I’m currently in the second last day of the Academy of Management 2010 annual meeting in Montréal

http://annualmeeting.aomonline.org/2010/ , with over 8,000 primarily academics.

This afternoon I had the opportunity to sit in on four paper presentations, two of which I had the opportunity to review and critique earlier this year as part

of the blinded review process. Being able to

interact with scholars from other institutions and evaluate their research increasingly shows me that whilst Walden’s quantitative requirements are probably less than most PhD programmes’, that their introduction to research theory and design in their newly-redesigned 8008 Foundations, RSCH 8100, and RSCH 8200 that I have completed so far, really allow us to make sure we’re asking the right questions when we get to the micro level.

This afternoon, one of the questions posed to a presenter who is a PhD student and faculty-member at the University of Maryland, was about the epistemological foundations of his definition of “aggressiveness” in terms of competitive signalling (the four papers were themed on competitive signalling in the Business Policy and Strategy division), and he could not answer the question. Walden’s systematic approach to research design necessarily would have addressed the fundamental epistemological and ontological issues as a matter of necessity in refining the right research questions and selecting the right research designs and methodologies and analyses to address them with the most validity as well as remaining cognizant of social relevance–not forgetting why we’re doing any of this in the first place. Walden’s Scholar-Practitioner model tries to keep this issue front and centre, but must therefore caution that much more that academia cannot compromise on theory construction and compromise internal or external validity to encourage practitioners to see the value in theory and expend effort to adapt it rather than eschew theory altogether. I feel that much of the time that practitioners claim that theory has no value in the real world and dismiss it, they do not know the theory in the first place; just as I did not feel right asserting how much I didn’t like LOST until I’d watched the entire series, I don’t feel that rejecting a theory without first demonstrating some mastery of it and a true willingness to adopt it if you later find value in it, is an informed decision.

Although I feel that abstracting a general theory from empirical data is already meeting practitioners halfway (and that to claim that they cannot apply theory–which was derived from data from the real world in the first place–and expect academics then to deduce back for them a specific application, when they are the ones getting paid the big bucks too, is to ask to meet us 3/4 of the way), sometimes academics do forget why we are doing any of this in the first place.

This experience has also reinforced my belief that Walden should encourage its doctoral students much more strongly to participate and present their research at events such as these, not only for the benefit of the students’ academic careers, but to showcase these strengths Walden has and mitigate the uphill aspect of the battle to legitimize Walden despite the bad reputation of diploma mills that already handicap us ceteris paribus.  I wanted to note also that only Qiang Li’s presentation alluded that different cultures may also differentially reflect and value signalling behaviours.  In spite of the Academy of Management claiming a 43% non-US membership at last night’s New Member Orientation, I still feel that many American researchers tend to portray an ethnocentric approach to research, not by claiming that Western attitudes and values are the best or even that their research only considers that specific case (external validity, in research design terminology), but simply seems naive of any other views or value systems.

The listing for this afternoon’s BPS division paper presentations was as follows: