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The AoM Conference 2012 – Impresssions and Reflections

The first couple of days at the Academy of Management Conference went by quickly and it has been very interesting. I have had the chance to see a number of people present whose ideas I have intensively dealt with over the past year or two. I spent most of my time at the OCIS PhD Consortium and the Professional Development Workshops listed below.

Here is a quick wrap-up of the events which I participated in and what has been most interesting to me about them.

OCIS PhD Consortium

The consortium was extremely well organized and thought through so kudos to Youngjin Yoo for organizing it. I usually pay much attention to the format of these events. In this case, I really liked the mix of student involvement and feedback/advice from senior faculty. We started the workshop with roundtable discussions of our own proposals. My group mentor was Sirkka Jarvenpaa. Due to the small size of the groups, all participants had actually read the papers, were able to give detailed, quality feedback, and ask very targeted questions. The morning roundtable session was followed by a number of stimulating talks by senior scholars, such as Michael Barrett and Robert Fichman. The keynote, and my personal favorite, was the talk by Noshir Contractor on building strong academic networks as a form of career development. Last but least, we were asked to present posters of our research at a reception of the OCIS division. Offering food and drinks certainly helped to bring a lot of spectators to the exhibition room and gave us the chance to present our ideas to a critical audience of a number of potential reviewers and journal editors.

PDW on Social Media

The Social Media PDW line-up of speakers read much like a ‘Who’s who’ in research on social media and online communities. I perceived the presence of so many renowned scholars as slightly intimidating, however the discussions at the PDW were colleagial and even the most senior scholars were very personable. Looking at the structure and process of the PDW, I liked the idea of having several panelists present only 2-3 minutes in order to raise key questions researchers in the field are facing. The most interesting contribution, to my mind, was Steven Borgatti’s and Jerry Kane’s intent to blend social media research with social network research using danah boyd’s affordances.

PDW on Sociomateriality

One of the talks I was particularly looking forward to was the one by Wanda Orlikowski who is an advocate of an approach called sociomateriality. Yet, most striking to me was not the methodological discussion surrounding this approach, but instead the research design used by Wanda in one of her recent studies called ‘Getting the truth’: exploring the material grounds of institutional dynamics in social media. In her study, Wanda contrasted how travel ratings on TripAdvisor, an online travel rating site, and a standard British travel guide by the AA are constructed, the former encompassing a mass of user-generated content whereas the latter is produced by paid experts. One the questions repeatedly posed about research concerning online communities is ‘What is different about online communities compared to offline ones?’. Wanda’s example about how these ratings come about was a superb example of where to look for these differences.

How to Create an Academic Poster? Tips and Tricks

I recently had to prepare a poster in order to present my research at the Academy of Management Conference. At the beginning of the process, I ran a little search on the internet and came across a number of really helpful sources which I wanted to share here before I forget about them again 😉

First, I thought about preparing both my oral and a poster presentation with the help of Prezi, a presentation tool I have introduced before. Although I quickly decided against that, my query actually led me to the first excellent source of information, a blog post entitled Technology Tools for Academics: Prezi by Lavanya M Proctor. Besides a nice review of the software, Lavanya refers to a Prezi on poster design by Sarah Walkowiak which I have embeded below.

Creating Effective Posters on Prezi

Another rather humorous set of instructions is provided in a blog post entitled Designing conference posters by Colin Purrington. Colin included a section on software tools for poster presentations which quickly led me to discover Postergenius.

The American Psychological Association has also published a manual called Displaying Your Findings: A Practical Guide for Creating Figures, Posters, and Presentations, the reference to which I have included below. I ordered a copy through our library and really like the chapter on poster design. Last but not least, I’d like to mention eposters.net as a place for you to store your work upon completion and a way to share your ideas with rest of the world.

Please feel free to add other relevant sources in the comment section below.

References:

Nicol, A. A. M., & Pexman, P. M. (2003). Displaying Your Findings: A Practical Guide for Creating Figures, Posters, and Presentations. American Psychological Association.

AOM Party Calendar

Besides the above described Professional Development Workshops at the Academy of Management Conference, it is, of course, also important to mingle with other researchers at some of the receptions hosted by the various divisions or by particular universities. For this reason, Professors @SekouBermis and @Unzueta have set up a public Google Calendar (thanks to this great tutorial).

AOM PhD Consortia and Professional Development Workshops

The Academy of Management Conference in Boston is just around the corner. It’s taking place from August 3-7, 2012. I had the privilege to attend the conference for the first time last year and wrote several blog posts about the experience. First of all, I’d like to say that the conference is great value for money. Students pay 90 USD for the annual membership and another 90 USD to sign up for the conference. In return, they get five days of high quality symposia, paper sessions, roundtable discussions, and much more.

If you’re a PhD student like myself, you should definitely consider applying for one of the several doctoral consortia. Last year, I attended a session hosted by the Organizational Development and Change (ODC) division. This year, I found another one that suits my research interests even better. It is the PhD consortium organized by the Organizational Communication and Information Systems. The organizer, Professor Yoo, even managed to secure a research grant, which helps most of the attendants finance their stay.

The second most outstanding offer next to the PhD consortia is probably what is called, in AOM speak, a PDW, i.e. a Professional Development Workshop. This type of workshop is targeted at established researchers who want to familiarize themselves with methods they haven’t used before or with emerging fields of research. I’ve listed my favorites below.

Researching the Informal Economy: Opportunities and Challenges of Social Media Research
Sociomateriality in Practice: Considering Consequences in Organizational Life and Research
Advanced Networks PDW: Cutting-Edge Social Network Theoretical Work and ERGM

To my mind, these workshops are a great way to get in touch with the people whose work I’m reading on a daily basis. I’m particularly looking forward to seeing Steve Borgatti, Ann Majchrzak, Samer Faraj, Sirkka Jarvenpaa, Wanda Orlikowski, Jerry Kane, as well as Martin Kilduff present and discuss their recent research projects.

Social Media and Knowledge Management: Opportunity or Threat?

I’ve acquainted myself with the work of Georg von Krogh when I first dealt with Nonaka and Takeuchi’s (1995) Knowledge Creating Company in a module on Organizational Learning at the University of Nottingham. That is mainly because in 2006, Nonaka, von Krogh, and Voelpel published a review on Knowledge Creation Theory in the journal Organization Studies that I happened to come across while finishing my coursework for the above mentioned module.

More recently, Professor von Krogh and his colleagues edited a very interesting issue of the journal Long Range Planning dealing with social software and strategy, which I referred to in an earlier blog post. In his most recent article published in the Journal of Strategic Information Systems, von Krogh deals with the impact of social software on knowledge management. von Krogh states that, on the upside, employees who use social software can do their work more flexibly. In addition, they can take better, more timely local decisions and they can solve tasks and communicate more efficiently. On the downside, the protection of critical knowledge assets becomes increasingly difficult, threatening the overall value of the firm. As a consequence, costs and risks need to be carefully balanced against the potential gains.

von Krogh further poses a number of questions that need to be addressed by future research in the field of strategic information systems, namely:

What are the choices and implications of social software for knowledge processes in organizations, and how do these differ from those of traditional knowledge management?
What are the barriers and enablers to the adoption of knowledge management by social software in ﬁrms?
How does the ﬁrm ensure the value of knowledge when implementing knowledge management by social software?
How do ﬁrms balance implementations of knowledge management?
What are the consequences of knowledge management by social software for competitive advantage?
How do ﬁrms dynamically recreate boundaries?

References:

Nonaka, I., & Takeuchi, H. (1995). The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation. New York: Oxford University Press.

Nonaka, I., von Krogh, G. von, & Voelpel, S. (2006). Organizational Knowledge Creation Theory: Evolutionary Paths and Future Advances. Organization Studies, 27(8), 1179–1208.

von Krogh, G. (2012). How does social software change knowledge management? Toward a strategic research agenda. The Journal of Strategic Information Systems. 21(2), 154-164.