ACR 2009 Doctoral Consortium Plenary

Where to Find Good
Ideas

A Presentation to the ACR
Doctoral Consortium 2009

October 22, 2009 Pittsburgh, PN

Robert V. Kozinets
Schulich School of Business, York
University

Thursday, November 12, 2009 1

Researching Research

• From Ideas to

• Cultivation to

• Communication

• Ideas about Ideas

• Cultivating Research Cultivation

• Communicating about Communication


ESPN Zone Chicago circa June 2009


American Girl Place
circa June 2003
Chicago

The Autobiographical Nature of the
Research Enterprise

• when I was nine years old

• Sidney Levy (1996), “Stalking the
Amphisbaena”


Research Enterprise

• introspection is inevitable

• introspection is another word for being self-
conscious, aware, thoughtful, having ideas

• we all need our introspections


Research Enterprise

• Shopping
• Credit Cards
• Ethnic Identity
• “Upper-Class WASPs as Consumers”

• Popular Culture
• “The Ideology of Consumption: A Structural-
Syntactical Analysis of Dallas and Dynasty”

• Hedonic Consumption

• Aesthetic Consumption
• Compulsion and Addiction
• Animals and Pets
• Ancestry and DNA Testing

People don't choose
their careers; they are
engulfed by them.

-John Dos Passos,
American artist and
novelist


Follow your bliss

• Follow your bliss and the
universe will open doors for
you where there were only
walls
• -Joseph Campbell


Try to transform

• We live on a wounded world,
in a complex society ﬁlled with
pressing challenges
• Consumption, marketing,
business, and policy relate
directly to many of these issue


They come in big piles ....follow the map


They are alive and
organic

...they grow in emergent ways


Cultivation I

• Ideation

• Imagination

• Creation

• Preoccupation

• Ediﬁcation


What’s “Interesting”

• Murray Davis (1971), “That's Interesting!: Towards a Phenomenology of
Sociology and a Sociology of Phenomenology,” Philosophy of the Social
Sciences, 1971, 1, 309-344.
• “Interesting" vs. "non-interesting" theories = in wide circulation (e.g., is
cited in textbooks, taught in courses)
• Structure:
• 1) "It has long been thought . . .”
• 2) "But this is false . . .”
• 3) "We have seen instead that . . .”
• 4) “And further investigation is necessary to . . .


“An interesting proposition was always the negation of
an accepted one.”


Cultivation II

• Fluctuation

• Nulliﬁcation

• Puriﬁcation

• Degeneration

• Humiliation

• Accommodation


What’s a
“Contribution”?

• Karen Locke and Karen Golden-Biddle (1997), “Constructing
Opportunities for Contribution: Structuring Intertextual Coherence and
“Problematizing" in Organizational Studies, Academy of Management
Journal; 40 (Oct), 1023-1062.
• Analyses revealed two key strategies for establishing a contribution


Contributions were established by organizing existing
knowledge into a “literature” and then subverting or
problematizing it.


Cultivation III

• Deiﬁcation

• Desperation

• Obligation

• Destination

• Congratulation


"If openness means to 'go with the ﬂow', it is
necessarily an accommodation to the present. That
present is so closed to doubt about so many things
impeding the progress of its principles that
unqualiﬁed openness to it would mean forgetting the
despised alternatives to it, knowledge of which
makes us aware of what is doubtful in it."

(Allan Bloom, "The Closing of the American Mind”)


"If what is at stake is an understanding of geographical and
historical variations in the sexual division of productive and
reproductive labor, of contemporary local and regional
variations in female wage labor and women's work outside
the formal economy, of on-the-ground variations in the
everyday content of women's lives, inside and outside of their
families, then it must be recognized that, at some nontrivial
level, none of the corporal practices associated with these
variations can be severed from spatially and temporally
speciﬁc linguistic practices, from languages that not only
enable the conveyance of instructions, commands, role
depictions and operating rules, but that also regulate and
control, that normalize and spell out the limits of the
permissible through the conveyance of disapproval, ridicule
and reproach.” (Allan Pred, 1984, Place as Historically-
Contingent Process)


• Virtuous

• Challenging

• Hard to disagree with


The Art of Rhetoric

• Rhetoric is one of the arts of
using language as a means to
persuade. Along with grammar
and logic or dialectic, rhetoric is

• One of the three ancient
linguistic arts (ancient Greece)

• The use of language as a
means to persuade

• How public speakers and
writers move audiences to
action with arguments


Whose Impact? Academic Colleagues


Impacting Which
Who is reading you?
Constitutents?

Degrees of Re(se)a(r)ch

• Doesn’t get written or distributed in any
form
– 85-90% of all academics do not “regularly”
publish
• Doesn’t even get cited in your sub-field
– 77% of all business research is never, ever
cited--not even once (David Hamilton 1991)
• Doesn’t get cited beyond your sub-field
• Doesn’t get cited beyond your field
• Doesn’t get cited by academics working in
other disciplines


Degrees of Re(se)a(r)ch

• Doesn’t make its way into your own and
other’s teaching
• Doesn’t inﬂuence consulting or the practice
of business
• Doesn’t get people on blogs talking to one
another
• Doesn’t gain local or mass media coverage
• Doesn’t contribute to policy decisions
• Doesn’t affect in any way the lives of Jane
and Joe Average Consumer


Re(se)a(r)ch Out climb down from the tower


Re(sear)ch Out climb down from the tower


Sum(mary) Ideas

• To leave you with


Impactful Consumer
Research

• The Role of Rhetoric

• Clearly written and Organic intellectuals who
presented can communicate across
communications silos and “great divides”


Impactful Consumer
Research

• The importance of Accessibility

• Published in for(u)ms, representational styles, and outlets to reach thoughtful,
affected, and concerned people and decision-makers

• Books, magazines, articles, blogs, FB links, tweets


Don’t “Settle”

• Be nomadic

• Don’t get comfortable

• Re(se)a(r)ch Out


Impactful Consumer
Research

• See the Bigger Picture

• “Relevance” is Deeply Personal,
Deeply Relevant

• Topics that address the problems of
our times (“transformational”),
related to the needs of constituents
outside academia and their
concerns

• Complex and serious answers to
complex and serious issues

• Answers that would have
consequences beyond the conﬁnes
of an intellectual debate


Thank you!


Impact

• “The redemption of the university, especially in terms of the
public's appraisal of the value of research and publication,
requires all the writers who have something they want to publish
to ask themselves the question: Does this have to be a closed
communication, shutting out all but specialists willing to ﬁght their
way through thickets of jargon? Or can this be an open
communication, engaging specialists with new information and
new thinking, but also offering an invitation to nonspecialists to
learn from this study, to grasp its importance and, by extension, to
ﬁnd concrete reasons to see value in the work of the university?”

•
--P. N. Limerick (1993), “Dancing with Professors: The Trouble with
Academic Prose,” New York Times Book Review,31 October.


ACR 2009 Doctoral Consortium Plenary

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