Writing, Authenticity, and Knowledge Creation: Why I Write and You Should Too

Abstract

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 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 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. …