Writing, authenticity, and knowledge creation: why I write and you should too.

I have never thought of myself as a researcher. The words "Outstanding Researcher Award" on the plaques the Association for Business Communication (ABC) and McGraw-Hill/Irwin awarded me this past year don't describe who I am and what I believe I do. Those words, in fact, cause me uncomfortableness, even embarrassment. I deliberately avoid describing myself as a researcher, let alone a "social scientist."

It has taken me well over a decade of my academic life to figure out what I do, aside from teach. Simply put, I write, or write articles. More precisely, I struggle to find time to write, avoid writing more times than I care to adroit because it's hard work, puzzle over how to "word and reword" (Rose, 1992) the organizational world I'm thinking about, and, more often than not, think and write badly. Not until the mid-1990s did I discover that what I am compelled to write are stories about communication problems I've stumbled across, the ways I've used to solve them, and the problems that still puzzle me. Telling stories feels authentic and enables me to continue writing, even though tenure and promotion are no longer rewards for my writing efforts.

This article describes my experiences and beliefs about academic writing in general and, more specifically, writing business and managerial communication stories. I will tell you a story that explains why I think of myself as a storyteller rather than a researcher and the extraordinary effect this change of thinking has had on my attitude toward writing and my ability to write. Before explaining why I chose this approach, I break with storytelling tradition by revealing my goals for telling this story.

My story has four goals. The first is to urge those of you who don't write, who may be afraid or lack the confidence to write because you believe you lack the rigor of social scientists and researchers, to consider reframing your professional selves and actions so that you'll be able to see yourselves as active writers who regularly publish your ideas. This goal is important because it strikes me that the ABC has become increasingly an organization in which its members talk--often presenting provocative, interesting ideas about myriad aspects of communication at our conferences and in informal conversations with each other--but don't write.

My second goal is to closely connect writing with effective teaching. For me, effective teaching is the art of weaving for learners a coherent story about communication. For that story to have power and impact, I believe we have to create, to write, part of that story.

My third goal is to begin a conversation about the kind of writing worth publishing that doesn't fit snugly into our current interpretation of a "research article." In sociology and subdisciplines of management, this conversation has already begun and has resulted in writing that breaks traditional research article structures: for example, dialogues, analytical narratives, autoethnographies, and interviews with embedded analyses (Tedlock, 2000). These innovative genres have created a new intellectual and emotional writing space that has enabled writers to better connect their academic work with their personal lives. Writers now can blend or integrate in their writing the professional "other" who is objective, rational, and analytical with the highly personal self who can describe the passion that draws a writer to a project, the confusion that often occurs while gathering and thinking about data, the exhilaration of discovering connections and relationships, and at times the self-doubt about the value of a project or the ability to complete it. This connection has energized writers to create work that is challenging to read, see, and think about.

My fourth goal is personal, therapeutic, and, quite frankly, self-indulgent. I have been a full-time administrator for 3 years. For me, finding time to write, to tell the stories about communication puzzles that interest me, to experiment with different ways of telling these stories, has become increasingly difficult. In short, I'm in a quandary about two different career choices--a career as a senior-level administrator or as an academic. Creating the narrative shape of this story has required me to think very deliberately and write carefully about why I write. This process of meaning creation will, I hope, help me understand how I want to spend the last 10 to 15 years of my career.

WHY A STORY

This story is an autoethnography. Ellis and Bochner (2000) describe autoethnographies as "highly personalized stories about the writers' lived experience that relate the personal to the cultural" (p. 739). To achieve the goals I just described, I intend to connect my struggles, doubts, and development as a writer with my interpretation of ABC's writing and research culture. Although my development as a writer may seem idiosyncratic because of my career path choices, I believe I am a representative figure for the struggles that many, perhaps most, of you have undergone. To use a rhetorical analogy, I believe I am a synecdoche--by and large the story of my doubts, insecurities, and attempts, often failed, to write authentically rather than for some evaluating "other" (tenured colleagues, journal editors and reviewers, promotion committees) is typical, indeed ordinary, for many people in our area, particularly for those who have crossed from English departments to business schools.

In a recent Harvard Business Review article, Robert McKee (2003), a screen-writer, well describes the value of storytelling. He states that "stories fulfill a profound human need to grasp the patterns of living--not merely as an intellectual exercise, but within a very personal, emotional experience" (p. 52). That stories deal with emotion helps make them persuasive and causes them to resonate within us over time. Furthermore, because most stories are narratives, although often fragmented ones, their constructed patterns help the teller/writer and the listener/reader to make sense of events. As Barrett (2003) points out, that sense-making occurs because stories put motives and reasons for choices within a developmental context. So, this story is about writing and research patterns I've noticed, the intellectual and emotional authenticity those patterns had for me, and my own intellectual and emotional sense-making of my motives and choices about the kind of articles I wrote and continue to write.

Finally, this story is a paradox; it's a fiction infused with emotional truth. The story is fiction for obvious reasons: It's rhetorically staged--I've wrestled information into a thematically organized, coherent narrative so that the messiness is cleaned up, I've left out information so the narrative isn't overly cumbersome, and the 'T' presented is a creation or construction. A cubistic story about me and writing from multiple points of view--those of my coauthors, colleagues, journal editors and reviewers, my wife, my daughter, and others--would provide a more encompassing story because these different points of view would move us outside my situational limitations and my interpretation of me. But I'm not that daring or talented to write that story--at least not yet. I claim this story is true for one simple reason: The self I describe feels authentic to me today.

I organize this story from the inside out, from the very personal to the public or collective. First, I will discuss my attempts to be a "researcher" or "social scientist" and the feelings of inauthenticity those metaphors created. Second, I describe how the process of reframing myself as someone who tells communication stories created excitement about writing and transformed the way I taught. Within that section, I also explain briefly why writing gives us power, an opportunity to individually and cojointly create an intellectual and professional world that has value to ourselves, students, and businesspeople. Finally, I suggest changes that journal gatekeepers can make to help ABC members reframe their writing selves.

WRITER OF STORIES VERSUS RESEARCHER

Between 1982 and 1989, I wrote for two reasons: to overcome the fear that I neither had the skill nor the talent to write for publication and to get tenure. Getting articles out the door and published in journals--both academic and practitioner--was one of my primary concerns. The other was developing confidence that I could write professionally. The doubts I had about my ability to get published not just once but regularly partly resulted from my shift in disciplines from English Literature to Business and Managerial Communication and a change from working in English departments to business schools.

The education I received at the University of Illinois while pursuing a Ph.D. in Victorian Literature well prepared me to think critically about texts and to analyze and synthesize information from secondary sources. But I didn't trust the value of that ability or believe in my gut that those capabilities would serve me well as a full-time academic in a business school. Instead, I felt I was entering a foreign country whose language and way of thinking I had only cursory knowledge of. To my detriment, I focused on what I lacked--knowledge of a variety of research methods, a firm grasp of the characteristics of an air-tight research design, and understanding of statistical techniques--rather than what I was good at.