Video link:
https://youtu.be/3kkXHQvxxY0?feature=shared
Transcript:
MOC Talk Episode #1
A conversation with Professor Kevin Corley about designing societally and practically impactful research questions, shifting our perspectives as researchers, and the importance of collaborative research teams in tackling complex problems.
CALEB PHILLIPS
Hello! Thank you for joining me today, and thanks for being one of our first MOC Talks.
PROFESSOR KEVIN CORLEY
Yeah, good to be here.
CALEB PHILLIPS
My first question and we'll just keep it casual. You’ve spoken of the importance of multi-audience research that is driven by societal and practical impact, ensuring our research is not constrained to narrow readerships of academics, but also to practitioners and end-users. You've also spoken of the criticality of designing research questions. So I'm wondering how you go about designing your research questions, keeping the societal and practical impact in mind.
PROFESSOR KEVIN CORLEY
It's a really good question. This is actually kind of top of mind, because I'm working on a methods book with Ann Langley and Charlotte Cloutier, and one of the things we've been thinking a lot about is, you know, where are the friction points in qualitative research, and one of them comes very early in the process: How do we decide what it is that we're going to study? And I think for especially a lot of junior scholars, a lot of people just starting out in their career, the easiest is to have it be very theory driven. Oh, I've read all these papers for my classes, or you know, whatever, and there seems to be a gap, or there seems to be something that we don't understand in the literature. I'm going to develop a research question and go after it.
The flip side to that – and there's actually lots of different paths developing a study idea and research questions – but the flip side to that is to say, “Hey, I'm out here engaging in the real world, right? And here's an organization, here's a profession, here's a set of people, and they're struggling with something right there, there's an issue that they have. There's a problem, a challenge. Something new that they're dealing with. Let me go and see what we understand about it… Huh? We don't understand that much about it right? There's nothing I can help them with there. I can't say anything. I won't think about that, or think about that. Okay, so this is, here's a practical problem. Here's something out there in the real world that we need some insight on. We need to understand. And we, as academics, don't understand it very well, either. Huh! This could be the basis for a really good study.”
So I think that's, you know that that's kind of an ideal case where some interaction that you're having with practitioners, whether that be it could be through exec ed, it could be through conversations with working MBA students, it could be through consulting, it might be through a friend who is talking with you about what life is like at work for them. But that something is generated there. And then we go and check and say, “Yeah, okay, we don't have much theory about this.” If you can develop research questions that way, I think that's going to lead towards more of the practical impact that we talk so much about needing more of, but we still haven't done a good job as a field. Because if I'm doing that, if I'm being phenomenon-driven, then the things that I'm learning, I can feed back to them and hopefully have an impact immediately as opposed to, “Well, I have to publish this paper in this academic journal. And then we're going to have to translate it in such a way that the practitioner…” It's just a little bit more immediate.
CALEB PHILLIPS
That's great. There's many follow up questions for you on that! Do you have any stories of when, it could be informants, but maybe friends or family, informed your research question.
PROFESSOR KEVIN CORLEY
Yeah, it's interesting that you bring that up, because I moved to London about two and a half, almost three years ago now. The neighborhood that we moved into actually has a little bit of a neighborhood feel to it. And they had a summer cookout type of – they don't call that here in the UK – but everyone comes out and brings some food and drinks and talk. I met one of my neighbors. It turns out that he is a principal at an executive search firm based in London, but they're global. And he and I started having a lot of conversations about executives: what they struggle with, where their challenges are, the types of things he sees as an executive coach. And that conversation spread out over many, many interactions, lots of long walks through Regents Park. And it's now gotten to the point where I think we can actually develop a research projects here. And he's fascinated by that! You know he's done a little bit at the business school. Now he's come into a couple of my classes, and he sees that there's something here where we could do some research – help him help his clients – but it would also be something that would have an academic impact as well. So let's say, it's very early days, we'll see what comes about. But just as an example of a completely serendipitous, you know, meet this guy, start talking, find a common interest, start following it, see where it goes, and now, all of a sudden, you know, there might be a research project there.
Doesn't always happen that way, but at the same time, you know, the same has happened in the past with exec ed clients. I didn't pursue this one, but there was another one, an MBA student that I was teaching. He spent a lot of time talking to me about his company and what they were going through, and I did what I could to help, and in that case there was a little bit of theory that could be fed back. But, yeah, I think it requires engaging with the people out there doing – living – these types of things, for us to maybe come across the research questions that wouldn't be obvious just reading our literature. Yeah, that could have a big impact.
CALEB PHILLIPS
You do serve on a lot of editorial boards. I'm curious if you see any shifts in how journals are approaching more phenomenon-driven research versus theory-driven.
PROFESSOR KEVIN CORLEY
Well, it's interesting, because as a qualitative author, reviewer, and editor, I think that's always been there somewhat. There have always been plenty of examples of the phenomenon-driven. Because a lot of what you're doing when you're trying to do that inductive research is to uncover new insights, things that we don't understand. And that somewhat lends itself to more phenomenon-driven types of research questions. But that being said, yes, you know, over the 25-some-odd years that I've been doing this, there’s been a big change, and I do see not only journals being more open to it, but even pushing it, asking for it a little bit more. So, for instance, I'm, along with Pratima Bansal, we did a special call for qualitative research at the Journal of Management, and we had taken a little bit different approach and one of the things that we did differently was asked for proposals. So submit a proposal, we've got this group of editors, and we'll go through the proposals. We'll find, you know, proposals that editors are interested in, and then we'll pursue paper writing from there. It was incredible to see – when we got those proposals – it was incredible to see how many of them really were phenomena-driven. Right here is this thing going on out in the world that we don't understand, and I want to not only do a study on it, but write a paper about it. Now, I'm not saying that every proposal was like that, there were plenty that were more gap-driven. There were some that were, you know, theory X and theory Y have never been put together, you know, let's go and study that. But there were a lot that were very phenomenon-driven, and interestingly, I think those were the ones that maybe attracted a little bit more attention from the editors.
Because there's a bit of a story baked into that already, right. Here's this thing, we know it’s going on out there, we don't understand it, shouldn't we understand it better? And I'm not saying that there isn't necessarily a storyline around, you know, theory X and we need to fill this gap about it, but I think editors are open to that “here's a phenomenon, let's understand it” kind of story. Especially, perhaps, on the qualitative side of things.
CALEB PHILLIPS
That's great. Thank you. Continuing along those lines, it strikes me that a large part of your career has been interacting with and interviewing informants. Have you ever had a moment out in the field when you're collecting data where the societal and practical impact particularly struck you?
PROFESSOR KEVIN CORLEY
I mean, the answer is yes. The better question, and probably the bit of an embarrassing question is, “Did you do anything about it?” It's embarrassing because that answer, especially early in my career, is no, because that's not what I was trained to do, and that's not where the incentives were, right? So I can think of a particular example where there was an opportunity to pursue – I guess you would call it consulting – coming out of a field project, and I didn’t do it. You know, as an assistant professor, that's not how my time was best spent.
CALEB PHILLIPS
Or incentivized probably.
PROFESSOR KEVIN CORLEY
Extremely incentivized. And this is one of the things I talked about in my distinguished scholar speech, is that we really can't put this onus on an individual scholar, because there is a system within which we all work. And there are biases and incentives inside that system that say: “Go write that next academic paper”, they don't necessarily say “Go and develop an exec ed course, or a consulting project, or something like that.” And so, you know, I'm a student of that system in the sense of that's how I grew up. I learned within that system, I learned how to work within that system, and obviously built a career out of that system. Here I am, a full professor at a top business school. So you know, I'm someone who benefited from that system. But it's not necessarily a system that we want to, or that I think we can continue to support and have it be a sustainable way for our field to survive and grow. So, yes, there were opportunities in my field research where I saw that, I could have pursued it, and didn’t.
But I'm trying to change that now, not only for myself, but for when I work with junior scholars, encouraging them to spend a little bit of time. It's not just a matter of writing a white paper and giving it back to the organization that let you in, but perhaps set up a couple of meetings and and talk through, perhaps go back 3 months later and see: The suggestions provided, how did those work out? Where are they now? Because not only is that potentially going to help on the practical impact side, but maybe going back to the system, maybe there's a second project there. Maybe there's something else that could be a follow up that you could do another paper with, or something like that. So I'm not saying that my encouragement always works – the system is pretty strong – but yeah, there's some scholars that I've worked with that I think have maybe done a little bit more on the practical side.
CALEB PHILLIPS
That’s great. You have talked, especially in your MOC distinguished scholar recipient speech, about some of those system incentives that maybe need to shift. And one of those was PhD researcher training and getting PhD students out of the seminar room and into the organizations. I'm wondering how you promote that? Or, maybe, if you could go back to your PhD at Penn State, what you would do different?
PROFESSOR KEVIN CORLEY
Yeah, it's interesting because, going back to what I said earlier, we can't put this on the students right? We can't say to the students, “Oh, you need to be more practitioner-driven,” or “You need to be worried about a broader type of impact.” If they're within a doctoral program, and they're certainly within an academic system, that's going to reward them for doing the academic outputs, then it's on us, it's not on them.
So you know two different questions, and maybe I'll explore the, “if I could redo my PhD program differently?” I think I would in a couple of different ways. One, I remember, I'd been working with Denny Gioia for about a year, and it was – maybe we were coming out of winter into that spring and having one of our regular meetings – and completely out of nowhere he goes, “You know what! I would urge you to go and get a job with the newspaper this summer and be a journalist.” And I was like, “Wait, I kind of have some plans this summer, like my research!” And these types of things. But the genesis behind that idea was, well, journalists think differently, right? There was a very practical academic suggestion there of, if you can learn to write like a journalist, you're not going to be one of these people who falls into the trap of: I write and it has to be perfect and I'm going to set it aside and come back and write more, and the next thing you know, months have gone by and you still haven't got this paper out there, right? Journalists have to write, get the idea down a paper, meet the deadline, and move on.
But I think there was also the other thing about that suggestion was, journalists are getting out there, and they're engaging with people living the news, right? So get out there and engage with people who are living these phenomena that you're interested in. And I did it to some extent, but not as much as the who-I-am-now would suggest, or would like. Which is pretty interesting if you think about – I had entered my PhD program from a management consulting job, so I had been out there, I was already there, I already had those contacts, I already had the language, I already had the perspective. But you get into that PhD, you start to say, I'm an academic now. I gotta start to think like an academic, talk like an academic, act like an academic. You certainly have plenty of rewards coming at you that way. You know, going through an American PhD system, comprehensive exams were a big deal your second summer. Well, that's the summer that Denny’s talking about! You know, that's more important. So in some ways, the PhD program that – maybe not so much today, well probably still, but definitely back then – beat all the practitioner stuff out of you. “No, you shouldn't be thinking like a practitioner! Now, you're an academic. Think like an academic, be a scholar.”
But, you know, hindsight is great. I'm not saying necessarily that was all wrong, but I do think that it's an area that we can begin to think about. How could PhD programs think differently about the training that we provide these PhD students? But it would have to go hand-in-hand with schools saying “Who is it that we're looking for when we go out on the job market? Are we looking for that person who's been sitting in their office for 5 years cranking out papers? Or are we looking for that person who has spent time engaging with organizations as they were working on their dissertation, or as they were in these papers? So maybe they don't have as good of an academic record, but they're bringing experience, or they're bringing perspective, or they're bringing a network with them.
So, just as an example of a very complex system, if those two things aren't aligned, you're either producing PhD students who the market doesn't value, or you're looking for PhD students the programs aren’t creating, right? So until there gets to be some alignment there, it's a really difficult thing to fix. And then, like I said, you can't put that on the student. Maybe there's some programs, some universities, some business schools that have already shifted a little bit – and I think that's true, I think you can certainly point to some schools. I think having come over here to the UK, schools look at things a little bit differently in the UK and Europe than they do in the US. So, I think there's some hope, but there's still a lot of work to be done.
CALEB PHILLIPS
Another shift – maybe to the incentive side – that you've mentioned is incentivizing solo author works. You've spoken of your reverence for the research team, and I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on how to encourage research teams in tackling bigger, more complex research, and any stories you have of your research?
PROFESSOR KEVIN CORLEY
Well, actually, the answer is partly wrapped up in your question, because I think if you're going to go and pursue complex challenging phenomena, it's very difficult to do that alone. And this is not to say anything – I still am in awe when I see single author ASQ, AMJ, Org Science papers, especially coming from junior scholars – I'm in awe, I know the work that went into that. That’s amazing. But I think there is something to this idea of – if we're going to start to tackle some of the what you call “grand challenges” or “wicked problems,” or however you want to look at it, if we're going to start to examine and be a part of the solution for some of these big things, it's probably not likely that a single mind is going to be able to do that. You're going to need multiple perspectives. You're going to need different experiences, past experiences coming to bear on that. You're going to need different skillsets. Whether that be because we have to look at this with a multi-method approach – the quant and qual. Maybe it's just the volume of data. Maybe it's something about the phenomenon that's going to require some actual in-time observation. Well, if we have a team, we can have multiple people in different spots, or we can be capturing different events, or those types of things. So again, it's not to suggest that the people who have done or are doing single author research, that their research isn't as good, or it's not valuable, or anything like that – it's just to suggest that if we have complex problems out there, we're probably going to have to bring the same level of complexity in our methods and in our research to that, that suggests teams of people working together.
So what can we begin to do as an academic field to encourage that, and to support that? One of the easy things is to stop telling people that in order to get tenure, you have to have a single author, top-tier journal paper. There are schools out there that still do that, and I think that's certainly not field-wide, it's certainly not something within academia that's necessarily valued. Even within our own “field” – the management field, different disciplines within and inside that – don't even look at that. So if, as a school, that's something that you're encouraging, or if, as a mentor of junior scholars, that's something that you're encouraging, there isn't necessarily the rationale for saying that. But it is rooted in this idea of, “Well, we need to make sure these junior scholars are doing the work themselves. We need to make sure they are the ones who know how to do these methods. They know how to write and those types of things. They can't have them relying on being on teams with senior scholars or things like that.” Okay, I get that. Again, I grew up in that. But we need to think differently because it isn't just about an individual's academic career. It's about what we're doing as a field to have the relevance for society. And if we can start to do things that encourage the complex research projects that are going to dig into these complex phenomena, I say, let's do it.
CALEB PHILLIPS
Yeah, that sounds great. Is there a team that you've been on, that you feel, or strikes you as, “We tackled really complex research question, and we couldn't have done that without having this diverse team?”
PROFESSOR KEVIN CORLEY
I mean, there's certainly – even some of the examples of – well, interestingly, my dissertation. Even though it was a dual author, me and Denny, there were other people involved in that, that I think, if we had gone after a more complex aspect of the changing identity phenomenon, would have required us to bring them in at the author level. There are projects that occurred later – so I'm thinking, for instance, of a couple of doctoral students at ASU who really tackled complex phenomenon, and it did require teamwork to bring those data together in such a way that we can make an impact. I think it's more challenging when it involves a dissertation, because there is that, you know, the student has to be driving. And so I think you start to move away from dissertation projects and get into projects that involve assistant, associate, and full professors, let's say, or postdocs and professors. Then you can start to put together a pretty complex team.
I don't know why this just popped into my head, but some research being done by some OB folks, which is ironic that I'm bringing this up, because when we often think about teams of researchers in the OB field, we think about experiments, right? But these are folks who are out in the field, either examining natural experiments or creating field experiments, and just the sheer complexity of putting those together requires three, four, five, six different people to be involved at the author level, because it's not just about putting the data collection together – it's also going to be, how do we tackle that and all that data when we want to analyze it? And then how do we write it up? So I definitely have a bias towards field research, certainly, as we talk about those things, you know, practical impact. I have a bias towards getting out there and engaging with that. You can imagine tackling some pretty difficult things from an archival standpoint. Maybe we don't need teams for archival data, I don’t know. Not to get off on this subject, but maybe our teams in the future will involve AI agents, you know, and that's where the complexity of other teams will come into play. So I'm certainly not pushing back against those people who do mostly archival data or lab experiments, I'm just suggesting that a lot of what we need to be doing as a field is probably best done out in the field of practitioners. And when you do that, you know, having a team around you can often be helpful.
CALEB PHILLIPS
Yes, definitely. I like that you clarified the author-level team versus, maybe the non-author-level, because as a PhD student, I know it takes a village to get me through – I have my supervisors, but then my informal mentors, getting friendly reads, and advice from so many in my department.
PROFESSOR KEVIN CORLEY
Yes, there's always a team behind every paper. It's just, you know, oftentimes a hidden team,
and what's interesting is even those papers that come out as a single author, or maybe two co-authors, it's interesting because sometimes there are other papers around that phenomenon, or even around that data collection effort that involve other people who were on that team. Right? And so sometimes in order to see the big picture of how team-based research works, you can't just look at a single publication, because these people over here, they were peripheral to this and what we were doing with this paper, but you look over here at this paper here and they were central to it, they had to be involved.
CALEB PHILLIPS
I'll go to my last question, and we have to end with MOC. Your career and research has spanned many disciplines, and you've spoken of the importance of multidisciplinary research. MOC is a proud home to scholars in many areas. I'm wondering if you have a story from your time in MOC that you think exemplifies how special this multidisciplinary community is?
PROFESSOR KEVIN CORLEY
Probably lots of stories. You know, my mind goes back to the first academy that I ever attended, back as a doctoral student back before I knew anything about MOC. I was working on a paper at the time as a PhD student, I had been assigned to a strategy faculty member, and we had a paper submitted to Academy. So that first time I was presenting that, and it was in what used to be known as the BPS Division. But you know, it was very strategy oriented. Looking back, it was very monolithic in terms of the thinking that was in the room. And that, being juxtaposed to the MOC social that I went to the next day, and just realizing that you had everyone from really, you know, deeply intrapersonal psychologists all the way up to sociologists and anthropologists in the same room, interested in this idea of managerial and organizational cognition. It was quite stark, right? To go from the part of the Academy that's very focused, and you just have a very small group of people all interested in the very same thing, and all writing in the same air, to all of a sudden finding yourself in a space where there was so much diversity of thought, diversity of background, diversity of experience. And that was one of the things that really attracted me to MOC. I mean, you know, what I studied – identity and sense-making and change – it fit MOC perfectly well. But it was just, it was also the social. It wasn't just, “Oh, I'm presenting a paper, and the right people in the room to give me feedback or thoughts on that.” It was, “Who is it that I want to be engaging with during the Academy? And who do I want to be spending my time with?” And that diversity of thought, the different disciplines that come together during MOC events. Yeah, it's just, it was so enriching.
So that was a big thing that kept me with MOC, and the service and leadership things I've been able to do within MOC. It's kind of always had that, in the back of my mind, as, this is a home for people who are really interested in looking at organizational phenomena from a lot of different perspectives. It also didn't hurt that a lot of MOC people at the time were qualitative researchers. So it was nice. I didn't find that as much in strategy that I would see that year, although it's gotten much better.
CALEB PHILLIPS
Yes , home to many different disciplines and methods.
PROFESSOR KEVIN CORLEY
Disciplines, methods, theories, data types. I think a lot of really good multi-method research comes out of MOC, just based upon the reviewing that I've done over the years and the best paper committees and stuff like that. And I hope, and I guess, going back to an earlier question you said, I have seen that in our journals as well. If you go back to when I was a doctoral student in the ‘90s, there was a bit of a disciplinarity to journals. Of course we had the big tent journals, you know, AMJ, and those types of things. But even within those, you saw very disciplinary-type of papers coming out. And now, here we are in 2025, you look and see completely different papers that have multiple theoretical perspectives coming, and you see the multi-method – although not enough – and you see the diverse datasets that are being brought together. So it has been nice to see that development, you know – I'm very controversial to say – the MOC-ing of our top journalists. No, that's not really what happened, but it has been nice to see that.
CALEB PHILLIPS
That’s awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time, Professor Corley, and for joining our first MOC Talks guest.
PROFESSOR KEVIN CORLEY
I think this is a great initiative you have started, so happy to be one of the first. Thank you.