Interview with Ping Wang and Neil C. Ramiller, Co-Authors of OCIS 2010 Division Best Published Paper Award Winner "Community Learning in Information Technology Innovation" Which Appeared in MIS Quarterly in December 2009Ping Wang and Neil C. Ramiller co-authored a paper titled “Community Learning in Information Technology Innovation,” which appeared in the December 2009 issue of MIS Quarterly. The paper was awarded the OCIS division’s 2010 Best Published Paper Award at this year’s Academy of Management conference in Montreal, Canada.
Ping Wang and Neil Ramiller, congratulations on winning this award. We have a few questions about the story behind an award winning paper like yours. Q1: What initially sparked your interest in researching this issue of community learning in the IT innovation domain? Ping Wang (PW): In the past decade, my research has been focused on understanding the popularity of IT innovations. When researching what makes a new IT popular and how popular ITs interact with organizations, I have found it inevitable to study the behaviors of the "other" players such as research analysts, consultants, journalists, and vendors, in addition to what happens in the adopting organizations. And yet the mainstream literature on IT innovation and on organization learning are primarily focused on the organizational level analysis, giving probably not enough attention to the socio-technical dynamics beyond the organizations, at the community level. Therefore, in 2003 when I started working on my dissertation Fashion in Information Technology, I wanted to do three studies to understand the players and their behaviors that affect the popularity of IT innovations at the community level. This paper originated from one of my dissertation studies. At that time, right after the dot-com crash, the incredible popularity of ERP (enterprise resource planning) was also rapidly waning. I thought it was an opportune time to reflect upon the dramatic history of ERP and the ERP community and draw some theoretical insights from such historical reflection. I was very fortunate to enlist Professor Neil Ramiller to annotate the 100 ERP articles with me. After I had finished this study for my dissertation, Neil continued being interested in this study and thus agreed to be my co-author, working with me to make the paper ready for submission to ICIS first. Based on the feedback we received from ICIS, we then revised the paper and submitted it to the MIS Quarterly. Neil Ramiller (NR): My own dissertation research had focused on how organizations and their leaders respond to the seemingly relentless parade of “grand ideas” for innovation involving information technology. We all know that such responses range from the timid to the bold, and from the rational to the manic, and I was interested in exploring how Weickian sensemaking and neo-institutional theory might be brought together to give an account of this phenomenon. At the time, I was also involved in some complementary theory-building work with Burt Swanson (my adviser) concerning the careers of such grand ideas. In due course, Burt’s and my thinking culminated in our papers on “organizing visions” and “mindfulness.” Ping had followed me in the Ph.D. program at UCLA, and somewhere along the way he and I started talking about his project. I jumped at the chance to be a coder, since it would give me the opportunity to get close to empirical data about the larger communities that generate and shape these organizing visions, and the language that they use in doing so. After Ping finished his dissertation, it seems we just weren’t done talking about what it all meant, and I wound up working on the paper with him. Q2: What core message did you want to deliver when you initially submitted this paper to MIS Quarterly? PW: I recall that we wanted to deliver two core messages in the manuscript we initially submitted to MISQ. The first and foremost message is that we wanted to initiate the discussion about the possibility that learning takes place in IT innovation communities, at a level that transcends and encompasses the organizational level. Much as the literature has established organizational learning as a process constituted by, but having properties distinct from, individual learning, we believe it is equally useful to recognize community learning as something that stands as a subject of distinctive interest. The second core message is that we wanted to promote another form of learning that complements the more familiar learning-by-doing. We call that form of learning "learning-about." In learning about an IT innovation, a learner gains knowledge by making sense of the information embedded in the discourse about the innovation, apart from material engagement with the technology. Learning-about is important because it is the means by which organizations tap into and make use of the knowledge embedded in the community. Learning-about may be much more prevalent than learning-by-doing as organizations learn to innovate with new ITs. This is because that organizations can learn about many IT innovations, but, however resourceful they are, can only afford to experiment with, adopt, and use a relatively small set of technologies. With this message, we wanted to call more scholarly attention to learning-about. Taken together, these two core messages led us to offer the punch line of our paper: Community learning, learning-about, and learning-by-doing build upon one another in a reciprocal cycle over time, as interested actors expand and refine the stock of interpretations, rationales, strategies, and experiences of IT innovations. NR: I can’t really say much that would amplify Ping’s summary. I will add that community learning seemed not merely a reasonable extension of the concept of knowledge creation beyond what happens with organizational learning. It was also a crucial move in helping to take scholarly inquiry into IT innovation toward a multi-level perspective. As for learning-about, we felt that it was high time this kind of learning had a champion. Of course, everybody knows how great learning-by-doing is. But as Ping just remarked, the issue of resources and efficiencies alone makes learning-about indispensible to organizations’ and individuals’ innovative sensemaking processes. Q3: How was this paper initially received (how did they react to it) by the review team at MIS Quarterly? PW: After the initial submission, the feedback we received from MISQ was actually mixed, including both positive and negative comments. The Senior Editor and Associate Editor believed that our paper had the potential to become suitable for MISQ and thus offered us the opportunity to revise and resubmit the paper. Q4: What did the review team seem to like most about the paper? NR: They seemed to like our relatively novel theoretical approach to the IT innovation literature, the conceptual model of the interrelationships between organizational and community learning, and the use of structured content analysis of ERP trade articles as a way to document collective learning over the course of time. PW: Also the review team seemed to agree that the manuscript was well written. I believe that the feedback from ICIS and a few seminars where we had presented this study had really helped us get the manuscript ready for submission to MISQ. Q5: What did the review team seem to be most concerned about? NR: The review team seemed to be most concerned about the way we positioned the paper in relation to the existing literature. The community learning phenomenon has intellectual ties with quite a few theories and concepts in several streams of research. In the initial manuscript we submitted, we reviewed those theories and concepts. However, our literature review was overwhelming and fragmented, as the review team was happy to point out. It was overwhelming in great part because our coverage of the theories and concepts placed excessive demands on the reader’s level of prior knowledge. It was fragmented because we had not yet found a coherent way to integrate the diverse theories and position our study as a contribution to advance existing knowledge. Q6: What is the biggest challenge you felt that you faced during the review process? How did you overcome this challenge? PW: Corresponding to the reviewers' biggest concern, our biggest challenge was to reposition our paper in extant literature and articulate the study's theoretical contributions. To overcome this challenge, we reviewed all of the additional papers that the review team suggested and some of the papers that those papers cited. We also listed all the theories and concepts related to the key phenomenon we were studying. Next we sketched the themes that emerged from the individual theories and concepts. Then we discussed different ways to prioritize the theories and concepts under each theme. Finally, we found it would be much more effective to reposition the paper at the intersection between IT innovation literature and the organizational learning literature. With this new framing, we could articulate and justify the need to study community learning and learning-about. To begin satisfying that need, we highlighted two community-level theories (on management fashion and organizing vision) in the foreground, and pushed other related theories and concepts to the background. In this way, we thought we could more easily present the contributions of our paper and, at the same time, sharpen our literature review and reduce the "cognitive load" on the reader. Q7: Did the direction or message of the paper change from initial submission to final publication? If so, in what way did it change? NR: I don't think that our core messages and punch line changed in the review process. But we did follow the review team's suggestion to streamline the structure of the paper, so that a more coherent and logical flow could help us deliver our main messages more effectively. For example, we shortened our justification of using trade articles as our data source and moved it from the methods section to the discussions section. This change made it possible for the reader to see our empirical results sooner and hopefully understand more quickly our theoretical arguments that the empirical results aimed to illustrate. Q8: What advice do you have for other researchers who hope to produce award-winning papers? PW: This award is a great honor to us. We appreciate the recognition and encouragement by our colleagues in the OCIS community. Speaking of advice, my credentials are really too thin for me to give advice to others. But I'm happy to share a piece of advice that I followed and served me well in this project. A few years ago at a reception during ICIS, Professor Rob Kauffman said to me, then still a doctoral student looking for a job: "Try to work on something that expands the boundary of our field; don’t flock to the mainstream." As researchers, when choosing projects to work on, we often face the trade-off between the mainstream and the peripheral. If we stay in the mainstream, our work might be more easily understood. But the room for significant contribution may be limited. And the mainstream is usually very crowded, when it comes to publishing in good outlets. In contrast, working on emerging topics in the peripheral, we may find it hard for others to understand and appreciate our work and the review of our work may be "dicey" sometimes. However, in the peripheral there is often ample room for making significant contributions. And if conducted successfully (and that's a big IF), research in the peripheral may have significant, lasting impacts on the field. So it may be true that it is riskier to work on emerging topics, but it is also true that it is extremely competitive to work in the mainstream. It seems clear to me that the topic of this paper is not in the mainstream of Information Systems research. Thus it took us some additional efforts to convince the reviewers that the topic is important, methods valid, and the contributions sufficient. While our efforts seemed to have been worthwhile, as indicated by the paper's publication in MISQ and by this prestigious award, I want to point out that this is a very lucky case for those working in the peripheral. Neil and I were fortunate to work with the editors and reviewers who were open-minded enough and willing to consider, understand, and help improve our work. When choosing between mainstream and emerging research topics, we need to be aware of the risks our choice entails. And such awareness would help us manage our expectations and efforts throughout the research, writing, and review process. Especially when things did not turn out as we had hoped, with the right expectations, we would feel no regrets, but only the desire to make our papers better. NR: I don’t know why particular papers win awards, and so I don’t have any advice to give someone who actually sets out to do a study, and write a paper, that will win an award. I will say that winning an award is relatively unlikely if one isn’t passionate about the work. One really needs to care about making an important discovery – and making a point about it. That’s a prerequisite for doing good work, work that has legs, work that people will want to read and think about. That said, Ping is absolutely right about the hazards of going off the beaten path. And so, research choices need both passion and sensibility. I have my own quote from a senior colleague to offer from my doctoral student days. I believe this conversation took place at the first AMCIS in Pittsburgh. Allen Lee, upon hearing me give a rather poor account of my dissertation project, explained to me, “You need to make sure you’re doing work that has a market.” The implication of Allen’s remark, however, is not to retreat to the mainstream to do ho-hum, me-too research. Rather, the larger lesson, if you’re working to expand the boundary of the field, is that you will need, yes, to do good research, but also to work on creating a community of allies who can help you occupy the territory that you’re opening up. That’s community learning at its best, don’t you think? Congratulations once again. |
