Category Archives: academia

academia, events worth blogging, Hierarchy, Uncategorized

Chairing academic sessions for fun and… diversity #IST2018 #manels #academia

Leave a comment

So, the International Sustainability Transitions conference has come and gone. A fine event, with a huge number of scholars delivering papers, speed talks, with plenty of time for schmoozing and boozing.  I wrote already about the problem of manels and ‘What is to be Done’, but that was before I had a) delivered my own talk and b) chaired a session unexpectedly.

So this post is to talk through how those went, what I learned, what I would do differently.  #reflexivity #narcissism

My presentation

  • I almost had a horrible powerpoint melt down.  So  always have the latest version on your email account (which I did) but ALSO have it on two (not one, but two) NEW memory sticks.
  • Having a countdown clock (my tablet) was hugely useful
  • I talked for too long explaining the multiple streams approach, but people seemed to appreciate it.
  • I didn’t talk about my methodology and nobody gave a damn.  In my opinion, if you aren’t trying to make a methodological contribution, then don’t waste limited time in a short session (ten mins) talking about it.
  • I asked the chair of the session for permission, and then I cut my session down by two minutes and used that time (as I’d previously advocated) to have people turn to the person next to them and try to come up with a question.

hm3-q-and-as

(source)

  • I am biased, and one is not a sample, but I think that there was extra energy in the room, and I got more, shorter, sharper questions than the following three speakers, who kept to the traditional format….

 

My chairing

The following morning I went to a session where the scheduled chair was not available.  The (good) advice from the conference organisers was that in such a situation, the speaker scheduled to be last should be the chair, since they are highly motivated to keep everyone to time.  I thought ‘sod it’, I’ll volunteer (I had been volunteering for the past two days, in my purple t-shirt).  So, I took the opportunity (not asking anyone’s permission, as I recall – perhaps I did ask the first speaker) to try out the “turn to the person next to you” innovation.

In my opinion there are four key roles that the chair has to accomplish in any papers-presentation session

In chronological and escalating order of difficulty

First, they have to make sure that everyone is welcomed to the session and at least mildly ‘energised’ (this can be as simple as a warm hello and a comment about lunch/the night before).
Second, they need to ensure that all powerpoints/prezis whatever are loaded onto the computer and ready to go.
Third, they have to keep schedule ticking over.  It is grossly unfair if the final speaker doesn’t get as much as the first simply because of the sequencing.  That means that speakers have to be kept to time, so that there can be some questions to them. Ask the speaker if they want –
A five minute warning as well as the mandatory “two minute warning”
questions one at a time or in batches
Fourth, they have to take all reasonable steps to ensure that everyone in the room has a realistic chance of participating, and that the discussion is not dominated/ controlled/ unduly shaped by a small coterie of the most confident/experienced/highest status actors.

So, less interesting is the fact that I was able to ensure that all four speakers got the same amount of time and we finished bang on time so people could get down for a cup of coffee and a schmooze (the most interesting bits of a conference are often the random encounters).  This was partly by giving the speakers warnings, but also, while they were answering questions, I brought up the next presentation on the computer. I also didn’t waste time introducing the speakers- they just started talking.

More usefully, though was the getting people to actually participate fully.  The first time I  I said “everyone, for two minutes, please speak with someone close to you- if you have question, get help honing it – a short question is a good question. If you have half a question, get help forming it”  there was confusion/mild bewilderment  but the ‘authority’ of the chair carried the day.  By the third speaker I could just say “you know what to do” with a wave of my hand, and they slipped into it.  (I did NOT explain the rationale)

 

So, that’s basically how it worked.  In the third Q and A and the fourth I gave priority to people who’d not asked questions before.
Again, this is one experiment, and I would hesitate to extrapolate or invoke without more efforts.  There were only about 20 people in the room, for example – might be harder with fewer or more.

BUT

  • there was a very good mix of gender with the questions
  • most people asked a question
  • some people came up to me and thanked me for the format, and were enthusiastic about it
  • one of the speakers was also very complimentary about it…

 

So, would I do this again?  Yes.  Would I have a single slide with the instructions on it?  Yes.  Would I ask people for feedback after the session? Yes.

 

The rationale

There are two purposes to this (though neither needs to be explained to the attendees unless you really want to be explicit)

Firstly, it means that people who are less confident, have been socialised into believing their question can’t be any good, are able to get help/reassurance/encouragement from others if they need it.

Secondly, it gives you options when you come to ask for questions, because there is now a sea of hands to pick from,not just the Quickdraw McGraws. This makes your job easier.

Advertisements
academia, activism, Social Movement Learning, Social Movements, sociotechnical transitions

Of manels, transitions and Ottawa. #IST2018 and #IST2019

3 Comments

The organisers of #IST2018 have worked extremely hard, and pulled together what has already been an interesting and thought-provoking programme (with a day and a half still to come). Barring a few things in the conference programme (the floor 1 and 4 switcheroo), it’s been a well-oiled machine – in part thanks to the affable and incredibly good-looking volunteers in the purple t-shirts. But I digress, because there have been – there’s not point denying it- a couple of tone-deaf moments. This blog is about one of those moments, the nature of question and answer sessions the world over, what we can learn from it, and what “we” (by which  I mean “hey you, hosts of #IST2019”) could do differently in future.

For those of you still wondering about the neologism in the title of this blog post – a manel is an all-male panel. The term was born on a Tumblr and the phenomenon has even been covered by the Financial Times. It’s not restricted to business or social sciences –  it’s a thing in the natural sciences too. The folks over at UN Global Compact have even pledged not to allow its employees to participate in or host an all-male panel. The executive director said

“Too often I’ve been the only woman on a panel. It is time that we challenge the status quo and stop making excuses — there is no shortage of qualified women,”

There’s a boycott site, where men can pledge to refuse to take part in all-male panels.

Today’s opening plenary panel, while full of rich insights  was… a manel. This did not go unnoticed in the twittersphere or in meatspace..

Now, I raised the manel issue with one of the organising committee of the conference (and in the interests of full disclosure I should say that two other members of the committee are my supervisors) and they said that there had in fact been a woman scheduled but this had fallen through and the final make-up was what we saw.

In the break after the plenary (and indeed, all day), I’ve overheard or participated in discussions about this. It left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths, mostly, but not only, women.  Let’s not catastrophize, it hasn’t meant people have been bereft, unable to take part in the many excellent discussions and sessions. It’s not the end of the world (climate change, now that is the end of the world), but it has I think dampened some enthusiasm, and become – fairly or unfairly – another anecdote for the (bulging) patriarchy scrapbook.

Alongside comments on the lack of diversity on the panel, there were twitter exhortations asking women to speak up. (And during the morning session there had been catcalls about women being chosen to ask questions, which was pretty extraordinary). I wasn’t there at the evening plenary, but I am told there was an awkward silence when women were explicitly called upon to speak out in the Q and A.

Taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture, (this is probably impolitic to say), but there is a certain irony here; in that we are seeking to reconfigure – or offer policymakers advice on reconfiguring – at the societal and systemic level, but respond with individualised “solutions” to systemic issues in our own backyard. (Then again, some of the practices within our own regime are not under the microscope, for reasons that both institutional theory and MLP scholars might well understand.)

Anyway, while, the functional utility of purposive endogenous lacrimal gland excitation as an adaptive response to the catastrophic decontainerisation of bovine lactates is low (see here) , we can still look forward to the future.

What is to be done.

I would modestly (cough, cough) put forward the following proposals

On manels

Strenuous efforts should be made to avoid manels. However, if a woman is going to be thrown in as an obvious token/fig leaf, then (and this may be controversial) I think that is probably worse than useless, and the manel should go ahead. However….

If a manel cannot be avoided,

a) it should be placed in the middle of any given conference programme, rather than the first session (which sets the emotional ‘tone’ for the event) or the last (which is what people remember- see the Peak-End effect).

b) there should be a clear acknowledgement that a manel is taking place, with a short explanation/assurance that the organisers took all reasonable steps to avoid this. The audience could be invited to suggest women who could have been asked to participate

Re the Q and A – time-keeping and emotional tone.

Chairs of sessions and facilitators of panels should be asked to keep all speakers strictly to time, perhaps via the ‘clap clinic’ method, which seeks to tackle  the problem of power dynamics between chairs (sometimes lower status) and the speakers. It simply involves setting a time limit and when that time is reached, starting to applaud and asking the (already prepared) audience to join in.

hm2-clap-clinic

Chairs of sessions and facilitators of panels should be asked to consider how they will ensure that those people who traditionally do not speak up (many women, some men, many ‘newbies’, introverts etc) can have brief opportunities to confer and hone their question. Perhaps via the ‘Q and A’ method.

Once the chair/facilitator sees a sea of hands (and they probably will) it will be possible to pick – say – a woman, a man and another woman: each to ask a question of no more than three sentences. Not all of the questions will necessarily be interesting, but then again, “interesting” might be in the eye of the beholder.

 

What other (better) suggestions do people have?   #reflexivelearning and all that….

 

UPDATE Thurs 14 June – from a very astute person who sent me a direct message on Twitter (reprinted with permission)

Good question, some thoughts if i may.

  • participatory sessions (see format of Transformations Dundee 2017 for example), speed sessions are useful for the audience – though may not suit all speakers.
  • Wider disciplinary contributions, but taking care who contributors run parallel to (a multidisciplinary session / more international perspectives in competition with a ‘big name speaker from within transitions’ would be a shame for all involved).
  • Question etiquette enforcement (short or microphone removed, ECR first – even if it requires a moment’s silence).
  • Balance in speakers – have a white middle-age male quota and don’t exceed it, actively approach others (and do not allow the programme to be dominated as it is).
  • Workshops.
  • Creative spaces e.g. collaborative writing jams.
  • Networking sessions.
academia, activism, Looting the Ivory Tower

Field mobilization and how little we know… #PhD

Leave a comment

Really really wish I’d gotten better hold of the institutional theory leg of this stool (chair?) that is my thesis earlier in the process. Am good enough on the policy stuff (MSA, PE, ACF etc etc), and the empirics, and even the sociotech transitions stuff. But I wasn’t deep, wide and overview-y enough on institutional theory early enough (not for lack of trying – it’s just … well…   (and yes, to my critical management theory friends out there, I know that inst theory is a panglossian functionalist colonialist exercise. I probably come down on the Willmott side of the Willmott-Lok debate, fwiw.).

Anyway, better late (and it is late) than never. Just mostly finished this great article:

Grodal, S. and O’Mahony, S. 2017. How does a Grand Challenge become Displaced? Explaining the Duality of Field Mobilization. Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 60, 4, pp.1801-1827.

And there are some corker bits in an article about how the big dreams of nano-tech were cut down to size by short-term needs of funders/boosters.
The existing literature does not always recognize the political realities of field dynamics that can unfold after fields mobilize and attempt to make progress on grand challenges.
(Grodal and O’Mahony, 2017:1802)

Without examining how participants’ rhetoric and underlying interests evolve as they take action and dynamically try to influence progress towards a field goal, we cannot explain what affects progress on grand challenges.
(Grodal and O’Mahony, 2017:1802)

While much research has focused on how field participants use rhetorical strategies to mobilize consensus on a common field-level goal (Wry, Lounsbury, & Glynn, 2011), it is the later stages, during which action is required, that can be more complicated.
(Grodal and O’Mahony, 2017:1803)

What is missing is an understanding of what happens after mobilization, when diverse field participants take action to address field-level goals in dynamic environments.
(Grodal and O’Mahony, 2017:1803)

There is a LOT else here, too late to really chew on as I finish this thesis. But I become ever more convinced that the only way we can do better on the multiple problems with sociotechnical transitions (both academically and in the real world) is by a much richer appreciation of institutional theory, institutional work and other tools.

Even then we will be screwed, but at least we will be a better-informed screwed…. Which is comforting.

academia, The Thesis

Mundane epiphany #94 on the thesis

5 Comments

I am walking around the park pretty much every morning now, with my backpack (weights, books) and journal articles in hand.

And things are coming together on this (though they probably could have earlier. So it goes).   And two mundane epiphanies that will mean nothing to anyone except me and my supervisors (who I assume do not read this blog).

a) this thesis is simply an investigation of collective contrapreneurship at the field-level, distributed maintenance work with a dash of ‘creative’ and defensive’  (trust me, this does actually make sense).

b) policy entrepreneurship in the Multiple Streams Approach is simply institutional work based only/primarily the regulative pillar of a field. Institutional entrepreneurship is work on the normative and cultural-cognitive pillars (Scott, 2005) (as well as the regulative one).  These aren’t much on display in the first two windows I look at, but become A Thing (as the young people say) in the third and fourth windows.

c) maintenance/defensive work is just trying to shore up the (one or more of the) three pillars of an institutional logic/set of institutional logics.

d) my theatres of power triangles could usefully be configured in terms of convening and partaking and collective entrepreneurial/contrapreneurial work within a field, with sub-fields interacting…

academia, biographical

Boxer’s disease

Leave a comment

“Boxer could not get beyond the letter D. He would trace out A, B, C, D in the dust with his great hoof, and then would stand staring at the letters with his ears back, sometimes shaking his forelock, trying with all his might to remember what came next and never succeeding. On several occasions, indeed, he did learn E, F. G. H, and by the time he knew them, it was always discovered that he had forgotten A, B, C , and D.”

Orwell, G. 1945. Animal Farm, p.30

 

Let’s just say there are only so many neurons in my skull, and they have their limits…

Ibn Khaldun etc etc.

academia, After The Thesis, Australia, Social Movements, sociotechnical transitions

Fear and the capture of new markets #transitions #energy

2 Comments

Oh I want a post-doc.  Not just for the paying of the bills: I actually know what I want to study too. I want to study the mobilisation of emotions (fear, greed, hope etc) by entrepreneurs and contrapreneurs to

  • create new markets
  • capture existing/emerging ones
  • prevent new ones forming because it offends your a) worldview and/or b) balance sheet.

solarpower feasibleI know how I’d study it too, conceptually: I want to combine institutional theory (my new intellectual crush – but I’m not blind to the critique of it from the critical management studies types) and transitions studies (I’m probably ready to move from the MLP – clunky, undercooked and overegged – to Strategic Niche Management.  And that would also take in social movement studies, I suppose.

While of course not losing sight, a la Benjamin the Donkey in Animal Farm, that it is all futile anyway because Oh Susie we ran out of time, as Bill McKibben just said about The Donald.

Where does all this exuberance come from?  From the incumbent tactics on display in my ‘home’ country of Australia.  Basically, the guys who like and/or own centralised fossil development realise that they need to slow down the move towards renewables and grid fragmentation (the two overlap, but aren’t the same thing).

And so they’re beating up all sorts of stories about inevitable blackouts.  This is standard operating procedure when a new technology threatens the interests of people currently making a packet: you’d only be surprised if it wasn’t happening.  But here’s what someone told the fantastic Reneweconomy site. about the emerging market in peer-to-peer electricity trading etc (emphasis added).

The networks, initially, for convincing the regulator to allow them to spend tens of millions of dollars on IT systems and research, and further out because they might see a role for themselves in aggregating this demand and playing in the wholesale or grid services market.

Greensync and co like it because they want to be the traders of this new commodity. As we reported on Wednesday, in our story devoid of blackout threats, we will get some idea of what this DSO and orchestration might look like, and who might control it, when AEMO and the ENA release a joint report next week.

And as one wise soul pointed out to RenewEconomy on the sidelines of the conference: “A lot of companies are hanging their hat on this. There’s a lot of money to be made for this, they all want boxes in houses, and they want it to be their box.”

And, this good person further noted, the best way to get things moving in Australia – and grab control of a citizen’s asset – is to spread alarmist rhetoric, confect crisis, and then look like you have a solution.

It’s the old “stampede” tactic. To be studied in real-time.  Looking at the cultural-cognitive and normative pillars, rather than (just) the regulative one. Looking at the competing institutional logics and resulting complexity, and how different actors engage in different types of institutional work/entrepreneurship/convening/partaking to manage that complexity.  Ya basta with the tedious regime (in the MLP sense)  stuff, based as it is on structuration and a fudge of monumental and consequential proportions…

Onwards (and “Death to Humanity”, as Napoleon the pig would say. Obvs).

 

academia, biographical

Rabbit Holes, Mole Hills and living life forward… #PhDburblings

Leave a comment
tenniel
The White Rabbit checks his watch

The fairly horrible (emotionally) but exhilarating (intellectually) process of The Thesis is coming to an end, overdue and incomplete as they mostly are.

While yomping around the park this morning articles with title like “Institutional Logics and Institutional Work: Should they be agreed?” and “How are Management fashions institutionalized? The role of institutional work”, I got to thinking – while not petting two dogs – about what this four years has given me (or what I’ve taken from them).

One of the realisations is that I’ve been using a negative metaphor for one of my (many) Bad Habits.  When I got (over)excited about a new thing (be it empirical or conceptual) I would read around/into the topic and cram my brains.  This we labelled ‘going down a rabbit hole’.  Possibly after Alice, I don’t know.  The point being, it was a ‘distraction’, and you’d come out covered in dirt and squinting, perhaps with pink-eye, or at the very least, not such Bright Eyes.

But another way of looking at it is that you’re clambering up, slowly and inefficiently, up a mole-hill, or up the slope of a much bigger hill, if you’re trying to understand a Big Theory (organizational studies/institutional theory/critical management studies or soctech transitions or public policy blah blah blah).  And from the top of a mole hill, or a mountain, you may – unless the sweat gets in your eyes – be able to get a better view of the terrain.  Now, you may not understand what you see, you may have to climb up the same hill (quicker next time? because you know the way, have better muscles) to see the terrain.

Anyway, it’s a more optimistic way of thinking about things. God knows why I like it.

Are all the rabbit-holes recategorisable as mole-hills or mountains?  Nope, some are indeed rabbit holes, (or seem that way now).   Could I have done better?  Oh yes. But we live our lives forward, while understanding them – if at all – backwards.

And the irony/problem is this – I really think I “get’ it” now: I can see the terrain(s) fairly clearly. I know where the quicksand is, where the well-worn paths are.  I see where I might be able to make a “contribution”.

But will I be able to get a job where I can ‘get it’ productively (both for myself – food on table – and for ‘society’).  I shall try.  We shall see.