My field’s principle organization, the Society for Industrial/Organizational Psychology, has been recently debating a name change. It’s a topic about which many feel passionately. I’ve been resisting joining the fray because I haven’t been sure where I stood on the issue, and frankly, I’m still not 100%. But I thought I’d lay out the various perspectives as I understand them and see what you think.
The problem is this: I/O psychology has historically not always been called I/O psychology, and even today, isn’t called I/O psychology in many countries outside of the U.S.A. The United Kingdom, for example, typically refers to I/O as occupational psychology. In continental Europe, it’s work psychology, although there’s a modern trend toward work and organizational psychology. In Australia, it’s most often simply organizational psychology (see Warr, 2006). This creates a lack of brand identity – in I/O, we know these are all essentially the same thing, but outside of I/O, it’s not nearly so clear. Add to the problem that within the United States, according to many of the comments on the pages above, many don’t refer to our field as I/O psychology to their own clients. Efforts to create competitive advantage by practicing I/O psychologists leads them to create their own label to which their clients will respond best – for example, if your clients tend to think of industrial as manufacturing and organizational as people helping you redesign your closets, then it makes financial sense to refer to yourself by a different term.
This lack of brand identity is a problem only if I/O psychologists want to make a global impact, which is the goal of SIOP. As more people become aware of I/O psychology and its role in the world, the more likely that I/O psychologists will be able to influence with science how work is conducted. Without such an identity, it is harder to be taken seriously; when SIOP approaches those in power with suggestions for how to improve work in the United States, the reaction we don’t want is, “What is I/O psychology?”
So what does this have to do with changing the name of a single organization? Since SIOP represents the interests of I/O psychology in the United States, changing the name of SIOP effectively changes the name of I/O psychology in the United States. Although it wouldn’t be immediate, educational programs would eventually change the names of the their degree programs, and the old name would gradually fade into history.
This has happened before. And if you don’t want a short history lesson, I suggest skipping to the next paragraph. Originally, I/O in the U.S.A. was probably considered economic psychology or business psychology (see Koppes and Pickren, 2006). The term industrial psychology probably came about due to the 1913 book byHugo Munsterberg, one of the early proponents of I/O, Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, although the term was not popularized until Morris Viteles several decades later. In 1937, the American Association of Applied Psychology (AAAP) created the Business and Industrial Psychology division, while in 1945, the AAAP merged with the American Psychological Association to form Division 14 (SIOP’s current division), then called Industrial and Business Psychology. Ghiselli and Brown published a very popular textbook in 1948, called Personnel and Industrial Psychology, which encouraged adoption of the term “personnel.” The Hawthorne studies, often cited as the birth of the topics typically studied in organizational psychology, were conducted in the 1920s-1930s, although not written about until the 1940s. These topics were typically more employee-focused (like leadership and teamwork), while topics in industrial psychology were more about shaping personnel (like selection and training). In 1962, Divison 14 was renamed Industrial Psychology, and in 1973, reflecting the increasing popularity of organizational psychology, finally became Industrial and Organizational Psychology, where it remains today.
Thus we have historically and continue to have a bit of an identity crisis. Topics traditionally considered organizational psychology are much more popular these days than those in industrial psychology (see Landers, 2009), although both literatures are sizable. Some believe the split is arbitrary anyway; after all, all of it refers to psychology at work, right?
There are several specific criticism of I/O psychology as well, which you can see in greater detail here. I will address my stance on each, one by one.
- There are too many syllables and the name is too long.
This is certainly true, but there are many memorable organizations or groups with longer names. The acts and marketing efforts of I/O will have a greater impact than shortening the name ever will, but still – I see the problem. - “Industrial” is an archaic term.
Well, sure. But so any other term we choose eventually will be. There is no reason to think that “work” or “organizational” will be the in vogue term even a decade from now. Is a name change every few decades really the solution to this problem? - No other international societies continue to use the term “industrial.”
This is a problem, but I think it’s quite arrogant of SIOP to think that it will lead the way in choosing a new name for the field internationally. If the concern really is to re-brand the field worldwide, then why aren’t we consulting with those other organizations before changing our name? - No one knows what I/O means anyway.
This is definitely a problem, but one shared across more areas than I/O, and not necessarily one solved with a name change alone. How many laymen do you think really know the difference between human factors, counseling, clinical, social, and cognitive? If SIOP becomes SOP, do you really think anyone is going to suddenly say, “Of course you’re not a therapist! The differences are so clear now!” - Having I and O tends to split people that self-identify with either I or O.
Of this list, I think this entry is the most important. The I/O split these days is somewhat artificial; most psychologists research or practice some combination of the two. But at the same time, changing the name from SIOP to SOP pretty clearly says “I is no longer a part of what we do,” which I think simply is not true. Our heritage lies firmly along both I and O; it doesn’t seem right to drop one for the other. If any change is appropriate, it should be a total change: perhaps to work or occupational psychology. But cutting out one area for the other just seems wrong.
So as of now, I am firmly against changing the name to SOP, although change seems like a good idea. I just don’t know to what. Perhaps we should go with the suggestion from Pablo Xia: let’s just call ourselves Bob.
Essay mills like Essay Writers are, in my mind, an enabler of the worst type of academic fraud that can be perpetuated by an undergraduate. These mills employ freelance writers to produce essays on-demand papers for students unwilling to write their own. The student decides that they are not going to write a particular paper, logs into the website, and submits a request, after which a freelancer/ghost writer completes the project. Personally, I consider this much worse than simple plagiarism. I imagine plagiarism usually stems from laziness; you don’t want to write something, so you Google the topic and copy/paste. But paying someone to fake ideas for you is a willful and purposeful attempt to deceive.
This recent video exposé at the Chronicle of Higher Education provides an enlightening journey into what exactly is involved on the freelancer’s side, and while watching it, I was surprised by a few things. First, essay writers get paid a lot for what is by most accounts a very simple exercise. One example is an assignment for which someone paid at least $25: a 5-page reaction paper relating class concepts to an episode of the TV show, 24. Seriously? When I assign reaction papers, if you’ve been following the class at all, a 5-page reaction paper would should be 30-60 minutes of effort. It’s not a scientific/citations-based affair – you’re just supposed to give your reactions. Based on the video, it would probably take 15 minutes just to set up the work order!
Second, according to the video, $5/page is actually low; $15/page seems to be the preferred rate. Apparently I should have been paid about $2300 for my dissertation.
Third, another example was given hitting a little closer to home: someone wanting a ghost writer for the Methods section of their doctoral dissertation. I thought Ph.D.-level work wouldn’t be part of this sort of thing, but evidently not. Although I wonder about the quality of work for those papers.
Fourth, these papers are quite customizable. British English or American English? Want a ghost writer to continue a paper that you’ve already started? Want to request a specific ghost writer, because you’re familiar with the quality of their work? It’s all possible in modern essay mills.
As an academic exercise, I wonder first who these writers are and how the quality is. And although there’s no way to ever know, for some reason, I always default to “graduate students low on cash,” just scraping by on the meager stipends of their programs, looking wherever they can for ramen-money.
And second, although I know I shouldn’t, I question which of my students might have used this or a similar service. Since this isn’t a copy/paste affair, and since the work they are turning in is original although by someone else, there is no way to ever catch them, aside from a sudden and shocking increase in quality from one paper to the next. But one can easily imagine a student with enough cash using such a service for every paper they ever needed to write.
At the end of the video, the speaker mentions that such a thing wasn’t possible without the Internet. I think that’s a bit of an oversimplification. Back in high school, I remember other students identifying me as a “good” student and asking me to write their papers in exchange for money. I never did it, but I imagine there were many who did. What the Internet enables is a worldwide, organized system by which such freelancers and unethical students can find each other – now you don’t even need to be on the same continent as the person for whom you are writing the paper.
It makes me wonder – what’s the future hold? If the introduction of the Internet enhacned this method of cheating so dramatically, what other methods will be invented in the years to come as the technology continues to improve? Is it overly cynical to think that students will identify every new cheating method and use them as soon as they can, in an effort to bypass their education, just to get the grades they want without any learning required? And as essay-purchasing and other similar methods become more popular, more such services will appear, prices will drop, and even more students will partake in these deceptions. It creates a downward spiral, at the end of which is the collapse of the value of education: if you can’t trust that any student did any work for their degree, then no degree holds value. What do we do? Can it be stopped? I wish I had the answers.
The success or failure of academia revolves around the integrity of its journals – the “trade mags,” so to speak, of each academic area. Which makes it all the more disturbing that major academic publisher Elsevier produced at least six fake journals in which pharmaceutical companies, including Merck, published probably fake academic research that they could reference in order to sell their products.
Merck apparently paid Elsevier to publish the quite legitimate-sounding Australian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, along with five others. Don’t even try Google – this journal does not and has never had a website, and furthermore does not appear in any academic databases, although I managed to locate a PDF copy of one of the issues here. Instead, this journal sits quietly behind the scenes, out of sight, where Merck can reference it when they need to sell you on the effectiveness of their products. Articles never go through the peer review process that maintains quality levels in real academic journals, so the material could be written by anyone the pharmaceutical companies paid.
This represents a serious breach of trust between academics and journal publishers. All I can know for sure is that Elsevier produces at least one legitimate journal – my very first published article, submitted while I was an undergraduate, was in an Elsevier publication: Computers in Human Behavior. And believe me, there was a peer-review process. But what about the others? Academia functions solely because of trust – we trust that other researchers don’t fake their data, conduct due dilligence in investigating their findings, correctly run the statistical tests they claim to, and actually run the research that they write about. When that trust is lost, science cannot advance, because you can’t believe that anyone has actually done anything that they claim to have done.
So what do we do about it? Well, there’s the problem. Elsevier publishes an astonishing amount of material in all fields, including psychology: over 2000 journals, according to their website. So is boycotting Elsevier a realistic option? Cutting off the problem at the source? Probably not for most. Academics survive on the publication of their research, and excluding the largest outlet in the world is probably not a good idea career-wise. Much like the banking industry, Elsevier is apparently too big to fail, regardless of how unethical their publishing practices may be.
If you personally want to hold Elsevier responsible for their actions, feel free to personally boycott the journals they publish, but be aware that unfortunately this includes several high-profile journals in psychology like Intelligence. You can find the full list here. The question that bothers me is – if you boycott the publisher, who ultimately gets hurt? The libraries will still order their copies, the database vendors will still index the same articles, and Elsevier will still get the same cash they were getting before. All that would happen, as far as I can tell, is that you’d fail to cite a researcher who didn’t do anything wrong.
Is there a solution? Many have been calling for an overhaul of the publishing industry in academia for a long time. Some have claimed the solution is to move all publishing to online open-access journals, but then there is no real centralized system of accountability, and we have the same problems that we have now – anyone can publish anything they want, as long as they have the money. If anyone has the answer, many are listening.
Update (5/18): Through this blog, I discovered that Elsevier provided a statement about their actions in this matter. See for yourself.