Author Archives: KatHansen

Is Blogging Scholarship?

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Given that I started this blog to synthesize and examine certain content areas in my PhD program, I’m interested in any commentary on the intersection between academia and blogging.

One such recent piece appears in Tax Prof Blog, a member of the Law Professor Blogs Network, which reports on a panel titled “Blogging: Scholarship or Distraction” at the Association of American Law Schools annual meeting, with the program describing the session this way:

One of the most salient developments in the Internet revolution is blogging. Blogging has become a widespread cultural phenomenon and has had important implications for politics, the media and education. This panel considers academic blogging and asks the question whether blogging is a new form of scholarly activity or just a diversion from the pursuit of serious intellectual inquiry.

Lots of fascinating lists and categories in the report. A list of law-blog categories developed by panelist Lawrence B. Slocum could be adapted to just about any academic discipline:
1. Blogs by academics with a focus in the blogger’s academic
discipline.
2. Blogs by academics with a focus outside the blogger’s
academic discipline.
3. Blogs by non-academics with a focus in an academic
discipline.

Slocum went on to list 7 ways in which blogs are important for [legal] scholarship, adapted here for scholarship in general:
1. Internet-time (v. snail mail-time)
2. Open-source revolution
3. Google searches
4. Disintermediation (the declining influence of scholarly intermediaries)
5. Lifting the cone of silence (the waning of the acoustic isolation of the academy)
6. Globalization of the dissemination of scholarship
7. eBayization of scholarship (changing the marketplace of scholarly ideas)

Apparently much discussion in this panel centered on how blogging is harmful for untenured faculty, presumably both because it distracts time from “legitimate” scholarship and because junior, untenured faculty can be harmed in the promotion and job search by saying controversial or unscholarly things in their blogs. Continue reading →

Org Storytelling Bibliography

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David Boje of the University of New Mexico is one of the preeminent scholars studying organizations through their storytelling. He has produced a nice annotated bibliography on storytelling and consulting. I admit that I find Boje’s scholarship a bit densely packed and intellectually challenging. He also issues a rather scathing … Continue reading →

An Intriguing “Business Novel”

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Last April, at the conference of Career Masters Institute in Denver, I heard a great entrepreneurial presentation by Laurie Taylor of Origin Institute. Laurie mentioned that her partner, James Fischer, was about to publish in the unusual but emerging genre of the “business novel.” Any work that uses story to … Continue reading →

Even the Circus Needs Story

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This just in… Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus has announced that — in addition to straying from its tradition 3-ring format (and in fact having NO rings) — it will “have a story line instead of being simply a cavalcade of acts,” writes Glen Collins in the New … Continue reading →

A Making

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In somewhat of an intersection between story and the job search, Amy Kimme Hea writes in Kairos (Fall 2004) of “A Making: The Job Search & Our Work as Computer Compositionists.” Kimme Hea is a faculty member in Rhetoric, Composition, and Teaching of English program at the University of Arizona. Her reference to herself and her field as one of “computer compositionists” was not one I was familiar with. She found herself frequently asked about the job market and job search for other faculty aspirants in her field.
Kimme Hea writes:

Finding such productive and insightful ways to discuss that making, however, is profoundly difficult — linearity, imposition of the ends justifying the means, and other factors can all conspire to form the most purposeful, logical story about our work and our lives. [Donna] Haraway (1992) urges us to recall that “[l]ives are built; so we had best become good craftspeople with the other worldly actants in the story.”

The “making” refers to Haraway’s assertion that nature “is made through discourses and practices,” and Kimme Hea’s discovery that her job-market success was “about the making and unmaking of my life as an academic interested in composition, technology and critical theory.”

She has thus created a hypertext work that uses her own story as a backdrop to inform and guide others in the faculty job search.

Kimme Hea goes on to describe the sections to which the main page of this work links (I found the grad students section most informative, and while targeted at her own field, relevant to other teaching disciplines). Continue reading →

99 Ways to Tell a Story

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I wanted to report about the Web site connected to a new book, 99 Ways to Tell a Story, by Matt Madden, but the site has MADDEN-ingly disappeared. Perhaps it gave away too much and would have hurt book sales? Here’s the (very cool) concept, as described in promo material … Continue reading →

The New Narrative Age

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The Ryan Group has proclaimed The New Narrative Age, stating that: This new cultural phenomenon is virtually changing the organization’s fundamental approach to training, learning, knowledge transfer, strategy, change, performance, and competitiveness. Conceptually, the “narrative age” recognizes the implicit value of knowledge (many times untapped knowledge) embedded within the body-organization. … Continue reading →

Story Scholar’s Credo

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“We believe in practicing and living in a narrative world where everything is shaped by our relationship to story.” — Steve Denning, p. 159 of The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative.