My Academic Journey

           One thing that has been a constant in my life, for as long as I can remember anyway, is that I have always liked to write. I also liked math and science.  I took a standardized test in middle school that was pitched as a career interest survey; based on your answers to the test questions about your likes and dislikes, this test was designed to give you feedback on the kinds of careers that would be the best fit for you (at least in terms of interest, if not ability).  I don’t know if the test had any reliability or validity, but for me it suggested that my interests aligned well with those who went into engineering and those who became college professors (and maybe one other profession that I don’t recall).  This feedback seemed odd to me at the time because I really didn’t know anything about either of these professions.  Interestingly, I ended up majoring in chemical engineering in college and later decided to become a college professor!

         After graduating college with my engineering degree, I worked for the DuPont Company for a couple of years at their main research and development facility (called the experimental station) in Wilmington, Delaware (the town where I grew up).  I worked in R&D in the agrichemicals area, focusing on one of the chemical steps in the synthesis of a new herbicide, and how this process could be moved from lab-scale to production scale.  At some point during my time at DuPont, I got some advice from my mentor at the company which reminded me of the scene in the movie “The Graduate” where Benjamin (the character played by Dustin Hoffman) gets some advice from Mr. McGuire who says: “I want to say one word to you. Just one word: Plastics! . . . There’s a great future in plastics.  Think about it.  Will you think about it?”  My mentor, however, pointed me in the direction of computers and information systems.  As a result, I started to write software programs in a fourth-generation language called RS/1. The programs were things that helped me work through engineering calculations.  After a couple of years at DuPont, it became clear that my future at the company would depend upon my willingness to move from R&D to a manufacturing plant either in West Virginia or Texas at some point, and having worked in chemical plants before, this was not especially attractive to me.  I wanted, instead, to get an MBA.  Moreover, my significant other was enrolled in a PhD program in Boston.  DuPont was willing to send me for a PhD in Chemical Engineering, but I decided that was not for me; I really wanted the MBA.  So, I ended up applying and going to MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

While I initially thought that I did not possess the background needed to go into information systems, and leaned instead toward marketing, even taking a summer job at a DuPont subsidiary (New England Nuclear) in the Boston area, I subsequently gravitated toward management information systems as my concentration area for the MBA.  During my time at MIT Sloan, I co-authored a non-refereed paper entitled “Biotechnology Opportunities and Challenges:  Markets, Engineering, and Regulation” in Chemical Economy & Engineering Review.  While it wasn’t a peer reviewed publication and was not based on any kind of empirical research, this was a turning point, although I did not see it as such at the time.  It marked the end of chemical engineering for me and the beginning of a trajectory that would involve publishing in scholarly journals. 

After graduating from MIT Sloan, I worked for a year at two small companies that did software development and then decided to get my doctorate.  I was fortunate to get into the Harvard Business School and chose to go there because this was the only school I applied to where I got the sense that there were close ties to business and an emphasis on addressing practical problems that managers face.  Like me, all the incoming students had some prior work experience, and this made it feel like a good fit.  At the time that I did my doctoral studies, artificial intelligence in the form of rules-based expert systems was becoming popular. My dissertation research focused on the implementation of an expert system at a computer company and involved a longitudinal survey coupled with a more qualitative case study approach involving over 100 interviews.

The implementation I was studying involved a system that was designed to help sales representatives with the complex task of properly configuring systems prior to generating a price quotation during the sales process.  The system was not being embraced by the salesforce and the developers had concluded that this was largely because the user interface needed to be improved.  The developers, having retooled the user interface, were convinced that the implementation would be successful.  As I got into the research, it became evident that the problems went well beyond the user interface and had more to do with a lack of any real incentive for the sales representatives to be concerned about configuration errors.  Moreover, the developers lacked a good understanding of what the sales process was like and decided that the configuration system could be developed without being integrated into the price quotation system and still be useful to sales representatives. 

As I conducted my dissertation research, it became apparent to me that while there was an implementation component to what I was studying, the more interesting story was how and why a company would continue to fund a system for so many years when it was not being embraced by the sales representatives.  While I collected some data on this through the interviews, I felt like I had to be very careful lest the company decide to stop allowing me access to do the dissertation research that I came in to do.  So, the question of why a company would continue to pursue for more than a decade what appeared to be a software project that was in trouble (and had been for a long time) was one that continued to puzzle me, but the answer to this puzzle would have to wait until after I graduated from the doctoral program.

As part of the doctoral program, I was encouraged to write Harvard Business School teaching cases and I wrote about half a dozen of these.  What I didn’t realize at the time was that doctoral students at other schools were writing journal articles.  Consequently, it wasn’t until I joined Georgia State University as an Assistant Professor that I realized that I had not been trained at all to do the kind of writing that I would need to do to get promoted and tenured (i.e., journal articles).  A couple of things occurred to me shortly after I joined GSU.  For one thing, I realized that I had better figure out how to publish journal articles.  For another thing, with no connections to companies in Atlanta, I realized that it would be far more difficult to engage in the kind of research opportunities that were possible for me when I was at HBS.  For that reason, I realized that I might need to retool and think about doing other kinds of research.  

At the beginning of my second semester at GSU, I was browsing through the current issues of journals in the library and stumbled upon an article in the Academy of Management Review.  The article was by Joel Brockner, and it was entitled: “The escalation of commitment to a failing course of action: Toward theoretical progress.”  A lightbulb went off in my mind.  This article could provide a useful theoretical frame from which to understand what had puzzled me so much in my dissertation research.  I photocopied the paper (this was before one could simply download a PDF) and left the GSU library eager to read this review article.  My wife, who is a faculty member at Emory University, had a departmental retreat (or function) that weekend at Calloway Gardens, which is about two hours south of Atlanta, and invited me to tag along.  I went with my AMR article. 

The next morning, while she was busy with her colleagues, I went off to the local Hardee’s (a fast-food restaurant) and read Brockner’s review article over breakfast.  I remember getting very excited as I read the article.  For the first semester at GSU, I was totally occupied with teaching and was stressing over the whole journal publication process and whether I would be able to master it in time to clear the tenure hurdle.  When I saw my wife later that day, I remember telling her something to the effect of: “I think I now know how I am going to get tenure.”  In my mind, I had not only concluded that the escalation of commitment literature would provide a useful frame for writing about what I saw in my dissertation research, but that it would provide a pathway for further research and give me a focus and a direction around which I could establish myself.  The rest, as they say, is history. I began diving into the escalation of commitment literature.  One article that I read which grabbed my attention was a short piece by Howard Garland in the Journal of Applied Psychology, entitled: “Throwing Good Money After Bad: The Effect of Sunk Costs on the Decision to Escalate Commitment to an Ongoing Project.” Around this time, I began to think about what resources I had at GSU.  Since this was not HBS where connections with area companies came easily, I began to think about conducting lab experiments. At the time, we were on a quarter-based system at GSU and it dawned on me that one thing we had in abundance were student subjects and frequent opportunities throughout the year to run experiments.  Thus, with no prior training or experience in designing or executing experiments, I began to move in that direction. 

My first experiment was patterned after Garland’s article and examined the sunk cost effect, but the stimulus material was recast within the frame of software development.  Since that time, I have designed and conducted numerous experiments on escalation and de-escalation of commitment, approaching the topic from a variety of angles including real options, risk, cognitive bias (e.g., illusion of control, problem recognition, evaluability bias, fairness effect), goal setting, bad news reporting (e.g., mum effect and deaf effect), ego depletion, performance appraisals, perspective taking, growth mindset, construal level, and process modeling.  In addition to the experiments, I continued to conduct survey research and case study research. 

My strategy was to select or reject research projects based on whether they fell under the umbrella of IT project management, as my aim was to establish a name for myself within this domain.  I therefore followed a niche strategy, and this has served me well throughout my scholarly career. This strategy also had the advantage of giving me time to have a family and help raise two wonderful children, as I didn’t have to crawl up the learning curve on multiple bodies of literature in order to be productive.  Later in my career, I became less restrictive in terms of the topics I studied, and more driven by the interests of PhD students and collaborators that I was working with.  As a result, I got into topics such as the digital divide, health information technology, information privacy, and conversational agents. 

       As my scholarly career has progressed, I have come to realize that it is the relationships with doctoral students and collaborators that are the most meaningful part of my academic journey.  I feel fortunate to have been able to chair or co-chair 25 doctoral dissertations (19 PhD and 6 DBA) and to work with more than 128 different co-authors from around the world.  My scholarly career has been very rewarding and looking back I have no regrets that I chose the path I did.  The opportunity to work with and get to know so many wonderful people from different countries and cultures has made this a pleasurable journey. 

Written for the MISQ Scholarly Development Academy (Summer 2022)