ICA 2009 Organizational Communication Doctoral Consortium:

Interdisciplinary Research and Teaching in Organizational Communication

Signup: To sign up, please visit the ICA Conference Registration Site http://www.icahdq.org/conferences/2009/confreg2009.asp

Time: Thursday, May 21, 8:30 – 16:45

Limit: 35 Doctoral Students

Cost: $40.00 USD (Includes morning and afternoon refreshments. Lunch on your own)
This doctoral consortium is open to doctoral students at all levels of study. The purpose of the consortium is twofold: (1) to offer an interactive forum in which colleagues who conduct interdisciplinary research and teaching share insights with young scholars seeking to maximize the potential impact of their research and teaching in organizational communication. The preconference will focus on providing concrete and actionable suggestions that are consonant with the careers needs of junior scholars and teachers who will soon grow into the future leaders of our field; (2) offer a forum where scholars at all levels can address a wide variety of professional and career issues of young scholars. The goal is to have participants leave with concrete, useful professional advice and direction as they begin productive careers in organizational communication.

Rationale:
As a relatively applied discipline, we seek to have important input to practice, problem-solving, and policy. Yet, one of the key ingredients to true problem focused-research and teaching that can inform complex issues is the intellectual spark and challenge that comes from seeking ideas in other disciplines and collaborating in interdisciplinary teams. Research consistently demonstrates that the most productive outcomes typically come from diverse teams that pool the intellectual resources from multiple disciplines.

But isn’t organization communication by nature interdisciplinary? When organizational communication first came to be legitimized as a significant subarea within the field of communication (the first doctoral courses in organizational communication were taught in the late 1960s), it had very scant history and no real depth of literature. Not surprisingly, the next few decades of research and teaching were rich in conceptual development and drew beneficially on theory and research in related disciplines such as management, psychology, sociology, engineering and humanities. This was an era where we saw a definitive handbook equally co-edited between communication and management scholars, and interdisciplinary collaborations contributed important insights to the growing field. Without a wealth of outlets for our work in communication journals, we published some of our work in these related fields as well, and taught our students about developments in other fields.

As we have grown over time as a legitimate subfield of communication, we have developed a clear history and significant intellectual footprint within the communication discipline. Mainstream communication journals regularly publish our articles, and we have developed specialty journals such as Management Communication Quarterly. As the field has matured, however, it has not remained fully interdisciplinary; today we can read, cite, and contribute to our own domain of literature with barely any reference to other disciplines on some of the topics in our field. One challenge we face as a field is to recapture some of this interdisciplinary perspective that has served us so well in the past. Doctoral students are the future of our field and this preconference is designed to partner them with senior scholars from a variety of areas within organizational communication to chart courses that benefit both these new scholars and the field that they will define.

Session topics:
1. The challenges and opportunities of doing interdisciplinary research and teaching
2. Finding partners, developing a research program, and seeking funding
3. Publishing issues
4. Working with scholars in other disciplines
5. Professional development issues: managing the job search process, dealing with the editorial process, balancing teaching, research and service, developing teaching skills
6. Leveraging interdisciplinary teaching and research for social and organizational impact

Session leaders:
Ling Chen, Hong Kong Baptist University
Noshir Contractor, Northwestern University
Joann Keyton, North Carolina State University
John Lammers, University of Illinois
Paul Leonardi, Northwestern University
Peter Monge, University of Southern California
M. Scott Poole, University of Illinois
Linda Putnam, University of California at Santa Barbara
Cynthia Stohl, University of California at Santa Barbara

Deadline for submission: Tuesday, February 10, 2009.
All materials must be received by midnight Eastern Standard Time on that date.
Email entries to Stacey Connaughton at sconnaug@purdue.edu
with the following in the subject heading: REDDING SUBMISSION. Please submit all materials electronically in either Word or .pdf format. Email Stacey if you have additional questions.

Thanks for your submissions in this important competition!