Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies: Itinerant Experts in a Knowledge Economy
Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies: Itinerant Experts in a Knowledge Economy
Selling Technology: The Changing Shape of Sales in an Information Economy (Collection on Technology and Work)
Marginality and Problem-Solving Effectiveness in Broadcast Search
Organization Science
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Scholars studying organizations are typically discouraged from telling, in print, their own stories. The expression “telling our own stories” is used as a proxy for field research projects that, in their written form, explicitly rely on a scholar’s personal involvement in a field. By personal involvement in a field, I mean a scholar’s engagement in a set of mental activities that connect her to a field. The assumption is that personal involvement is antithetical to maintaining professional distance. In this paper, I argue that the taboo against telling our own stories stems in part from an epistemological misunderstanding. Learning from the field entails upholding both distance and involvement; the two dimensions should not be conceptualized as opposite ends of a continuum. Moreover, I suggest that the taboo has become too extreme and stifles our collective capacity to generate new insights. To make this argument, I start by discussing the general taboo against telling one’s own stories. Second, I focus on the rationale set forth to justify not only the taboo but also its limitations. Third, I examine what distance entails and how involvement, far from lessening distance, creates opportunities for generating potentially strong theoretical insight. Fourth, I showcase several areas of theoretical development that might benefit from revisiting the taboo. I conclude by reviewing key practical implications of such a shift for our profession and by arguing that organizational scholarship could gain a great deal from relaxing the taboo.