Abstract
As we write this editorial, we have just finished our cosponsoring attendance at the Research in Management Learning & Education (RMLE) Unconference in Copenhagen. The Unconference afforded us an important opportunity to build community with editors from the other three major management education journals—Eugene Sadler-Smith from Management Learning, Ken Brown from Academy of Management Learning & Education, and Vijay Kannan from DSI Journal of Innovative Education—and to move SOTL work in new directions as an academic field. We don’t see it as hyperbole to say that the Unconference was one of the most energizing experiences we have had in any of our JME roles.
Participating in an Unconference structure—one that deliberately destabilizes traditional academic meeting hierarchy to foster creative, often unfettered idea generation—led us to consider the process by which ideas and questions ultimately become published journal articles. What we came to realize from this experience is that the scholarly creative endeavor of publication is a much longer, messier, and quite personal process than we had overtly acknowledged prior to the meeting. During the one and one half days of the Unconference, we participated in group discussions with no set agenda or named facilitator that were organically put together, ever-changing, and group member-directed. Following the first morning session, we weren’t at all sure where things were going (a not entirely comfortable place for journal editors!) and had to consciously remind ourselves to “trust the process.” By the end of the Unconference, we were interacting with participants who were excited, empowered, and committed to seeing their now more refined ideas for management education research and scholarship move to the next step in the development process. We’ve begun to ask ourselves, “How did that happen? What moved Unconference group participants from garden variety brainstorming to publishable SOTL research agendas?”
How creative ideas bubble up individually, get burnished by collaborative feedback, and eventually move toward realization is of great interest to us as editors. Many different scholarly models attempt to unpack the idea generation process, and what we have found is that they all include some critical interplay between an individual’s knowledge and passions, and those of others in a group setting (see, e.g., Harvey, 2014; Paulus & Brown, 2007; Welsh & Dehler, 2013). The experience we shared at the Unconference seems consistent with the notion that scholarly ideas that eventually find their way to publication owe debts to many factors other than individual creative initiative. While Paulus maintains that group creativity starts with the individual (Harms & van der Zee, 2013), he also asserts that individual idea generation results only from many antecedent and iterative conditions, such as group commitment to creativity, skilled group facilitation, and a stimulating collective ethos. Engaging, too, with others’ ideas during the creative process feeds one’s own ideation (Paulus & Brown, 2007).
So, as SOTL scholars, we are most creative in community—a community that cares about what happens to each member within, that respects each person’s ownership of what he or she thinks is interesting, and that is engaged for the long-haul. And being members of such a community requires that we use skills other than those we normally find included in scholarly mentoring: ceding the floor when a participant gets particularly caught up in an idea, being patient while a group member struggles to articulate an idea, or engaging with an idea through a hermeneutic of generosity. Each of these resists linear thought development and yet was instrumental in the energy and outcomes that we observed at the Unconference. These are the human processes that move ideas into publications that contribute to our collective knowledge.
Much has been written about the role of the journal editor in knowledge creation (see Baruch, Konrad, Aguinis, & Starbuck, 2008), and prior to the Unconference experience we viewed our Editors-in-Chief role primarily as being operant further along in the creative process—for example, during Writers Workshops where some form of manuscript is already in place or during the end of the review process when ideas are most set, having been structured and refined into a form close to publication. Our participation in the Unconference helped us recognize that our contribution as Editors-in-Chief needs to begin earlier, and stimulated us to reflect on how we might foster structures and spaces where innovative ideas are tossed around and built upon, pulsing with energy and commitment, at nascent stages of the article publication process. We’re now reflecting on what those structures and spaces might look like, and how we might we enact them at any stage of the knowledge generation process.
Some of those structures and spaces are already in place at JME, particularly in our developmental review and editorial orientation. But we can and should do more. We have to support—but not get in the way of—other peoples’ creative process and recognize that there is enormous value not just in the end “product” of a JME article but in the nourishing steps along the way. To that end, we are committed to our “JME Roadshows,” where we and the Associate Editors represent JME at conferences and other scholarly meetings, talking with potential authors about their research. We interact each year with literally hundreds of people this way and are steadfast in practicing the tough-to-model but exceptionally important idea development behaviors we observed at the Unconference in order to open up the creative space necessary for scholarship to flourish. In addition, our editor’s email,
In this issue, we bring together articles that explore a range of topical areas in management education including questions about taken-for-granted assumptions in the resources we use. Among the areas addressed are defensiveness in the classroom and how understanding neuroscience may help us minimize it, the impact of the Cold War on textbooks used in contemporary classrooms, how students derive benefits from networks and networking, transitioning our syllabi from pedagogy to andragogy, and challenging the use of textbooks in intro OB courses. Nothing here for the faint of heart in management education! We know you will find them interesting, useful, and provocative.