One of the trumpeted concepts in SIOP is the idea of the scientist-practitioner: the I/O psychologist with one foot in rigorous academic research and the other working with real organizations on real problems. It’s a difficult balance, and one that many simply choose not to attempt, landing themselves firmly on one side or the other. Frankly, I’d always thought of this as a uniquely I/O (or perhaps even psychology) concern. But it’s not. Many areas have scientists and practitioners and all the conflict that goes along with it.
Enter this article from the Escapist. Some familiar themes emerge.
With 25 years on one side and three on the other, I can tell you that the difference between our two worlds isn’t as big as one might think, and the delineations between “practicing” and “preaching” are not as important as they often seem. There is value to each side of the equation. There is also great value in there being no equation, no sides at all.
Such a quote could fit right into an I/O conference presentation about the scientist-practitioner divide, couldn’t it? But it’s not – this quote is about the video game industry, where academics in the ivory tower fight to remain relevant to commercial video game projects. Suprisingly, many of the same themes emerge. Some issues raised in the article:
- Once a person goes into industry, it is very difficult to get back into academia.
- Practitioners feel academics are too judgmental about the expertise of practitioners.
- Practitioners who have successfully completed a few major projects assume that makes them qualified to teach, while academics disagree.
- Practitioners assume many academic innovations are not commercially valuable, at least initially.
- Practitioners think academics without industry experience could not possibly know what they’re talking about.
Sound familiar? What this tells me is that the scientist-practioner model is one that exists outside of I/O, in many fields, even though they might not describe it with the same words. Perhaps some of these other fields have something to teach us? Does this occur in chemistry, biology, and physics? In what fields has the scientist-practitioner flouished, and why? And perhaps more importantly, where has this model failed, and is I/O going down the same road? I wish I had an answer.
Several major changes have occurred at Thoughts of a Neo-Academic.
- We have moved from neoacademic.wordpress.com to neoacademic.com.
The migration allows us to use custom features not possible at wordpress.com.
If you are currently accessing the blog via an RSS feed (e.g. Google Reader, Feedburner), you should change the feed to this new address: https://neoacademic.com/feed/ - We have separated professional posts from personal news. Professional posts now appears in the center column (as they always have), while snippets of personal news appear in the right sidebar (click the More links to access the full text). If you read via an RSS feed, you’ll no longer receive personal posts. I’m looking into ways to address this.
- You might have noticed that I am using the term “We.” That’s because my wife has promised that she is going to start posting in the Personal section. We will likely have many updates there as we move across the country and begin working on our new house in Virginia Beach starting this coming weekend.
According to this recent article in the Chronicle, it has become common for college newspapers to put their full archives online, and as a result, anything you did in college that anyone ever wrote even decades ago may now be Google-able. The examples from the article of people affected by this:
- a reporter who graduated from Penn State being characterized by an article she wrote in college about the “hook-up culture” on campus
- a Marine who graduated from Emory who wrote about the war and domestic and economic policy (his quote: As a rule, politics and the military don’t mix”)
- a lawyer who graduated from Cornell who had been charged with burglary while a student (although, it seems, not convicted)
- a current student at Macalester who made comments on underage drinking
- a variety of seniors at the University of Pittsburgh who had been featured in the paper’s summaries of police activities, documenting underage drinking, public intoxication, and fake ID usage
There are several perspectives on this, many of which conflict.
- Personal Responsibility: If you don’t want the world to know, don’t do anything you wouldn’t want your next employer to read about.
- Personal Privacy: It’s your right to keep your activities private.
- Organizational Responsibility: Responsible companies should put this information in its proper context when making hiring decisions. For example, a report of underage drinking might matter in some professions (e.g. politician) more than others (e.g. sequential artist).
- Journalistic Integrity: These are real, honest newspapers, even if they are college-sponsored. Journalistic integrity does still mean something, so many papers are reluctant or unwilling to pull or alter stories unless something contained within them is factually inaccurate.
- Alumni Relations: Today’s graduates provide tomorrow’s donations. It doesn’t pay (in several senses) to alienate your student body.
I’m commenting on it here because I think it continues a discussion we had here earlier. Should organizations use this information? I suppose my stance is the same as my comments before: just because Candidate A has a report on him in College Town Gazette doesn’t mean that Candidate B didn’t do something much worse that you don’t know about. Hiring on information for some applicants and not others is also dangerous to organizations: you could be introducing adverse impact (unintentionally biased hiring on protected classes). And let’s not forget the meta-question here: is it ethical to hire people based on what they do in their free time?
For the job applicant, this is little comfort. There’s no way to really know if a particular recruiter is looking you up on Google or not. Such a practice is not (yet) illegal, and I can tell you from experience that when you have a wide selection of very similar applicants, it’s difficult not to take 5 little seconds out of your day to search for them, in an effort to differentiate them somehow. So for now, taking the approach of personal responsibility or perhaps making a plea to the current editor of the paper are your only real options to safeguard your reputation. And I imagine that as more and more people make information about them publicly available, this problem will only worse.