foreign [Music] welcome everybody to the final episode of the AMR origin series, at least underneath our team of AMR editors. We launched the series about two and a half years ago, or just over two years ago, as part of one of the initiatives that we would engage in as an AMR editorial team underneath the leadership of Sherry Thatcher, our editor-in-chief. And so to bookend or to wrap up the series, at least as it stands underneath the team that have launched it and put it on for the last few years, we're going to chat a little bit about or reflect a little bit on why we launched this series, what did we get from launching the series, what have we learned, what might we do differently, and how do we think that some of this content can live on into the future. So I'm joined for this final discussion and interview by Sherry, and who and I are going to have a little bit of a discussion about the series and what we can take from it. So Sherry, thank you for

being here, of course. I'm so excited to be here. I can't believe it's been two and a half years since we launched this. I can't believe it's been three years since our term, but I'm really excited to be able to talk and reflect on the origin series. Awesome. So, when you set out at the start of your term and sort of discussing potential initiatives and where you were going to invest time, effort, and energy, and where we as a team would put our focus, what were you hoping to achieve in sort of launching this concept of the origins, the AMR origin series, and to what extent do you think you've, you or all of us collectively, have been able to hit on some of those aims, objectives, or things that you were striving to achieve? Yeah, that's a great question. I think this was a perfect example of one of the things that we wanted to do. Our team was really focused on intentional inclusion and the idea behind the initial conclusion of diverse voices and

Global perspectives is um being able to reach people that are scholars that may not have a sense of what AMR is about or how to write theory papers. And I I had thought and really wanted to use technology in some different way than we've traditionally used to be able to reach people who don't always have access to our journals or to our workshops or to our conferences. And um to be completely um frank I didn't come up with this specific idea Richard McAdok in one of our meetings right as we were throwing around and spitballing ideas about what are some of the things that we can do to really help do this outreach and Richard said hey you know I do this other thing for the strategy field but maybe we could adapt it somewhat and do it for the AMO for AMR um. And so with a lot more discussion on our team and and with Rich we decided yeah you know this would allow us to be able to interview authors and get them to talk about where their ideas come

from because that is one of the things that we often get asked right when we're at a conference, and people go, Oh my gosh, you're the AMR editor, you're the AMR associate editor. How do you come up with your ideas? And we thought, Well, maybe it would be helpful for people to just understand where ideas come from and how people take those ideas and actually turn them into beautifully written manuscripts in their own words. And so, that is the genesis of the origin series. And I think that it was a perfect fit for our intentional inclusion of diverse voices and global perspective mission. What do you think about? No, I mean, one of the things that excites me in this sort of context is the opportunity to experiment a little bit because when you step into the role as an editor or an associate editor or into any role of leadership, you've sort of got the notion, Well, we can do what's always been done, and often it's important to carry

forward that legacy and to stick with certain institutional norms and ways of doing things and best practice. But in addition, there's an opportunity to say, Well, what hasn't been done before that we could experiment with and do something different with in order to reach a new audience, convey a new message, reveal new insights? And to me, this is one of those things that hadn't necessarily been done, and certainly not in this format. And so, I think it's part of sort of, if you think about our object as a team, it's one of the things we're doing to be a little bit different, so to at least experiment and be somewhat innovative in terms of opening up this perspective on theorizing, on writing conceptual papers, on understanding what goes into the back end of a paper. And it's certainly been, you know, there's been certain things that have been highly revealing, and we'll talk a little bit about some of those lessons in a moment, but it also hasn't necessarily been easy.

and I don't think it's necessarily appealed to everybody, right? And that's the nature of experimenting with something that's a little different, that's out of the norm, is that you'll reach some people, you'll connect with certain people, and you won't necessarily connect with everyone. Um, and so I think just being part of the sort of notion of experimenting to expand scholarship and to think about, you know, scholarship in a different way is really, really exciting. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Um, so this definitely was a big grand experiment. Um, I also love the idea we started off thinking, Okay, we were just going to be doing these videos that we could post on YouTube. And then, then I think you were the one, right, who said, No, well, let's put it on podcast form. And by doing that, I think you expand the expand it even more. It's a different way of, you know, using what we've done and putting a different fashion, but to try to reach a broader audience. And um, it certainly worked as you know, I

think that you mentioned we had about 14,000 views of some of the material um in over 60 countries, so we've certainly been able to at least reach some people, right, who may be interested in this format. Yep, so what have you personally learned from the series, either from sort of facilitating and overseeing and leading those of us who've had the chance to be involved, and/or from listening to some of the authors tell their backstories to some of their papers? Are there any sort of things that stand out as learnings for you in terms of leading it or in terms of listening as a listener? Yeah, for sure. Um, I think one of the most fun things I've learned, I think, is how excited people are to talk not necessarily about their research but about the process. Um, that there are, you know, people love their research stories and kind of how it started and then where it, where they ran into problems and roadblocks. Um, and so the enthusiasm and excitement of authors to talk about that process

and share that I actually I wasn't sure that people would be so excited to do that um so I was pleasantly surprised about their their desire too just do I wanna I wanna build on that exact point because I think it's such an interesting point and I think it's very pertinent for junior Scholars or others listening out there is that simple question of tell me the back story to your paper can reveal so much whether you meet someone at a conference and you recognize their name from a paper that you've read or whether you've got someone visiting and giving a talk at your institution and you you have to sit down and have dinner with them or have a meeting with them and you you're not too sure what to talk about I think both in terms of people having the opportunity to talk about something that's dear and meaningful to them and actually feels like a substantive conversation but on the other end of that the person who gets listening to that the opportunity to learn from that simple question and so I think it's something that I would

love to see more people going around at the Academy of Management conference and using it as a conversation sparkler and as an opportunity to learn in that kind of setting. So that just builds on the notion that people do love talking about the backstory to their research papers, right? Which again, I think it just is so funny, right? Because we always think, Oh, people love to talk about their research, but in some ways, there's more excitement about that backstory. Um, and then I just love some of the backstories. I mean, I think some of them were fabulous. Um, I particularly like the one about some authors who were talking about teaching an MBA class about network effects, and they didn't have the explanation for why something was happening. They could see that it happened. They could see this phenomenon. They said the economists had written an entire, um, article, articles about it, but yet they still didn't know how to explain it. And so they needed to write the theory paper to be able to teach better. And so we talk about research informing our

class interactions, but sometimes our class interactions can inform our theorizing and our research. My another favorite one of mine is the one about basketball coaches and how, you know, the no strategy is a strategy, and that that came about from watching a sport that many people love. And so, you know, Theory just comes from everywhere. One story that I enjoyed about not just where it came from but how it started, how the process started, was being stuck in an immigration line for three hours, and um, they started talking about a research idea, and they said by the time they passed the Customs line that they had the whole outline for the paper done. So, you know, use your time wisely, right? You never know when something is going to be an opportunity. Yeah, yeah, I think one of the other lessons for me was around team formation, and when you do land up discussing with someone something that is a little bit contentious, around which there is some energy and insight from the different individuals involved, but there is no obvious answer, that can often be

the Genesis of an opportunity for a conceptual paper when there's some other phenomenon or theoretical puzzle that collectively you can't solve but you as a as a as two or three individuals come together and recognize that that this is something in theory we should be able to speak to but we we can't um that can often be the Genesis and it's often about bringing different groups of people together someone might be coming with a certain work experience someone else with a certain theoretical background and it's that that combinatorial efforts and then I I was always intrigued by what keeps that effort going over time and and I think um you know using figures and diagrams as artifacts to create Collective understanding um sometimes they land up in the paper sometimes they don't but the whole notion of being more visual in our theorizing um I think was was something that was revealed to me consistently the willingness to take time and be patient um most of people's stories of how papers evolved were a lot longer or the

the gestation period was a lot longer than I expected. I think that it's for anyone embarking on this journey, the recognition that you don't do this in a weekend or in a few weeks or even in a few months. That it takes time for these things to germinate and to mature and to evolve, both prior to the first submission and then through the RNR process, was something that certainly struck me as being very consistent across many of the interviews. An importance almost in that paper finding its voice and finding its home and finding a perspective. So, those are certainly some of the things that struck me. I agree completely. That timing issue, right? Because it's another thing that we often hear from Junior Scholars, Oh, I can just write the theory paper first, and you know, that won't take very long. But in fact, you heard consistently from all of the authors that how long the process takes. And sometimes, it's a couple of

failed papers that are then put together or revived after a certain amount of time that end up getting published. So, it's not always that the first attempt goes somewhere; sometimes, you just need to - it just needs to marinate in the back of your mind for quite a while before it actually gets somewhere and gets to fruition. And part of that is the willingness to dive deep, diving deeper into an area in which you might already have some expertise or deep into an area where that might be a little bit less familiar. And that can often mean reading some of the classical or historical books to gain a grasp of something, or it can mean really trying to understand a body of research that you haven't yet grasped in order to incorporate that properly. It can mean, in the one, the most recent episode that we just released, it can mean going out and, as a doctoral student, taking additional coursework that you wouldn't have otherwise taken in order to get to grips.

with something so I think you've got to be willing as an author to take your time, be patient, and go deep on certain things in order to get to the perspective and in order to create breakthroughs in understanding so that you've got something novel and interesting to say. Yeah, absolutely, 100% agree. Would you do anything differently if you were gonna reconceptualize this AMR origin series from both, and it might be conceptually differently, think about sort of a different angle for it, or it might be very pragmatically differently, just basic things, or do you think you would sort of follow a similar recipe if you were going back two and a half years and relaunching it? Yeah, I mean, I think for—I can't imagine the time that we launched this that we would have done anything that different than what we did. I, of course, was not the one doing all the interviews and arranging all that, so you might have some more specific ideas on that. But one thing that I would have

loved to have been able to do um, and we talked about it briefly, but basically, we're told that we weren't able to is rather in addition to having these videos on a YouTube channel and a podcast channel, but to embed them in the paper somehow um, so that a person, as they're reading the paper, can can either before, after, during, whatever, actually listen to some of that backstory. It may actually make the paper jump to life a little bit more, so you know uh, aom is changing and revising things all the time, and possibly in the future, there may be an opportunity to do something like this, but I think that would be a nice addition. How about you, you think what would you change um, so there, there are I, I was actually a little uh, uh, concerned about the notion of people telling their backstory to their papers when we first launched this on the notion that I, that to be honest, I didn't think people would, would embrace it or tell the full story, or they would, and I was surprised that they were, and

so um I think if you had asked me at the outset, I might have said, Well, we could have a different focus to this, but I actually grew to really like and love the whole notion of there being a storyteller, telling storytelling elements to the backstories of papers. Now, I will say that um creating a podcast or a set of video interviews is hard work um and one of the things I've come to appreciate is just how hard it is to do a really, really professional job. And there are levels at which you can do this. So, for anyone who picks up a podcast and starts listening to the hidden brain or how I built this or one of those very well-produced podcasts, the team, the effort, the energy that goes into all aspects of that as someone who was producing these, I've got a new appreciation for just how much work that is. And so, I would say we chose to do it fairly simply, fairly low level of editing, no sort of professional

involvement um and just make the content available and give people access to these the interviewees' thoughts and perspectives and insights without trying to professionalize it too much, right um and and I think that that's a that's almost like a conscious choice like we we're not going to go and spend lots of money and and take up all our time trying to produce a podcast and so I just hope that our listeners can appreciate that that was a choice that we made. Now if I was continuing to do this and we would we're going to say oh we're going to scale it and we're going to make it maybe there's an opportunity to professionalize it a little bit more but I actually don't know how much more we would get out of that um I do uh uh I I I think that the uh the uh the interviews where we got people to where we spoke to more than one co-author were yeah and and you saw some of that interaction between co-authors were uh more slightly more

engaging, and you got a little bit more from seeing those interactions. So, I think if we were doing it again, I'd almost insist that we try and get multiple authors involved if there was more than one author. So, that would be something. But overall, I think in terms of getting material out there that's valuable to others, I think, and I hope that others will agree, that we did a reasonable job. Well, I think you did a fantastic job, so I would like to publicly thank you on this and say that it was one. Rich started it, and he did a fantastic job. When he was unable to do it any longer, you jumped in and have really taken it to another level, so thank you. Yeah, so how do you hope this content will continue to add value? You know, from our perspective, this will come out right at the end of our official term as the editorial team at AMR, and yet, you know, we, I suspect, don't want

people to just stop listening or to never listen to any one of these in the future again and for them to just die on the vine. So do you have any thoughts or ideas or perspectives of how it could actually have some kind of longevity to what we've created? We first started this, I was thinking, okay, um, the reach is global, right? So that's the value in terms of reaching students or junior scholars or people who don't have access to materials about understanding theorize, you know, what AMR does. Um, and, and I think that we certainly have achieved that, and, and that's where we see many people that are looking at our materials. But I also realized that these are great for PhD classes. Um, I've used them in my PhD class. I've talked to many others who have used them in their PhD classes because it does a few things, right? One, it kind of humanizes this research process, which just seems so daunting and scary to new PhD students. Um, second, it gets them to, it helps them

realize that this is a long-term like radio Theory manuscript is hard, but that ideas can come from anywhere. You don't have to be like the super smartest person in the world to be able to publish an AMR. You can have ideas that come from all sorts of things that you yourself are interested in, um, that may help you with your theorizing. So, I think it, the, our goal was to demystify where a Theory comes from, but I also think that it's helped to humanize and help people understand the process. And so, if you're teaching a PhD class, whether it's on Theory or not, I think having people listen to the interviews will give them a lot of insight, um, and having discussions around those insights will be valuable for all involved. So, I think that's, um, to me, the biggest impact place where we can encourage people to, to integrate some of what we've done with the AMR origin series. Yeah, especially if any of the papers for which we've done interviews or part of

your yes uh PhD sort of seminar syllabus assigning the interview alongside the paper, and you sort of see both sides. You see the behind-the-curtain and then the publicly facing side of the paper, um, can create a lot of richness to that discussion. Um, uh, certainly, yeah. The other area where I would love to see um, or where I think we've probably already had a little bit of an impact, but I hope we will continue to have an impact, is just in having experimented with this format and creating this Channel and talking about things in this kind of way. You know, AMJ have launched something that AMJ radio idea, which builds on and extends and does even more exploration in different areas, and they may or may not have done that if uh, if we hadn't tried this, but uh, but I believe we had some kind of impact on that, and on the same level, I hope that other editors, editorial teams, will continue to experiment with creating ways to humanize research, to reveal the back process to

discuss and debate how things happen. Um, and almost I envisage there being almost like a network of content that's available. Um, to upcoming academics, upcoming scholars in the Management Field and in broader Fields where they can tap into methodological ideas, conceptual uh, conceptual Concepts, maybe ideas about writing, ideas about certain um, uh theories. And you can almost pick and choose what you're going to consume so much more of what's happening in the world today as being consumed by podcasts and YouTube videos. And so I hope that we're a part of the sort of front end of more of that in Academia so that we can access more people, more people can get the insights and perspective and inspiration that they might need to write more papers. Absolutely. And I think again, again go back to p classes and students. You know, we know that students now are learning differently. That in our PhD seminars, in the past, I mean, it's just reading, talking, you know, and once in a while you had a speaker, right, and

um now people are consuming and getting their information in so many different ways and learning in so many different ways that I think we need to respond to that. And I do think that we've been at the front end of experimenting with this kind of thing. And I'm excited to see what some of these other journals are doing. I know that they've taken some inspiration from this, and it's exciting to see. Fantastic. Well, Sherry, thank you for being willing to drive some new initiatives, for being willing to entrust both Rich and myself with sort of doing some of this stuff, and giving us the opportunity and the access to authors to be able to chat with them, and to be able to do it underneath the IMR brand. It's been, I think for both of us, a privilege to reach out to so many people. And I'd love to just take the opportunity to thank all of the authors or the teams who were so responsive and so willing to engage and open up and share. It was certainly a joy for me, and

It's been um really really um enriching and engaging for me to be part of this, so thank you, Sherry. And I as well, I would like to thank all of the authors that have participated um, and I apologize to any authors who would like to participate but were not going to be around to do this anymore um. But I hope there'll be other venues for you to to tell your backstory um, and also to you know you of course and to Rich for for making this what it is. I mean it truly would not have come to fruition unless um you had taken the time and energy to to do this and to do it so well. So we're in great gratitude and um excited excited that we have this out there and we can always look back on it and and see the important work that we've done. Thank you. Thank you very much. Foreign

AMR Origins Series - Episode 42 - Thatcher

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