and communications become increasingly electronic, you
could imagine constructing these maps automatically.
It's important to understand how profoundly the buzzing activity of
network-building that you observe is organized and supported by the
institutions. Recall, for example, the role of the library as a sort
of catalog of potential intellectual friends. Most people in the real
world do not order their friends from catalogs, for the simple reason
that they do not generate the same sorts of elaborate public personae
that scholars generate when they publish their research in journals.
In fact, most professions do create incentives to build professional
networks, and many sorts of organizations and directories do exist to
support networking in business and politics, for example. Even so,
few professions provide the extraordinary level of institutional
support for the process that the research community provides.
The dynamics of networking in the research community, however, do not
remain the same over time. The Internet has certainly accelerated the
process through electronic mail. In some fields the process has also
been altered substantially by the Web, although I remain struck at
how little effort the average researcher puts into building a Web
presence. Since most researchers already know personally the finite
world of individuals whose opinions of their work really matter, and
since libraries already make their publications available to the few
people who don't get them by exchanging drafts, researchers do not
have strong incentives to create an elaborate home page with their
publications and so on. That's how powerful the existing institutions
are: they bond people so tightly that even the Internet does not
radically change the dynamics. The Internet makes it easier for
people in outsider universities (such as the former students of
people at the insider universities) to stay in the loop, and as I say
it speeds everything up. But the fundamental phenomenon, the one that
drives and shapes the research community's day-to-day practices, is
the complex of institutions that rewards some activities and not
others.
That said, I do think that the institutions of research have changed
in one important way over time. From the aerial perspective, you
could say that the temperature has gone up. The activity of forming
and reforming networks is more frenetic than it used to be, and less
predictable. In the old days, fields were stable and hierarchical,
and they had strong boundaries. You were trained in a field, changing
fields was almost impossible, and the concept of interdisciplinary
research did not exist. Every field had two or three leading journals
whose editors were kings, and they had one major conference, held
once a year, where faculty introduced their students to the faculty
of other departments in the patriarchal hiring system. That old world
is hardly gone, but it is changing. You could say that we are moving
from a world of conferences to a world of workshops. Where
conferences are large and permanent, workshops are small and
temporary. Some workshops are held year after year, but others are
transient by design. A conference is an immutable fixture in its
participants' lives, but workshops are organized more or less
spontaneously whenever network-builders such as yourself manage to
articulate emerging themes that motivate a critical mass of their
peers to abandon their research for a few days to participate.
Workshops are indifferent to the boundaries of fields, and they allow
people to join multiple research communities, and to migrate freely
from one research community to another as they seek out new research
topics that fit their interests and talents. Although it is not
without dangers, I think that this shift toward a more dynamic
research community is basically a good thing, not least because it
calls on everyone to make their own fate by engaging with others.
Disagreement and pathology
That is the big picture, and I think it is a fairly hopeful one.
Returning to earth, however, I do appreciate that you will have to
deal with the negative and pathological aspects of the institutions
as they actually exist. Take, for example, the simple fact that many
of your fellow researchers will not share your research interests,
and more importantly your values. Although networking is very much a
process of picking your friends, nonetheless you will often find
yourself sharing a committee or a department with people who you just
plain disagree with. What to do? I have given part of the answer
already: find something -- anything -- that you agree with them
about, and talk about that. Create a human bond on any basis at all,
have a social conversation with them about just those topics, and the
rest will follow much more easily.
The next step in dealing with people you disagree with is to learn
their arguments. You don't know your own arguments until you can
argue the other side. The history of philosophy makes clear that
intellectual progress requires that evenly matched schools criticize
one another in detail, so that each side feels compelled to overcome
the criticisms that the other side has presented (see Randall
Collins' book "Sociology of Philosophies", mentioned above). You
should live this deep truth in your own life by really learning the
arguments of the people you disagree with. You should also search
fearlessly for valid points that your opponents do make admist their
errors. Make sure that you aren't denying those valid points, just
because your opponents make them. That sort of denial is very
dangerous, and you should make a big point of avoiding it. For
example, if you're an economist you should admit that markets
sometimes fail. If your work is situated on the political left then
you should admit that crime is bad. And don't just admit these
points: embrace them. Don't just treat them as nasty counterarguments
that you immediately trounce with your brilliant come-backs. Rather,
accept within yourself that the valid points are valid, and carefully
disconnect them from the false ideas with which they have formerly
been associated. By submitting yourself to these disciplines, you
will accomplish many things. You will present a smaller target to
people who disagree with you. You will confound their expectations
and throw them off-guard. You will minimize unnecessary polarization
and avoid foreclosing potential coalitions. And you will clean the
junk out of your own arguments. People aren't stupid, and you need to
believe that the people you care about respect intellectual honesty.
The arguments that you can't explain away will compel you to invent
new arguments, which after all is your job.
Of course, all of this talk about learning arguments requires people
to fight fair. But many people, as we all know, do not fight fair. To
deal with these pathological people, you need six ideas:
First, you should distinguish between people who are irrational in a
general way and people who are irrational on specific topics. When
people are irrational, it means that they have been hurt in the past
and are afraid that they are going to be hurt the same way again.
Oftentimes, you will do something reasonable that superficially
resembles a bad thing that some other crazy person did in some other
situation. For example, you might propose a new course that falls
somewhat outside the usual framework of the curriculum, not knowing
that your department went through years of warfare over the framework
of the curriculum before you got there. The extreme response you
receive from otherwise rational people will be out of proportion to
anything you really did. When you do something reasonable and
encounter an irrational response, therefore, one approach is to stop
and figure out what bad experience the other person has had. Then you
can assure them that you aren't going to do the same bad thing that
the crazy person did earlier.
Second, you should never try to change or fix pathological people,
and you should certainly never persuade yourself that your personal
happiness or success depends on changing or fixing them. Fixing
pathological people doesn't work in personal relationships, and it
certainly doesn't work in professional relationships. Release the
miserable people to their misery, refuse to let them into your space,
and carry on with your life.
Third, understanding where the pathologies come from will make the
pathological people easier to deal with. For example, you will find
many assistant professors engaged in pre-tenure psychosis, in which
the uncertainty of the tenure process causes them to become
delusional, adopt self-destructive defenses, play maladaptive
politics, spin conspiracy theories, and generally mess themselves up.
Not having been admitted to the inner circles of the institution,
they have not sufficiently internalized how the institution works,
and so their imaginations fill the vacuum with whatever basic beliefs
about the world they happen to have gotten from their childhoods.
Fourth, you need to tell yourself that pathological people behave in
pathological ways because they do not understand the positive and
constructive view of the world that I am explaining in this article.
Pathological people are pathological because they believe that the
world is a fundamentally bad place, and whenever you feel the urge to
send them to hell you should understand that they are already living
in hell. Of course, when you are confronted with hard-core power
freaks it can be hard to tell yourself this. If the power freaks have
dug their claws into resources, if they have built an empire of
cronies and serfs, if they have recruited others into their distorted
view of the world, surely there is a real sense in which they have
benefited from their evil, is there not? No, there is not, and this
is what you have to tell yourself. When Jesus said that the world is
corrupt, and when the Buddha said that the world is illusion, this is
what they were talking about. Pathological power freaks think they
are in control, but they are hallucinating. If you convince yourself
that your success and happiness depend on wrestling control of those
hallucinations yourself, then you have locked yourself into the same
perdition as they have. Let go of them. You will make your success
and happiness through networking in ways that are not yet revealed to
you, and that have nothing to do with the illusory power that
pathological people appear to hold.
Fifth, if a pathological individual happens to attack you
emotionally, whether through shouting fits or sarcasm or accusations
or whatever, you should learn the proper method for getting the
toxins out of your system. The key is to revisit the specific details
of the situation. You can do this with your notebook or with a
trusted personal friend (preferably not a professional colleague).
Simply recount the events in detail. By "detail" I mean the specific
actions and words, step by step. Think of yourself as extracting
venom from a snakebite, removing each bit of the venom by
deliberately revisiting each element of the experience. If you were
emotionally hurt, however slightly, you will find yourself tending to
describe the events in a vague way, for example by giving paraphrases
rather than the actual words or by skipping over details that don't
seem important. This is a mistake. The purpose of emotional abuse is
to subvert the victim's capacity for rational thought, and you will
only regain your rational mind if you carefully extract the toxins
from your system. If you find yourself howling for revenge, then you
haven't gotten all the toxins out yet.
Sixth, the purpose of networking is to let you escape pathological
people by building your own supportive community. The stronger and
more extensive your community, the less power the pathological people
will have over you. Your network is your personal intelligence
system. Your conversations with other people in your network will
help you understand how different organizations do things, and they
will broaden your thinking by helping you internalize a wider range
of perspectives on the institutions and the research. When a network
is functioning properly, a kind of electricity runs through it: the
excitement of the research, the affirmation that comes from sharing
that excitement with others, and the confidence that comes from a
continually updated affirmation that your research is finding a real
audience. The electricity of a functioning network makes pathological
personalities seem less important.
Leadership
Having declared your independence of pathological people and their
established ways of doing things, how *will* you achieve the personal
success and satisfaction that you seek in your career? The general
outlines are probably clear enough from my advice so far: build a
network, articulate an emerging theme, organize institutions around
it, build another network, articulate another emerging theme,
organize institutions around that theme, and so on. It's a cycle.
With each pass through the cycle, you will ascend to a new plateau in
the professional world, and in your career. You will them build
networks and organize institutions with other people who occupy
similar plateaux, having built their own networks and organized their
own institutions back in their home territories. And then you will
use that plateau as a base from which to ascend once again.
The critical intuition is that the emerging themes will become more
abstract with each pass through the cycle. When you organize your
first conference panel or journal issue, you will probably choose an
emerging theme that brings conceptual order to the work of a
half-dozen people. That's fine; it gets you started. Once you gain
the perspective that a round of professional organizing affords,
however, you will find yourself articulating bigger and more
encompassing themes, ones that bring order to the research programs
of scores or hundreds of people. Examples of abstract themes that
help large research movements to coalesce include "neuroscience",
"cultural studies", "communications policy", and "human-computer
interaction" -- in other words, the sorts of phrases you see as the
titles of journals and conferences. This is where journals and
conferences come from: every one of them started when someone
followed the procedures that I am describing. The genius of the
institution is that it supports this kind of incremental growth: as a
new researcher it is impossible to engage with the voices of every
researcher in the world, so the institutions are arranged to let you
pick a few voices -- the ones that are closely related to your
dissertation topic -- and engage with them. Then as your career
progresses you can engage with broader and broader ranges of voices.
The meritocracy of research starts with peer review, but its essence
lies in the opportunity that it provides everyone to ascend in their
careers by organizing networks around progressively larger themes.
The justice of the system is that engaging with diverse voices makes
you honest: you are compelled to reconsider your assumptions on ever
deeper levels, and this makes your work more useful to everyone.
Of course, leadership isn't simply coming up with a name, but talking
to everyone and developing a language that lets them all recognize
themselves as members of an emerging community. This is intellectual
leadership in its most general sense, and done honestly it is the
best kind of leadership. A leader always has a couple of activities
in the works that gather people around emerging themes -- and not
just any people but the people whose work seems in the best sense to
represent the future. At any given point, then, you will always be
involved in organizing a conference, convening a committee, starting
a journal, putting together a multi-site grant proposal, founding a
research center, or whatever makes sense at a given time. If you're
not involved in any such activities then you should figure out what
the problem is. Reconnect with your network, articulate emerging
themes, build consensus, and move forward.
An especially important type of intellectual leadership concerns
research funding. Every funding agency, whether the government or a
private foundation, maintains a dialogue with the research community
to help articulate the research program that they want to fund. Your
job as an intellectual leader is to mediate this dialogue by talking
both with your network and with the funders about where everyone sees
things going. When you talk to people in your network, you should
constantly update your map of the community's collective research
agenda. Elicit each individual's research agenda, and then put those
research agendas together into orderly wholes. Keep lists of research
topics that come up in conversation, sort the topics into outlines,
and tell clear stories that give the outlines a unified sense. This
is what emerging themes are for, and by continually working to
articulate emerging themes you will evolve the language that the
research community and the funders use to talk to one another.
This conversation can be organized in many different ways. The
National Science Foundation, for example, is largely driven by the
research community itself, and intellectual leaders who can organize
workshops and assemble their findings into "white papers" play a
pivotal role in the process. The incentives to organize such things
are strong: if you write the white paper that NSF draws on in
defining a funding program, then it is likely that your own proposal
will fall squarely within the scope of the program once it gets
defined. Other agencies, public and private, are directed more by
their own agendas, or those of their patrons, but even in those cases
your job is much the same: staying in the conversation and
continually offering a compelling vision of the future direction of
research, based on your honest sense of where the ideas are heading.
Of course, a dialogue by definition goes both ways, and you also lead
by articulating the genuine insights in the funders' agendas and
synthesizing them with the bottom-up development of agendas in the
research community.
This process may sound phony, and it can certainly become phony if it
is done badly. But believe it or not, the leaders of funding agencies
are usually very intelligent, and their opinions do usually reflect
real insight. Of course, a failure of leadership can result in a
situation where a powerful funding agency leads the research
community around by the nose, imposing arbitrary agendas on it from
the outside. But avoiding this kind of failure is precisely what
powerful leadership is about. Powerful leadership is far-sighted
enough that the relationship with funders is based on a shared vision
of emerging directions for the research.
Now, many people do not get excited at the prospect of articulating
research agendas and conversing with funding agencies. They do not
see themselves as leaders, and they would rather stay in their labs
and libraries doing their work. I say fine. It's a free country.
Nonetheless, you have to understand how these things work. Money for
your research does not materialize from the clouds, and you don't
want to be stranded when the agenda-setting process strays away from
the topics that interest you. Participating in the process, if only
at a basic maintenance level, means that you retain a degree of
control over your life, as well as an early-warning system that
prevents you from getting stuck later on. But more fundamentally, as
I have emphasized throughout, the networking process is good for your
own thinking. Networking serves many functions, but the most
important is as a process of collective cognition. When you talk to
everyone and listen to their research agendas, and when you write all
their agendas down in front of you and look for the emerging theme
that brings order to them, you are stimulating the most crucial
functionality of your mind: the largely unconscious ability to
synthesize fragments into coherent wholes. Down deep, everyone has a
drive toward wholeness. This is the force that makes you a more or
less integrated human being and not a schizophrenic mess, and it is
also the force by which like-minded individuals cohere their thinking
and form movements that are intellectually and institutionally
stronger than the separate individuals that make them up. In a sense,
then, deliberately talking things through with everyone in your
network simply amplifies a force toward wholeness that is already
operating in everyone's personality. The difference is that it's now
a force for the collective good, as well as your own.
Beliefs
At several points in this article I have described the self-defeating
beliefs that keep many people from having the careers they want.
Dysfunctional beliefs can come from several sources:
* The culture, for example the idea that networking is necessarily
greasy, dishonest, burdensome, "political", or a substitute for "real
work".
* Political movements that have run off the rails, such as the idea
that the world is infinitely and hopelessly oppressive.
* The dysfunctional cultures of particular occupations or workplaces,
such as the belief that getting a job requires you to give up your
integrity and commit yourself to work that you do not respect.
* Dysfunctional subcultures of the research world that arise because
people in particular situations -- for example, graduate students or
untenured faculty members -- lack the information they would need to
distinguish between genuine oppression and random paranoia.
* Traumatic experiences, such as having your work plagiarized, that
leave you forever worrying that the same bad thing will happen again,
until that worry blows up into an all-consuming worldview.
* Child abuse, whose survivors often experience the world as an
endless series of abusive situations which they cannot escape.
I want to focus particular attention on one mechanism through which
people develop negative beliefs. Most people get socialized into
institutions such as the research world without anyone ever
explaining how the institutions work. For example, few PhD students
ever get explicit lessons on the sorts of career strategies that I
have been explaining in this paper. What is more, the social world is
filled with unspoken rules that keep these things hidden, for example
the taboo against boasting or the imperative of explaining one's
motives in terms of the general good rather than in terms of
self-interest. These unspoken rules help people to get along, but
they also make it much harder for average PhD students in complex
professional interactions to figure out what is really going on. Most
students do acquire up some insight from watching the experts, but
they usually do not develop a complex theory like the one I have been
explaining here. As a result, they often perceive their social
environment in a relatively superficial way.
Let us consider a comparatively mild misconception that can arise
from this sort of superficial perception of the professional world.
Some students develop the idea that a professional network is an
encumbrance. After all, the more people you know, the more you have
to constrain your voice to avoid saying anything that will offend
anyone. Isolation is painful, but at least it leaves you free to
speak your mind; the alternative is a life of walking on eggshells.
Right? Wrong. People who believe such things fail to understand how
people change when they articulate shared values. Once you have
created a bond with someone based on the values you share, you can go
ahead and disagree with them. Having established what you both really
care about, you can easily display your agreement on fundamentals
before going on to explore your differences on details. If you have
not articulated shared values, then indeed you are likely to step on
some land mines. The simple fact that they don't know you will
heighten the danger of misunderstanding. But once you internalize
other people's thinking and allow it to influence your own, these
dangers are much reduced. Actively engaging with other people is a
way to discover and articulate your own beliefs.
More serious hazards arise as students who don't understand the
underlying logic of networking encounter the established power
structures of their field -- that is, the networks that have already
been built by the people who got there first. Such students often
they imagine that the power structures they encounter are immutable.
They might listen to the players' conversations, but they don't
understand the layers of meaning that people who do understand
networking take for granted. Then, based on their understanding of
the situation, they devise plans of their own. And because their
understanding is imperfect, their plans go wrong. They might try to
break into or circumvent the existing structures, only to commit a
faux pas or provoke a weird misinterpretation. Or they might try to
conform to the seemingly implacable order of things, only to find
that they are giving up their integrity and getting nothing in
return. They will end up frustrated and alienated, and they will go
looking for someone to explain why.
Meanwhile, other students (and faculty with stalled careers) who have
screwed up in similar ways will be feeding them negative ideas: the
game is fixed, it's all about power, you can't win, everyone is
competitive, the whole culture is based on tearing other people down,
and to survive you have to join the culture or drop out. Those
negative beliefs will always have some slight basis in truth: if you
go around looking for confirming evidence, you will certainly be able
to find it. But you can find confirming evidence for any belief. The
fact is, the people who are trying to sell you such negative beliefs
are a cult. Their end in life is to justify themselves, and to that
end they want to recruit you. They are dangerous. You should hand
them a copy of "Networking on the Network", and then you should walk
away from them until they get some better beliefs.
What exactly is wrong with the cult's beliefs? The cultists believe
that the social structures around them are static, and that they
themselves are isolated. They believe themselves to be powerless, and
because they haven't the faintest idea how power works, they honestly
cannot imagine what it would be like to get any power for themselves.
Is it their fault? Partly yes, partly no. It doesn't matter. What
matters is getting and teaching a more positive view. The fact is,
every one of the current power-holders of your field acquired their
power through the methods that I have been describing. They built
networks, articulated emerging themes, organized events, and founded
institutions. Your job is not to attack them, but to build networks
of your own. Occupy the new ground that is opening up, and when they
retire your network can inherit the world, assuming that you even
want it.
Building a rewarding career, then, requires positive beliefs. Along
the way, I have described some of the positive beliefs that are
necessary in order to approach networking in the most productive and
ethical way. These include the idea that networking will pay off
somehow in the future, even if the exact mechanism is not yet clear.
In the remainder of this section I want to talk about what I mean by
"beliefs", and I want to describe some of the other beliefs I think
you should have.
When I talk about "beliefs", I'm not talking about the intellectual
theories you have in your conscious mind, or anything that you reason
about at a clinical distance or write papers about with fifty-cent
words. Rather, I'm talking about your fundamental, deep-down way of
relating to the world. For example, if you believe -- if you take for
granted, if you assume, if you presuppose -- that the whole universe
is fundamentally bad, and that people are fundamentally corrupt, then
I want you to stay away from me, because I submit that you are unable
to approach anything in a positive spirit. You expect that everyone
is going to shaft you, and so you are going to give up, or act
ironic, or treat everything as a meaningless conspiracy, or go around
preemptively shafting everyone else.
I want you to give up those sorts of negative beliefs. Instead, I
want you to adopt some positive beliefs. I want you to believe that
you will get a good job, that you are going to have a productive
career, and that you are going to build a supportive network of
decent and intelligent people. I want you to believe that you will
enter into highly productive lifelong collaborations in which all
parties fully express their talents. And I want you to believe that
you will build a community whose members continually exchange all
manner of resources and services, such as job-hunting information and
draft-reading.
Of course, when I propose these beliefs, it immediately becomes
unclear what "belief" could mean. I do not mean, for example, that
you are going to think positive thoughts and then sit around waiting
passively for them to become true. I am not calling for a mindless,
naive optimism. Nor do I mean that you can just pick people at random
and magically turn them into your productive lifelong collaborators.
No magic here. Quite the contrary: your good job, productive career,
and supportive network are only going to materialize if you get out
there and build them. Work is required. The point is that you have to
undertake this work in the right spirit. If you treat networking as
an arbitrary chore, or as manipulation, or as social climbing, or a
matter of sucking up to the powerful (which is itself a kind of
manipulation), then you will get a cynical life of phony
relationships.
But why? Why do positive beliefs lead to positive outcomes, and why
do negative beliefs lead to negative outcomes? Because your beliefs
determine what you see. If you believe that you can build a network
of supportive people, then you will be looking for supportive people.
Because you will be making distinctions, you will gravitate to the
right people and you will shun the wrong ones. You won't try to do
things that can't be done, you won't try to organize meetings that
people aren't going to attend, and you won't try to wake people up
who would rather stay asleep. On the other hand, if you don't believe
that supportive people exist, then obviously you won't be looking for
them. If you believe that people are all manipulative operators, then
you will be looking for games and schemes and angles, simply asking
yourself which of them best fits the needs of your own manipulations.
When people cannot imagine creating the world they want, and believe
themselves to be living in a finite, zero-sum world instead, they
build a culture of competition and back-stabbing instead of the
positive culture they need. They act in ways that cause their beliefs
to come true, and then they conclude that they were right all along.
It is only when people believe in a decent world, and are out looking
for the elements of it, and watching for the outlines of it to emerge
from the fragments that they've gathered along the way, that they
have a chance of getting it.
So my point here is not that everyone in the world is perfectly good,
or that the whole world is beautiful. I have repeatedly explained how
you should deal with the evils and pathologies that you do encounter
in the world. A "belief", in the sense that I'm using the word, is
not about the world in general, but about a deeper emotional reality.
The world may be evil on the surface, but you have to believe that it
is positive underneath. Your job is to cut through the surface junk
and build a positive life. This is originally a religious idea. In
Christianity it's the idea that you should let go of your own agenda
and let God lead you to the life He means you to have. But it also
takes secularized forms. In Marxism, for example, it is the idea
that, below all the division and oppression lies a deeper reality in
which people are sociable and cooperative. Of course, some Christians
get so wrapped up in sin and punishment that they forget about the
positive aspects of their religion, and some Marxists get so wrapped
up in persuading people that they are oppressed that they forget
about the positive values of social solidarity that supposedly solve
the problem. Likewise, you need to maintain a clear sense that you
can build a positive career for yourself, and that the details will
become clear once you get out there and start doing it.
My advice should be contrasted with the advice that prevails in
American culture, which is to "follow your dreams". I agree that
following a dream is better than watching television all day. The
problem with a "dream", however, is that you have no way of knowing,
at the beginning of your journey, what your ideal life should look
like. Lots of people have "dreams" that are completely disconnected
from reality. The truth is, the good life that you can build depends
on factors that you simply cannot know about until you start building
networks, articulating emerging themes, and exercising your
leadership capacities. In order to see what opportunities are out
there, you need to be open to unexpected possibility. Preconceived
scenarios can only narrow your vision.
If you can't come up with a "dream" a priori, then, how should you
proceed? What should you steer by? That's what this entire article
has been about. Start with a research topic that you find compelling.
Do a round of research, hit the library, identify people who should
be part of your network, approach those people, talk to them, let
yourself change as a result of those conversations, see what themes
are emerging in the collective work of your community, follow the
directions that you personally find compelling, build networks around
those new directions, and repeat. Get yourself embedded in a
community of people whose work you respect, and from that embedded
point of view you see what opportunities start to become visible.
Nobody can start a new institute, for example, unless a lot of
different factors come together. Likewise, nobody can found a new
field of research just because they have a "dream" in their head to
do so. It may be part of your path to start a new institute or found
a new field, or it might not. Let go of those a priori scenarios, and
instead look carefully to see what is being offered to you in the
real world. Work the process, and let it pull you forward.
Perhaps the most fundamental belief you need is that you have choice
in your life. Many people simply assume that their lives are dictated
by others, and that they are completely hemmed in by powers beyond
their control. This belief is obviously a self-fulfilling prophesy,
but that doesn't explain why it is wrong. The underlying problem is a
false understanding of the nature of freedom. For many people, indeed
for the mainstream of Western political theory, freedom means
complete individualistic autonomy -- the power to do just exactly as
you please in your own personal zone of total autonomy. This belief
system is unfortunate because it provides no way of reconciling
freedom and relationship. Relationships, on this individualistic view
-- relationships of equality, in any case -- are inherently
constraining. At best they represent a trade-off in which individuals
surrender parts of their freedom in order to get something else. This
is totally confused.
I hope to have presented an alternative view: freedom is something
that you discover, that you build, through relationships with others.
You build networks around the issues you care about, you grow and
change through the relationships that result, you articulate the
themes that are emerging in the community members' respective work,
and through community-building and leadership you get the resources
to do the things that you most care about doing. It's true that this
method will never give you arbitrary power. But the desire for
arbitrary power is not freedom -- it is a particularly abject form of
slavery. If you can let go of preconceived ideas then you are free:
you can choose who to associate with, and as you build your network
you multiply the further directions that you can choose to go. You
also multiply the unexpected opportunities that open up, the places
you can turn for assistance with your projects, the flows of useful
information that keep you in contact with reality, the surveillance
of the horizon that keeps you from getting cornered by unanticipated
developments, and the public persona that ensures that people keep
coming to you with offers that you can take or leave. That is what
freedom is, and it is yours if you will do the work.
Power
If you follow my advice then you will acquire power. If you carry
around the prevailing cultural stereotypes about power, then you may
be surprised at the reality of power when it happens. For example,
simply having a network confers power. If you know two people, A and
B, who do not know one another, then they might ask you about each
other. Is this person smart? A good speaker? Well-suited to serving
on a certain committee? That is already a kind of power. If you are
trapped in a negative, conspiratorial view of the world, then you
will answer these questions in whatever way best suits your own
"side" in some imaginary war. You may not even be thinking about
whether the person in question is smart, a good speaker, and so on,
but rather about whether it suits your private game to be promoting
or frustrating them.
You might even take this mode of operation for granted, having picked
it up from the culture around you, without stopping to reflect on
whether it really serves you. Besides, being asked about the person
has made you feel important, and exercising arbitrary authority over
them has made you feel even more important. This kind of nastiness
can become intoxicating, and paradoxically its root cause is the
down-deep belief that you are not powerful, and that your actions
have no real consequences in the world. It is in such simple
situations -- being asked their opinions of others -- that many
people first face up to the consequences of having actual power in
the world, however slight. You might serve as a referee for a paper,
in which you can rant intemperately without being known to your
victim (though the editor of the journal will know perfectly well).
You can fail to mention someone's work to someone else even though it
was relevant to the conversation. You can go along with stereotypes
that distort the seriousness of another field's research methods.
And, being intelligent, you can rationalize any of this. After all, I
have told you myself to shun negative people, and you can tell
yourself that those others are all negative, when in fact they are
simply inconvenient.
So right away, early on in your career, the question will arise of
what kind of power you want to have. It is good to be powerful, but
only in the correct sense of the term. People with the right kind of
power, in my view, do not need to manipulate or control others. To
the contrary, they are know that they are well-served when others
grow and find their own directions, so they happily support everyone
in their growth. They don't take responsibility for others' growth,
which is a different question. They speak to the healthy part of a
person, and they are concerned to draw out and articulate the
brilliant ideas and worthy vision that lie beneath the surface of
whatever anyone is saying. For example, they don't try to enroll
students as acolytes in their empire-building strategies, but
honestly ask what's best for each student's own development,
confident that their knowledge, vision, and connections will have an
important influence on the student's development in any case.
If these considerations seem overly abstract and New Age, let us
consider their consequences for the unfortunate phenomena that I
described in the previous section: professors' incentives to narrow
their students' thinking, and everyone's incentives to defend the
intellectual turf that legitimates their research topics. These
"incentives" are illusory, of course, but they are deeply ingrained
nonetheless. Where does the problem come from?
You may recall my passing mention of opportunists who do superficial
research as an excuse for empire-building. And you may well ask
yourself, where is the line here? How do I know whether I am a
serious, moral individual, or whether I am a superficial operator?
Superficial operators can talk the language of empowerment as well as
anyone, and it is very hard to devise an objective test to
distinguish the operators from the serious people. The real
distinction, down deep, is that a real leader talks to everyone,
thinks deeply into the ideas, draws to the surface a real insight
about where the ideas are going, and builds consensus around the
result, whereas an operator talks to everyone, sees which way the
wind is blowing, and hustles to get out in front of it. By networking
widely and listening, the operator hopes to get in on the ground
floor of something, anything, it doesn't matter what -- surfing on
issues, and from issue to the next. The real leader is a dynamic
force for an intellectual movement that is genuinely creative, and
that keeps being creative in the future. The operator, on the other
hand, is actually a follower, a parasite who has learned how to utter
the words that make people in an emerging intellectual movement feel
good.
If the serious scholars don't do their networking, then a vacuum
opens up, and operators will seize the opportunity. That's one more
reason why serious scholars should build networks. Even so, the line
between serious scholars and operators is not always clear, and as
you get involved in intellectual leadership, you will definitely feel
the temptation to operate. You will find yourself saying things
because they mobilize people and not because you really believe them.
And it's hard to tell the difference, given that being socialized
into a new profession inevitably means learning a new language. You
will probably sound fake to yourself much of the time, as you learn
how to speak this language, and so it's easy to slip into
manipulation instead of real leadership. From that kind of
manipulation, it is a short step to the sorts of aggressive
empire-building that I described above: encouraging others to talk
your own language rather than coming up with their own. That is the
deepest moral question that you will face as you engage in
professional networking, and you might be surprised how quickly you
have to face it.
Appendix: Some References on Networking
Here are some general guides to professional networking, without any
special reference to electronic mail. Note that the number of new
books about professional networking has started accelerating some
time in 1994, though I haven't been reading these systematically.
Wayne E. Baker, Networking Smart: How to Build Relationships for
Personal and Organizational Success, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994. A
fairly comprehensive book on the networking process, with greater
emphasis than most on strategy.
Wayne E. Baker, Achieving Success Through Social Capital: Tapping
Hidden Resources in Your Personal and Business Networks, Wiley, 2000.
A new book from Baker that I haven't seen yet.
Donna Fisher and Sandy Vilas, Power Networking, Austin: Mountain
Harbour, 1992. This is probably the best all-around book on the
subject. It abstracts a long list of guidelines that apply just about
as much to research people as to the corporate people who are their
main audience.
Ronald L. Krannich and Caryl Rae Krannich, The New Network Your Way
to Job and Career Success, Manassas Park, VA: Impact Publications,
1993. Another worthwhile networking book, aimed more at job-seekers,
with a fair amount of useful concrete advice.
Ann Boe and Betty B. Youngs, Is Your "Net" Working?: A Complete Guide
to Building Contacts and Career Visibility, New York: Wiley, 1989.
Another book in the same spirit, based on stories about mistakes
people make in their networking activities. I find it less useful
than the others, but it may well help those who regard themselves as
complete beginners.
Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps, The Networking Book: People
Connecting With People, New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986.
This book looked useful when I happened across it in a used book
store near the University of New Mexico one day, but I haven't had a
chance to evaluate it yet.
Harvey Mackay, Dig Your Well Before You're Thirsty: The Only
Networking Book You'll Ever Need, New York: Currency/Doubleday, 1997.
I haven't read this one either, but I do know that this guy has a
quite astonishing gift for networking, or at least a gift for getting
celebrities to endorse his books.
Tom Jackson, Guerrilla Tactics in the New Job Market, second edition,
New York: Bantam, 1991. An inspired book on the networking that's
involved in finding a job through the "hidden job market" of hiring
referrals.
Thomas J. Stanley, Networking With the Affluent and Their Advisors,
Homewood, IL: Irwin, 1993. This book is probably the least directly
relevant to research people, as should be obvious from its title, but
nonetheless it should be a good resource for those wishing to think
more deeply about professional networking. Its focus is on the
different roles that someone can play as part of a network.
Ford Harding, Rain Making: The Professional's Guide to Attracting New
Clients, Holbrook, MA: Bob Adams, 1994. Another business book that
might be useful in the same indirect way.
Here are some Web-based resources:
Marie des Jardins, How to be a good graduate student. An article
broadly similar to this one but aimed more at beginning graduate
students. It is available on the WorldWide Web at:
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/HTMLit/how.2b/how.2b.html
David Chapman, How to do research. A collection of advice for
graduate students, including a discussion of the "secret paper
passing network". http://www.cs.indiana.edu/mit.research.how.to.html
Heather A. Carlson, Advice for academia. A lengthy Web page of
bullets and links. It was originally compiled for a UCSD workshop for
women graduate students though most of it is applicable to everyone.
http://mccammon.ucsd.edu/~hcarlson/Women.htm
Advice columns from the Chronicle of Higher Education are gathered on
the Web at: http://chronicle.com/jobs/archive/advicearch.htm You
might need a password, which you might be able to get from your
department or library.
Hal Varian, How to build an economic model in your spare time. This
is a short chapter that tells graduate students in economics how to
invent, work through, present, and write up a mathematical model.
Although it is aimed specifically to economics students, many of the
ideas generalize. http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/how.pdf
Patrick Winston, Some lecturing heuristics. These are the bulleted
conclusions from PHW's legendary self-referential lecture about how
to give a lecture.
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~brd/Teaching/Giving-a-talk/phw.html
Bruce Donald, How to give a talk. Geared more to technical talks
organized around overhead transparencies.
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~brd/Teaching/Giving-a-talk/giving-a-talk.html
Thomas W. Rishel, The academic job search in mathematics. The basics.
http://www.ams.org/employment/academic-job-search.html
Bonnie A. Nardi, Steve Whittaker, and Heinrich Schwarz, It's not what
you know, it's who you know: Work in the information age, First
Monday 5(5), 2001. Based on ethnographic studies of employees in
high-tech industries, this article argues that the resources that are
exchanged within professional networks are increasingly replacing
traditional institutions.
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_5/nardi/
Adviser, Teacher, Role Model, Friend: On Being a Mentor to Students
in Science and Engineering, National Academy Press, 1997. So you'll
know what good advising is.
http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/mentor/
The modern project of articulating guidelines for networking
originates (more or less) with feminist authors circa 1980. Their
books still hold some interest:
Carol Kleiman, Women's Networks: The Complete Guide to Getting a
Better Job, Advancing Your Career, and Feeling Great as a Woman
Through Networking, New York: Lippincott and Crowell, 1980. Aimed at
women professionals and executives who wish to set up relatively
formal networking organizations.
Betty Lehan Harragan, Games Mother Never Taught You: Corporate
Gamesmanship for Women, New York: Rawson, 1977. Although not
centrally concerned with networking, I mention this book because of
its cultural influence as the first hard-hitting how-the-world-
really-works book for professional women. Its ideology, which has
shaped many feminist discussions of networking since then, reflects
both the strengths and weaknesses of the feminism of that era. One of
the weaknesses is its inattention to social class; it explains that
men learn how the world works through playing football, even though
this would predict that working-class men would be as successful in
business as their wealthier brothers.
Here are a few references for literature on contemporary patterns of
networking:
Howard E. Aldrich and Mary Ann von Glinow, Personal networks and
infrastructure development, in David V. Gibson, George Kozmetsky, and
Raymond W. Smilor, eds, The Technopolis Phenomenon: Smart Cities,
Fast Systems, Global Networks, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield,
1992. Approaches to rationalizing and managing the networking process
through social psychology, network mapping, and systematic
development of networks.
Thomas J. Allen, Managing the Flow of Technology: Technology Transfer
and the Dissemination of Technological Information within the R&D
Organization, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977. A scary book of
experimental and quantitative studies of information flow in groups
of research and development people. Many of the results are things
that you've always known but that hardly anybody acts as if they
really believed, for example that the most productive groups enjoyed
a steady flow of ideas from other groups and other disciplines.
Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, translated from the French by Peter
Collier, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988. A difficult and perhaps
cynical but nonetheless very insightful sociological study of the
ways in which academics accumulate capital through the symbolic
politics of their writings and institutions. Bourdieu himself is a
master of the art and should know.
Diana Crane, Invisible Colleges: Diffusion of Knowledge in Scientific
Communities, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972. A highly
influential study of academic social networks. Because these networks
cut across the boundaries of individual colleges, they are called
"invisible colleges".
Ronald S. Burt, Structural Holes: The Social Structure of
Competition, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. This research
makes precise the intuition that influence derives from a social
network that bridges different worlds. More of Burt's research can be
found at http://gsbwww.uchicago.edu/fac/ronald.burt/research/ .
Oscar H. Gandy, Jr., The political economy of communications
competence, in Vincent Mosco and Janet Wasko, eds, The Political
Economy of Information, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988.
An interesting article about the role of communication skills in
reproducing social inequalities.
Bernard Michael Gilroy, Networking in Multinational Enterprises: The
Importance of Strategic Alliances, Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 1993. The economics behind ongoing changes in the
workings of global companies, in which the boundaries of the
enterprise are less clear and employees' own networks have increasing
economic consequences.
Mark Granovetter, The sociological and economic approaches to labor
market analysis: A social structural view, in George Farkas and Paula
England, eds, Industries, Firms, and Jobs: Sociological and Economic
Approaches, New York: Plenum Press, 1988. Presents evidence
demonstrating that people get jobs because of who is in their
professional networks, and argues that simple economic ideas about
supply and demand do not suffice to explain such things.
Kerry Grosser, Human networks in organizational information
processing, Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 26,
1991, pages 349-402. A survey article about social networks in
organizations and their role in passing information around.
Linda M. Harasim, ed, Global Networks: Computers and International
Communication, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993. An edited volume in which
several of the usual suspects in the Internet world (and related
network worlds) offer mostly brief rundowns of their respective
projects.
Edward O. Laumann and David Knoke, Policy networks of the
organizational state: Collective action in the national energy and
health domains, in Robert Perrucci and Harry R. Potter, eds, Networks
of Power: Organizational Actors at the National, Corporate, and
Community Levels, New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1989. A really
interesting empirical study of shifting alliances within networks of
people trying to affect policy-making in Washington.
Myrna P. Mandell, ed, Getting Results Through Collaboration: Networks
and Network Structures for Public Policy and Management, Westport,
CT: Quorum, 2001.
Sharon M. McKinnon and William J. Bruns, Jr., The Information Mosaic,
Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1992. An interview-based study
of how managers get information. One conclusion is that they use a
wide variety of sources in a patchwork fashion, and that their
queries are largely aimed at verifying or elaborating things they've
already observed in some other fashion.
Nitin Nohria and Robert G. Eccles, eds, Networks and Organizations:
Structure, Form, and Action, Boston: Harvard Business School Press,
1992. A big collection of papers about networks in industry -- mostly
in the sense of "social networks", with little reference to computer
networks. I find this kind of work to be somewhat sterile in its
foundations but occasionally revealing in its observations. Its
attention to questions of power is refreshing, up to a point anyway.
Constance Perin, Electronic social fields in bureaucracies,
Communications of the ACM 34(12), 1991, pages 75-82. Some ideas about
the informal networks within organizations that get connected
together with electronic mail, often scaring their managers in the
process.
Robert P. Singh, Entrepreneurial Opportunity Recognition Through
Social Networks, New York: Garland, 2000.
Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler, Connections: New Ways of Working in the
Networked Organization, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991. A general study
of organizational uses of electronic mail.
Barry Wellman, Janet Salaff, Dimitrina Dimitrova, Laura Garton,
Milena Gulia, and Caroline Haythornthwaite, Computer networks as
social networks: Collaborative work, telework, and virtual community,
Annual Review of Sociology 22, 1996, pages 213-238. A survey of
research on the role of computer networks in creating and
transforming social networks. Many common cybermyths are exploded in
a satisfying way.
Here are some comparative studies of networks and networking in
various cultures:
Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of
Intellectual Change, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Andrew B. Kipnis, Producing Guanxi: Sentiment, Self, and Subculture
in a North China Village, Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.
Alena Ledeneva, Russia's Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking, and
Informal Exchanges, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Yadong Luo, Guanxi and Business, Singapore: World Scientific, 2000.
Alejandro Portes, ed, The Economic Sociology of Immigration: Essays
on Networks, Ethnicity, and Entrepreneurship, New York: Russell Sage
Foundation, 1995.
Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern
Italy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. An interesting
and influential book about the role of civic life in encouraging both
democracy and prosperity. Putnam describes the centuries-old pattern
in which northern Italy, where people run their lives by gathering
into a wide variety of associations, is generally a happier and
healthier place than southern Italy, where people look out for
themselves and engage in hierarchical, clientelistic relationships.
The basic point applies to the professional world as well.
Annelise Riles, The Network Inside Out, Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2000.
Barry Wellman, ed, Networks in the Global Village: Life in
Contemporary Communities, Boulder: Westview, 1999. A theoretical
introduction to the study of personal social networks, followed by
comparative studies in several countries and online.
Y. H. Wong and Thomas K. P. Leung, Guanxi: Relationship Marketing in
a Chinese Context, New York: International Business Press, 2001.
Finally, here are several books that might provide general guidance
and orientation to graduate students and others in academia. I
haven't read most of them, but if you do then please let me know what
you think.
Hazard Adams, The Academic Tribes, second edition, Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1988.
Robert R. Alford, The Craft of Inquiry: Theories, Methods, Evidence,
New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Rae Andre and Peter J. Frost, eds, Researchers Hooked on Teaching:
Noted Scholars Discuss the Synergies of Teaching and Research,
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997.
Kenneth J. Arrow, Richard W. Cottle, B. Curtis Eaves, and Ingram
Olkin, eds, Education in a Research University, Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1996.
Alexander W. Astin, Academic Gamesmanship: Student-Oriented Change in
Higher Education, New York: Praeger, 1976.
Tony Becher, Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry
and the Cultures of Disciplines, Milton Keynes: Open University
Press, 1989.
Howard S. Becker, Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and
Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1986.
Howard S. Becker, Tricks of the Trade: How to Think about Your
Research While You're Doing It, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1998.
Thomas Bender, Carl E. Schorske, and William J. Barber, American
Academic Culture in Transformation: Four Disciplines, Fifty Years,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Bennett Berger, ed, Authors of Their Own Lives: Intellectual
Autobiographies by Twenty American Sociologists, Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1990.
Ralph Berry, The Research Project: How to Write It, fourth edition,
London: Routledge 2000.
James L. Bess, Collegiality and Bureaucracy in the Modern University:
The Influence of Information and Power on Decision-Making Structures,
New York: Teachers College Press, 1988.
Robert T. Blackburn and Janet H. Lawrence, Faculty At Work:
Motivation, Expectation, Satisfaction, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1995.
Robert Boice, The New Faculty Member: Support and Fostering
Professional Development, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992.
Robert Boice, Advice for New Faculty Members: Nihil Nimus, Boston:
Allyn and Bacon, 2000.
Ernest L. Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the
Professoriate, Princeton, NJ: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement
of Teaching, 1990.
Alan Brinkley, Betty Dessants, Michael Flamm, Cynthia Griggs Fleming,
and Eric Rothschild, eds, The Chicago Handbook for Teachers: A
Practical Guide to the College Classroom, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1999.
Alfonso Borrero Cabal, The University as an Institution Today: Topics
for Reflection, Paris: UNESCO, 1993.
Burton R. Clark, The Higher Education System: Academic Organization
in Cross-National Perspective, Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1983.
Timothy Clark and Nicholas Royle, eds, The University in Ruins:
Essays on the Crisis in the Concept of the Modern University,
Stirling, UK: Oxford Literary Review, 1995.
Jonathan R. Cole, Elinor G. Barber, and Stephen R. Graubard, eds, The
Research University in a Time of Discontent, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1994.
Francis M. Cornford, Microcosmographia Academica, Ares, 1995.
Larry Cuban, How Scholars Trumped Teachers: Change Without Reform in
University Curriculum, Teaching, and Research, 1890-1990, New York:
Teachers College Press, 1999.
Jan Currie and Janice Newson, eds, Universities and Globalization:
Critical Perspectives, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998.
John S. Daniel, Mega-Universities and Knowledge Media: Technology
Strategies for Higher Education, London: Kogan Page, 1996.
Gordon B. Davis and Clyde A. Parker, Writing the Doctoral
Dissertation: A Systematic Approach, Barron's, 1997.
A. Leigh Deneef, Craufurd D. Goodwin, and Ellen Stern McCrate, eds,
The Academic's Handbook, Durham: Duke University Press, 1988.
Robin Derricourt, An Author's Guide to Scholarly Publishing,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Patrick Dias, Aviva Friedman, Peter Medway, and Anthony Pare, Worlds
Apart: Acting and Writing in Academic and Workplace Contexts, Mahwah,
NJ: Erlbaum, 1999.
James J. Duderstadt, A University for the Twenty-First Century, Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.
August Epple, Organizing Scientific Meetings, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997.
James J. F. Forest, ed, University Teaching: International
Perspectives, New York: Garland, 1998.
Andrew J. Friedland and Carol L. Folt, Writing Successful Science
Proposals, Yale University Press, 2000.
Peter J. Frost and M. Susan Taylor, eds, Rhythms of Academic Life:
Personal Accounts of Careers in Academia, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage,
1996.
William Germano, Getting It Published: A Guide for Scholars and
Anyone Else Serious About Serious Books, University of Chicago Press,
2001.
Hugh Davis Graham and Nancy Diamond, The Rise of American Research
Universities: Elites and Challengers in the Postwar Era, Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Norman Graves and Ved Varma, eds, Working for a Doctorate: A Guide
for the Humanities and Social Sciences, London: Routledge, 1997.
Allan D. Grimshaw, Collegial Discourse: Professional Conversation
Among Peers, Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1989.
Ronald Gross, The Independent Scholar's Handbook, Ten Speed Press, 1993.
Malinda L. Hayes, Encouraging Words: A Source Book of Words and
Phrases for Dissertation and Report Writers, Beckham House, 1999.
Reza Hazemi, Stephen Hailes, and Steve Wilber, eds, The Digital
University: Reinventing the Academy, Berlin: Springer, 1998.
Mary Morris Heiberger and Julia Miller Vick, The Academic Job Search
Handbook, second edition, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1996.
S. C. Humphreys, ed, Cultures of Scholarship, Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1997.
Clark Kerr, Higher Education Cannot Escape History: Issues for the
Twenty-First Century, Albany: State University of New York Press,
1994.
Bruce A. Kimball, Orators and Philosophers: A History of the Idea of
Liberal Education, New York: Teachers College, Columbia University,
1986.
Jennie Jacobs Kronenfeld and Marcia Lynn Whicker, Getting an Academic
Job: Strategies for Success, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996.
Leo M. Lambert, Stacey Lane Tice, and Patricia H. Featherstone, eds,
University Teaching: A Guide for Graduate Students, Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 1996.
Ann F. Lucas, Leading Academic Change: Essential Roles for Department
Chairs, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000.
Beth Luey, Handbook for Academic Authors, third edition, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995.
David Madsen, Successful Dissertations and Theses: A Guide to
Graduate Student Research from Proposal to Completion, Jossey-Bass,
1991.
Elaine Martin, Changing Academic Work: Developing the Learning
University, Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 1999.
Randy Martin, ed, Chalk Lines: The Politics of Work in the Managed
University, Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.
Dennis P. McIlnay, How Foundations Work: What Grantseekers Need to
Know About the Many Faces of Foundations, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,
1998.
Robert J. Menges et al, Faculty in New Jobs: A Guide to Settling In,
Becoming Established, and Building Institutional Support, San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999.
Richard E. Miller, As If Learning Mattered: Reforming Higher
Education, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.
Richard W. Moore, Winning the PhD Game, New York: Dodd, Mead, 1985.
Steven Muller, ed, Universities in the Twenty-First Century,
Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1996.
Margret Newhouse, Outside the Ivory Tower: A Guide for Academics
Considering Alternative Careers, Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1993.
Thomas E. Ogden and Israel A. Goldberg, Research Proposals: A Guide
to Success, second edition, New York: Raven Press, 1995.
Bernice A. Pescosolido and Ronald Aminzade, eds, The Social Worlds of
Higher Education: Handbook for Teaching in a New Century, Thousand
Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1999.
Robert L. Peters, Getting What You Came For, New York: Noonday Press, 1992.
Estelle M. Phillips and D. S. Pugh, How to Get a PhD: Managing the
Peaks and Troughs of Research, Milton Keynes: Open University Press,
1987.
Fred Pyrczak, ed, Completing Your Thesis or Dissertation: Professors
Share Their Techniques and Strategies, Pyrczak, 2000.
Bill Readings, The University in Ruins, Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1996.
Richard M. Reis, Tomorrow's Professor: Preparing for Academic Careers
in Science and Engineering, New York: IEEE Press, 1997.
Julie A. Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual
Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Robert M. Rosenzweig, The Political University: Policy, Politics, and
Presidential Leadership in the American Research University,
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
Audrey J. Roth, The Research Paper: Process, Form, and Content,
Wadsworth, 1998.
Sara Ruddick and Pamela Daniels, Working It Out: 23 Women Writers,
Artists, Scientists, and Scholars Talk About Their Lives and Work,
New York: Pantheon Books, 1977.
Kjell Erik Rudestam and Rae R. Newton, Surviving Your Dissertation: A
Comprehensive Guide to Content and Process, second edition, Sage,
2000.
Jan Secrist, Debra J. Wright, and Jacqueline Fitzpatrick, Secrets for
a Successful Dissertation, Sage, 1998.
Mark A. Shields, ed, Work and Technology in Higher Education: The
Social Construction of Academic Computing, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum,
1994.
Sheila Slaughter and Larry L. Leslie, Academic Capitalism: Politics,
Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University, Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Page Smith, Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America, New
York: Viking, 1990.
Liz Stanley, ed, Knowing Feminisms: On Academic Borders, Territories
and Tribes, London: Sage, 1997.
David Sternberg, How to Complete and Survive a Doctoral Dissertation,
St. Martin's Press, 1981.
John M. Swales and Christine B. Feak, Academic Writing for Graduate
Students: Essential Tasks and Skills: A Course for Nonnative Speakers
of English, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Jane Tompkins, A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned, Reading,
MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996.
Pierre van den Berghe, Academic Gamesmanship: How to Make a PhD Pay,
London: Abelard-Schuman, 1970.
Steven Walfish and Allen K. Hess, eds, Succeeding in Graduate School:
The Career Guide for Psychology Students, Erlbaum, 2001.
Marcia Lynn Whicker, Jennie Jacobs Kronenfeld, and Ruth Ann
Strickland, Getting Tenure, Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993.
Acknowledgements
This essay has been improved by comments from Mark Ackerman, Sue
Allen, Robert Barger, Barbara Brett, Phil Candy, Harry Collins, David
Crawford, Randal Doane, Paul Dourish, George Duckett, Ken Friedman,
Sara Gronim, Jonathan Grudin, Eszter Hargittai, Michael Helm, Rebecca
Henderson, Martha Hiller, Bill Humphries, Chuck Huff, Larry Hunter,
Larry Israel, Lisa Jadwin, Mihail Jalobeanu, Nitish Jha, Matthew
Jones, Simon Peyton Jones, Joaquim Jorge, Tom Lane, Bettina Lange,
Arun Mehta, Roy Rosenzweig, Charles Rhyne, Yvonne Rogers, Alan
Scheinine, Mark Smucker, Jonathan Sterne, Susan Sterne, Jozsef Toth,
Mark Warschauer, Jeremy Wertheimer, Alan Wexelblat, and JoAnne Yates.
Advertisement
Consider subscribing to The Red Rock Eater News Service, a mailing
list to which I send whatever I find interesting. To subscribe, send
a message to RRE's automated server like so:
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: subscribe rre
For more information, including complete archives, see the RRE home page at:
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/rre.html
end
|
