Discussion: View Thread

MG-ED-DV can provide a place for practitioners to ask about research on
management education and training. There are already established lists
such as TRDEV-L where practitioners already try to find leads on academic
research on training and development. However, the general level of such
lists is probably much lower than a management professor centered list
might be.

This link to practitioners always sounds like such a great idea until we
try to implement it. I think MED does a better job than most divisions in
attracting and appealing to practitioners, but once we get them to a
meeting and they attend other sessions devoted to a bunch of esoteric
stuff they don't understand or care about, we lose them. Perhaps what
we need is to expand the role of Practitioner Liaison to work in that
area. I tried to do that when I held that position, but with little
success. My experience was that ASTD was such a leader in the MD area that
there was little we could do to complement their efforts. Maybe we need to
sharpen our focus and hone in on specific areas such as executive MBA
programs and executive education in general, and leave the broader MD area
to ASTD.

On Tue, 15 Oct 1996, Charles Wankel wrote:

> MG-ED-DV can provide a place for practitioners to ask about research on
> management education and training. There are already established lists
> such as TRDEV-L where practitioners already try to find leads on academic
> research on training and development. However, the general level of such
> lists is probably much lower than a management professor centered list
> might be.
>

Dave Lemak wrote that practitioners who come to AOM meetings and become
bewildered by some of the esoteric sessions that they might end up in.
This is a great insight. Indeed we might chart a roadmap through the
meeting for practitioners so that they can attend the more useful sessions
for them. Indeed, the meeting might be laid out with a track across
divisions designed for practitioners which they might attend as a group at
times. Special practitioner receptions and activities might be through in.
The local arrangements people might help create local activities involving
the regional business community that could be crafted to be attractive to
practitioners.
Perhaps Dave is right that we might abdicate much ground to ASTD since
we perhaps we can't compete with them. But as someone who has presented at
ASTD, I see great interest in the academic portion of their program that
could translate in interest in ours.
Dave's suggestions about developing the niche markets of executive MBA
programs and executive education generally certainly has merit. We might
be able draw academics from disciplines other than own for such sessions.
Charlie Wankel
St. John's University in New
York City

The idea of having a practitioner track at the Academy within MED is
interesting. Does anyone have any idea what percentage of MED registrants
at Academy tend to be practitioners? IT might be that we could suggest a
practitioner's track throughout the entire meeting, crossing division lines.
To do this would take some serious coordination, though. On the other hand,
I'm not sure MED has enough practitioner-oriented programming to make a MED
track. Add in Mgmt Consulting, HRM, OD, and a few other
practitioner-oriented divisions (at least in part) and we could have a
track. Anyway, what do people think??


--
Bill Ferris
Management Department
School of Business
Western New England College
Springfield, MA 01119
Tel: 413-782-1629
FAX: 413-796-2068
INTERNET: BFERRIS@WNEC.EDU

Bill, sounds like an excellent idea to take it Academy wide at the annual
meeting. Then it would be an empirical question on its overall draw at the
Academy. I do believe it would also reinforce the commitment to actually
address real world concerns in management. Perhaps coordination across the
Divisions could occur informally if formal approval is not granted. A
guerilla movement in the Academy I love it........ Tom Kolenko

At 01:21 PM 10/16/96 -0400, you wrote:
>The idea of having a practitioner track at the Academy within MED is
>interesting. Does anyone have any idea what percentage of MED registrants
>at Academy tend to be practitioners? IT might be that we could suggest a
>practitioner's track throughout the entire meeting, crossing division lines.
>To do this would take some serious coordination, though. On the other hand,
>I'm not sure MED has enough practitioner-oriented programming to make a MED
>track. Add in Mgmt Consulting, HRM, OD, and a few other
>practitioner-oriented divisions (at least in part) and we could have a
>track. Anyway, what do people think??
>
>
>--
>Bill Ferris
>Management Department
>School of Business
>Western New England College
>Springfield, MA 01119
>Tel: 413-782-1629
>FAX: 413-796-2068
>INTERNET: BFERRIS@WNEC.EDU
>
>

Charlie's idea about a "recommended" series of presentations for
practitoners is a reasonable suggestion, as is working with local
arrangements committees to set up some specific activities. But again, we
have to be careful to keep in within the Division. This past meeting
Daniel Twomey (Fairleigh Dickinson U.) asked for our support, along with
some other divisions, for preconvention time to set up a "practitioner
dialogue" session, which we did. The bad news was that the time scheduled
was right "on top" of a practitioner session that Marvelle had set up
months earlier. This may have just been bad luck, but if we continue to
reach out to that segment of the Academy membership, we need to keep it an
MED function. Here again, I think we need to expand the role of the
Practitioner Liaison to coordinate those activities so we avoid future
conflicts.

Bill,
Remember the "Practitioner Task Force" that the Academy set up some years
ago as an interest group? It was dropped like a bad habit for lack of
support - mostly because (I think) each division was doing it's own thing
vis-a-vis practitioners. See my previous message.
Regards,
Dave

On Wed, 16 Oct 1996, Bill Ferris wrote:

> The idea of having a practitioner track at the Academy within MED is
> interesting. Does anyone have any idea what percentage of MED registrants
> at Academy tend to be practitioners? IT might be that we could suggest a
> practitioner's track throughout the entire meeting, crossing division lines.
> To do this would take some serious coordination, though. On the other hand,
> I'm not sure MED has enough practitioner-oriented programming to make a MED
> track. Add in Mgmt Consulting, HRM, OD, and a few other
> practitioner-oriented divisions (at least in part) and we could have a
> track. Anyway, what do people think??
>
>
> --
> Bill Ferris
> Management Department
> School of Business
> Western New England College
> Springfield, MA 01119
> Tel: 413-782-1629
> FAX: 413-796-2068
> INTERNET: BFERRIS@WNEC.EDU
>

This is Jim Carroll - trying to add my 2 cents to this discussion.

The concept of Practitioner involvement in the Academy has interested
me for years. To further develop this concept, it may be advisable
to disaggregate the concept of practitioner into smaller subsets.
For example, some of the practitioner subsets might include Trainers,
Organizational Development consultants, H/R executives, Marketing
Executives, Financial Executives, etc. I have always fond it
difficult to consider the total population of "practitioners" since
it is hardly uniform.

Further, it has been my experience that practitioners do not identify
themselves with the label "practitioner." In the corporate area, the
identity is usually to function, such as Marketing. It may actually
take a few practitioners a while to realize that the label
"practitioner" applies to them. With a vision of our market, we may
be able to craft a plan to reach certain subsets of the total market.
For example, a session entitled "Operations mangers who train and
still meet Production demands" would allow all of us to visualize the
types of content appropriate to such a session. Operations managers
could see themselves attending such a session.

Finally, the snooty folks in "those" divisions (We all know which
divisions that I am talking about) consider the term "practitioner"
as a pejorative and demeaning term. I note that the quarterly
journal is not called the "Academy of Management Practitioner" but
rather the AoM "Executive."

I suggest that, as a first step, we consider using the term
"Executive" instead of "practitioner." A suggested second step would
be to add a functional modifier to the term as MED looks to address
subsets of the population. Based on this approach, I could see a
session called "Marketing Executives discuss continued education on
Internet use in Sales of Intangibles." To me, that would be more
desirable than "Practitioners discuss continued education for
Internet applications."

In reading the other post, I noted that Judy Strauss seems to move in
this direction. She talked about a specific person and their
background.

Let me know what you think. That was my 2-cents.


Jim Carroll
Email: drjamesjcarrollcpa@prodigy.com


Wee I guess it's about time for me to add my 2 cents also to this
practitioner/executive/corporate/whatever discussion.

I've read with GREAT interest all of the various viewpoints regarding
"those who do rather than teach" involvement in the Academy. I guess my
basic question is does anyone want their involvement other than us? Oh
sure, the AOM executive board says they do but then continue to restrict
membership at the student level to only Ph.D. students (i.e., MBA and BBA
students are not allowed or welcome). How then do we embrace the
executive group? From my view this sounds like we speak (as a collective
whole) with forked tongue? Doesn't this bother anyone else? Bottom line
for me: until we open membership anything we attempt (as a division or a
collective whole) will prove ineffectual. Comments?

------------------
Kathleen J. Powers
Associate Professor of Human Resource Management
campus: phone 503-370-6111; fax 503-370-3011
home: phone 503-588-0591; fax 503-585-3350

hi Gang! I think I support Kathleen's view - we need to welcome all who
profess to be managers whether they are professors or no!

New subject. I've been giving a little thought to the session evaluation
process. One thing that has bothered me, despite MED's justifiable pride in
saying that all of its sessions are evaluated, is for what real purpose do we
do it? in my view the only truly useful purpose is for immediate feedback to
those presenting. As far as I can tell, except for the pre-conference stuff,
the subject area's preference or "usefulness to MED" has not played much of a
role in selecting/designing future presentation sessions. I'm leaning toward
a recommendation to do just that...have the sesion evaluated by the audience
and then provide the feedback to the presenters forthwith. Of course some
form redesign would be necessary but thta's what I'm here for! Thoughts,
please? Jackbyrne@msn.com

----------
From: Management Education and Development Discussion on behalf of Powers
That Be
Sent: Sunday, October 20, 1996 3:01 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list MG-ED-DV
Subject: Re: What might MG-ED-DV's niche be?

Wee I guess it's about time for me to add my 2 cents also to this
practitioner/executive/corporate/whatever discussion.

I've read with GREAT interest all of the various viewpoints regarding
"those who do rather than teach" involvement in the Academy. I guess my
basic question is does anyone want their involvement other than us? Oh
sure, the AOM executive board says they do but then continue to restrict
membership at the student level to only Ph.D. students (i.e., MBA and BBA
students are not allowed or welcome). How then do we embrace the
executive group? From my view this sounds like we speak (as a collective
whole) with forked tongue? Doesn't this bother anyone else? Bottom line
for me: until we open membership anything we attempt (as a division or a
collective whole) will prove ineffectual. Comments?

------------------
Kathleen J. Powers
Associate Professor of Human Resource Management
campus: phone 503-370-6111; fax 503-370-3011
home: phone 503-588-0591; fax 503-585-3350

John - I share much of your concern about the evaluation process. For
the last three years, I dutifully logged all of the responses to the
evaluation forms. This information was then presented as a short article
in the newsletter (which was latter used to justify our existence to the
Academy). I would then give this information to the incoming Program
Chair for planning purposes.

My question is: Did the Program Chairs ever use the information? If
they did, what did they find helpful and why? If they did not, what
information would they need to be helpful? Do any other officers make
use of the information?

To my knowledge, the Program Chairs get more utility out of the MED
Interest Survey of who would like to participate next year.

Terrell Manyak
manyak@polaris.ncs.nova.edu

On Thu, 24 Oct 1996, John Byrne, Jr. wrote:

> hi Gang! I think I support Kathleen's view - we need to welcome all who
> profess to be managers whether they are professors or no!
>
> New subject. I've been giving a little thought to the session evaluation
> process. One thing that has bothered me, despite MED's justifiable pride in
> saying that all of its sessions are evaluated, is for what real purpose do we
> do it? in my view the only truly useful purpose is for immediate feedback to
> those presenting. As far as I can tell, except for the pre-conference stuff,
> the subject area's preference or "usefulness to MED" has not played much of a
> role in selecting/designing future presentation sessions. I'm leaning toward
> a recommendation to do just that...have the sesion evaluated by the audience
> and then provide the feedback to the presenters forthwith. Of course some
> form redesign would be necessary but thta's what I'm here for! Thoughts,
> please? Jackbyrne@msn.com
>
> ----------
> From: Management Education and Development Discussion on behalf of Powers
> That Be
> Sent: Sunday, October 20, 1996 3:01 PM
> To: Multiple recipients of list MG-ED-DV
> Subject: Re: What might MG-ED-DV's niche be?
>
> Wee I guess it's about time for me to add my 2 cents also to this
> practitioner/executive/corporate/whatever discussion.
>
> I've read with GREAT interest all of the various viewpoints regarding
> "those who do rather than teach" involvement in the Academy. I guess my
> basic question is does anyone want their involvement other than us? Oh
> sure, the AOM executive board says they do but then continue to restrict
> membership at the student level to only Ph.D. students (i.e., MBA and BBA
> students are not allowed or welcome). How then do we embrace the
> executive group? From my view this sounds like we speak (as a collective
> whole) with forked tongue? Doesn't this bother anyone else? Bottom line
> for me: until we open membership anything we attempt (as a division or a
> collective whole) will prove ineffectual. Comments?
>
> ------------------
> Kathleen J. Powers
> Associate Professor of Human Resource Management
> campus: phone 503-370-6111; fax 503-370-3011
> home: phone 503-588-0591; fax 503-585-3350
>