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An immoderate request for moderators

  • 1.  An immoderate request for moderators

    Posted 11-23-2021 13:04
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    Quick: what are the latest findings in your field, and what do they mean for theory and practice? Most of us can't answer that question with any confidence, which is both awkward and expected. It's awkward, because we're experts and should know this; yet it's expected because, come on, there's just so much work being published all the time. How do we keep track of the every-moving cutting edge? How do we know, as authors and reviewers and editors, if our work or the work we are assessing is actually incorporating and building on all that is out there, or if it's just rehashing, renaming, ignoring, or cherry picking?

    I recently created Seminars To Advance Cumulative Knowledge (STACK) as my imperfect effort to keep pace with the cutting edge of scholarship on social innovation. You can view the first few seminars here. Now I need to scale this, if it's to be useful as a means of keeping track of the ever evolving literature. And that's where I need your help. New papers of relevance come out pretty much over day, and so I need more moderators than just me. Might you be interested in being a moderator? Might you know others who are?

    The way I've initially created these webinars is surely too burdensome to organize at scale. Moving forward, I'll be simplifying them to just the webinar portion, and that will consist of only five questions that will be asked of each of the panelists. The attached document lists those questions. So the job of the moderator will be simpler than what you see in the prior examples. In a nutshell, moderators will work with their papers' authors to find panelists and then record the webinars. The webinars will be around a half-hour long, in the simplified format. My sense of the workload would be maybe one or two webinars per month, per moderator.

    So, might you be willing to volunteer? Or to suggest suitable others? The hardest part will be in finding willing panelists. I'll be asking the authors to suggest or even confirm suitable panelists themselves, but the best moderators will see this as an opportunity to tap and build their networks, both within their discipline and beyond, and into practice, by finding panelists to take on these roles. I'm also working with the Aspen Institute to link to practitioners who might be willing to serve as panelists. 

    I'm especially asking/begging for moderators outside of management. Would you be willing to consider not just your direct colleagues, but to also forward this to colleagues across your business/management schools, so that I could find moderators in areas such as finance, accounting, marketing, and management information systems?

    As these webinars come rolling in, I'll be working with the Network for Business Sustainability to organize them in a way that best demonstrates the continuous cutting edge of research. And I'm drawing the articles primarily from their table of contents here.  

    Glad to answer any questions, as I know the above is a bit of a ramble -- just get in touch at: mbarnett@business.rutgers.edu

    Thanks,
    Mike

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    Michael Barnett
    Professor
    Rutgers University
    Newark NJ
    (973) 353-3697
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