By Author:
Yonghoon G. Lee – Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Martin Gargiulo – INSEAD
Interviewers:
Martina Pizzinato – University College London
Neveen Saied – Vlerick Business School
Article link: https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392211055198
- We would like to start by talking about something that drew our attention to the paper at first, which is the sample that you used, K-pop songwriters. How did you choose this sample and what inspired you to study K-pop songwriters?
Yonghoon: I think most great research is inspired by your personal experiences. This is also inspired by personal experiences, but I’m not a musician or a songwriter. It just happened that I had a few friends who were trying to break into this industry when we were young and trying to do something about our lives. Many of them tragically failed, so that got me interested in why it’s so difficult for them to transition into this popular music and then be successful. And, of course, most research needs to have some luck. I was fortunate with the surge of K-pop, which is nothing related to our paper, nothing related to me as a cause. We started in a situation where K-pop was getting traction and the industry itself was growing fast. Even now it’s growing pretty fast. So, it was a bit of luck with a bit of personal inspiration.
Martin: My interest in the topic springs from my interest in Yonghoon, who was a PhD student at INSEAD. I knew about K-pop’s existence, but I’m not particularly familiar with it as you can imagine. It’s not my generation. I think it’s also important that my trajectory as a scholar has been fundamentally focused on network analysis and network theory and the topics have never been something that I was focused on. My focus has always been on certain particular research questions that have to do with the development of network theory. K-pop provided an excellent setting, so I got very excited about the idea of working on some issues associated with the field because of creativity, the dynamic nature of the networks, and because it allows us to focus on something that is a major concern for me, which is how people change networks, how people build the networks, and how people escape networks that may not be the ones that they need to advance in their careers.
- You conducted around 27 interviews with K-pop songwriters, and we were wondering how this qualitative approach helped you in shaping your study and to what extent was it informative for you.
Yonghoon: I have to thank Martin and my dissertation committee for forcing me to interview these people. I started my PhD program because I was shy about talking to people. I tried to avoid speaking with the people as much as possible. But my dissertation committee, including Martin and Philip Anderson, suggested that if I was studying this phenomenon, I needed to understand how it’s working. They gave me a month to go back to Korea and do interviews. You can imagine that I was overwhelmed, wondering where I was going to look for these informants. I knew only one person who was working in something related to K-pop. And, basically, I activated my network to the extent that I was asking everyone that I knew if they knew someone who was working in K-pop. Fortunately, I snowballed, and it turned out that there were a lot of people who wanted to talk to me, because not many people are interested in songwriters. Most people are interested in the performers, but not the songwriters. So, they were quite interested in talking to me and sharing their experiences. Having said that, I want to leave a note to encourage most of the PhD students out there, as opposed to my initial objection to doing interviews, I think it helped me massively to understand why these things happen, how these things happen, and to understand and be an expert on the topic I was studying. So, this whole paper was never really shaped as a qualitative study, but the qualitative understanding from the interviews that I did, is the backbone. It has sort of given us an understanding of where we should start and where we should look into. So, these interviews not only validated our theories but also gave us a lot of insights into where we should look and what are the challenges that these songwriters are experiencing in day-to-day life. It was a massive help.
Martin: It’s true, I mean, we pushed him to do that. I think I always push my students to do that. Some people don’t know this, but I was trained originally as a social anthropologist, and in my dissertation, the first paper that I did after my PhD in Sociology, I spent almost seven months doing ethnographic work in a community of farmers. What came out of that is quantitative, but the insights came from the fieldwork. I think even for quantitative researchers, it is important to talk to people that are familiar with the phenomenon that you are interested in because of what Yonghoon was saying. I mean, you need to validate your findings. Now, it’s not always easy, because sometimes you’ll find these are things that people don’t recognize, but you need to identify patterns in the field that correspond to those findings. Otherwise, you’re not a social scientist, you are a disguised statistician. We have many of those around us, but I also make a big effort with my students and in my research, and I say that whatever happens in this world in terms of social sciences, it is because somebody somewhere either does something or doesn’t do anything. Therefore, we needed to understand what these songwriters did, or did not do to make sense of the results that we found.
- How long did this project last? And was the published paper generally the same as the original submission or did you make substantive changes? What do you think that the readers of this blog can take out of your review experience at ASQ?
Yonghoon: I think I’m going to start a little bit in a different place. I think, especially for junior scholars nowadays, there are different modes of writing papers. One is, under the pressure of publishing or perishing, you write things quickly, start to send them out quickly, and then go around different places. Sometimes you get lucky and find the right audience, then you get your paper published. There is, in my opinion, an older mode of writing papers, which is that you sit on that paper to understand who your audience is, so you’re very confident in terms of “Okay, so this is the audience that I want to talk to. This is the contribution that we want to make.” So, for this paper, we were following the mode of the latter scheme. ASQ was the first place where we sent the paper, and we were very lucky in the sense that they saw the potential of the paper in the way we saw it. Of course, there were different concerns raised and constructive reviews that helped to bring out the real contribution that we wanted to make, so it did change quite a lot. I will say it expanded because we were first interested in how this network that is good for survival is different from success and we were trying to argue about the transition, but that was more on the back end. The reviewers pointed out that they were more interested in how this transition happened. So, if you’re comparing the first submission and the last published paper, there’s quite a bit of new addition to the process of understanding how these transitions happen. I have to say that the review process took a long time and ASQ was gracious, as it’s known for, with us, and gave us more time to collect more data. It took some time for us to figure out how to do it and to compile a whole dataset and analyze that but at the end of the day, it made the paper much richer than its first submission.
Martin: I think your description is accurate. We started with even more because we did have some elements of the decision, but they were a decided focus thing, and we dropped that and we naturally focused more on the transition. But it was a good process. I mean, that’s my third ASQ, and it’s always a back-and-forth. Now, one of the things that are a feature of mine, and I have to hold it sometimes when I’m working with a graduate student, is that I tend to be very stubborn. If I don’t agree with the reviewers, I say “No, this is not true. You misread it.” I do it nicely, but I tend to push back. And I think it’s important to point out the role the editor plays, especially at ASQ. They point out the things the reviewers say that are relevant for shaping the paper, highlighting those and deemphasizing others. Editors who don’t do that, they are not doing their job. And I think Maxim does a good job on that. He was our editor and he allowed us to shape the paper. And we didn’t necessarily like everything that he wanted us to do, but in the end, he was very understanding when we pushed back and said “No, this particular issue that you guys are suggesting doesn’t fit the paper or doesn’t work the way you think it works.” Okay, now you need to argue these points and you need to provide data. But it was overall a very good process, although you will experience that when you start going through that process is not always as pleasant as it looks once the paper is in print.
- Going through a review process can be a daunting experience for some people, especially for students who are doing it for the first time. How was it for you? What was your emotional experience with it? And how did you manage all the emotions that come with the reviewing process?
Yonghoon: It is daunting. I forgot who mentioned this, but ASQ is indeed a place where it encourages PhD students and helps their dissertation to see the light of day. In that sense, it’s very developmental. I now have a little bit more experience getting papers in different journals and it felt very different in terms of how the review process was shaped and guided along the way, giving much more freedom to the authors than the other places in terms of what we wanted to say and how we wanted to say it. So, I didn’t see the animosity that viewers can sometimes show you. It might or might not have ended up in ASQ, but it gave me much more confidence that at least after this review, the paper will be better. And I think that was something that I appreciated during that process. And I also appreciate the editor for understanding how important these reviews could be, how the process could be, especially for young scholars like me, and yourselves.
Martin: That is something that I think most reviewers at ASQ tend to do, which is they avoid taking the position “If I had written this paper, what would I write.” You didn’t, so have to take the viewpoint of the authors and if you do not agree, that’s a different story. For most of the papers I review for ASQ, I recommend a rejection, but that’s okay because there is a rationale for that. Sometimes you have experiences in other journals where the reviewers, rather than taking the viewpoint of the authors, are trying to take the positions of the authors and think about how they would have written the paper.
- It’s very interesting. I see that you guys have great dynamics between the two of you. Something really interesting is that the paper itself is a network paper, but it’s also a study collaboration. This makes us wonder how did your collaboration emerge and how did it evolve?
Yonghoon: There is a power differential here. I don’t know whether this is the relevant point, but I started to work with Martin at INSEAD pretty late in the stage of my doctoral study. Some students would have the luxury of having their dissertation developed starting in year two or three. I didn’t and I blame this on Martin because he was on sabbatical for that period! One thing that I really appreciate about him being my advisor and also being a co-author in this paper is that he was very open and generous with his time. So, whenever I wanted to talk to him, it wasn’t like I needed an appointment. I could just knock on his door and say, “Can we talk about this issue?” and he would be available, so I really appreciated that. As you can see, he really challenges you to think more clearly, which I think benefited this paper and much beyond that. I think I’ve grown as a scholar under his guidance because he was pushing me to the edge to think as clearly as possible. I think that is an experience that not everyone might have. So, I actually do share it with my students as well as my other peers saying that it’s actually very lucky to have those kinds of advisors around you who are very generous with their time and also really challenge you to be at your very best. I think Martin has been motivating me with a bit of encouragement every now and then. He would tell me things like, “At least you improved!” It’s a small pat on the back that pushes you further.
Martin: Thank you for your kind words. I’ve been advising these students for a number of years and lately, for different reasons, I have become a Korean specialist. I have another Korean student now. I think I’m very generous with my time because I really enjoy engaging in conversations with my graduate students. I have a great privilege when it comes to academia because I only do executive education and doctoral students. I haven’t taught MBAs for years. I like this contrast because when I’m working with PhD students, it is just very strict and very relentless intensive theory mechanisms. I was trained by two people who are the founding fathers of this field; Harrison White and Ronald Burt. Neither of them is necessarily a kind soul, but they’re extremely supportive. Yonghoon and I have a great relationship. If he starts saying things that are not consistent, I would say, “You’re mumbling. You’re saying three different things. Make up your mind. What do you want to say?” That has built a very collaborative relationship, for sure. It is important for us to develop our students and then push them out because they need to go and do their own thing. Otherwise, they become an appendix to their advisor and that’s not a great idea. It has been a great process for me. I think I can say that Yonghoon has been one of my favorite students to work with. We got along very well. Personally, we also communicate well. It was an easy process, actually. I don’t think I had issues at some point where I said, “What am I doing with this guy?”
- Amazing! That’s such a great experience of collaboration and perhaps building a little bit on this. The whole study speaks about the experiences of professionals that work in precarious work conditions. In your opinion, can any parallels be drawn between songwriters and academics perhaps?
Yonghoon: Yes, so much. One thing that we were very surprised about, even though we knew about the context, is the similarity between these two careers. Obviously, the interviews helped us to understand the context and what’s going through songwriters’ minds and how songwriters learn about their own failures, and so on and so forth. However, when I was actually writing the paper, I always had my own career in the back of my mind. I think part of it is because I am still a junior scholar, and we are really talking about early-stage songwriters or early-stage freelancers who don’t have that sort of security to fall back on. So, for me, this is a paper that really reflects my own experience, and I think it was much smoother to write because, to some extent, it was almost like research where you really talk about your own experience. One particular and very interesting fact that didn’t make it to the paper, but we know is that you need to make that transition within three years of your first songs. This is actually very similar to our own profession, where we are given a three-year contract first to see whether we have the potential to make some footprints in the field and to make sure that we can continue on our tenure track positions. I’ve also been talking to some of the friends who read the paper and they shared the same thoughts. One of my other collaborators is actually not a distant collaborator, but he was outside of our institution. I actually reached out to him because I realized that it’s my job to be more proactive rather than passively waiting for these research collaboration opportunities to come. I need to talk to people and pitch the ideas to see whether they are interested and see whether these ideas have potential.
Martin: It’s interesting that you say that because I think I mentioned to you when we were writing the paper that the process of the songwriters is somehow similar also to my own process. When I started my PhD at Columbia, I was known among the scholars who were doing Latin American politics and political sociology. That was my field. When I decided to start doing network analysis, it turned out that nobody knew who I was. So, I had to reach out, and at the beginning, it was kind of scary. It was a nice niche that I had in Latin American politics. People would invite me to give presentations, but I wanted to do something different methodologically and also focus more on organizations. Therefore, I started moving into another field, and there is this sense that you’re leaving behind something and that you’re breaking or weakening the ties to the community that was your home. It is a little bit daunting at that point. I think junior scholars also need to go through these transitions to establish their own identity; who they are and what kind of things they care about. Gerry Davis, one of our former editors, is a very colorful guy, and he used to say that in our field, some people have one good idea while the rest have fewer. I’d been pursuing some of these key ideas in different ways, working with my students and by myself. I always try to get to the next stage. I don’t find it interesting to write the same paper again and again. There’s that sort of value if you write fewer papers, but hopefully, each of them can add more to our common knowledge.
- Talking about collaboration, do you have any advice that you would like to give to PhD students who are interested in publishing a collaborative piece in ASQ?
Martin: First of all, make sure it is a collaborative piece. Make sure that your co-author does the part that they’re supposed to do, especially for a senior person. One of the deals that I always have with my students is that they tend to be first authors, but not because I’m just nice, because they have the original idea. And it’s not that I don’t work on those papers. I put in the hours, but the original idea comes from the student. They collect the data. It is a part of the dissertation. So, it’s important to set the authorship order from the beginning. If this is your paper and your idea, you have to claim that position. It is important. Second, I would say to make sure that you are compatible with your co-author. We have a great relationship. I would say that, in a way, we are even friends. There’s a big age difference here but we talk a lot about things that go beyond the paper. It’s not that you need to have that relationship but you need to have some compatibility. This is a very intense process. Frictions can emerge. It’s important to understand that you need theoretical and methodological compatibility. Otherwise, your co-author may take you to a place that you don’t want to go and you shouldn’t go. The second thing is if you ask authors what proportion of the paper they contributed and you add those proportions, you get a number that is much bigger than one. Everybody thinks that they contribute more than what it is, especially when you have several authors. Within those biases, it’s important that your co-authors contribute to the extent that they are in the paper. When you have got co-authors who for some reason don’t do that, they shouldn’t be there.
Yonghoon: I think Martin said most of the things that I wanted to say. Let me focus more on the ASQ side rather than the collaborative side. I think one of the reasons why ASQ says that it is more developmental and it appreciates dissertations is because of the value of originality. In that sense, I think the collaboration needs to be really trusting, especially because you’re pushing the ideas to the edge with an original voice. And of course, with your original voice, you get a lot of pushback. If you’re working on some more established work where you know you have some frameworks and you’re collaborating within that framework, the collaboration can be more mechanical since you know what you need to do. However, because you are doing a more creative and original job, there is no overarching framework in which you can divide the work. It’s not like you do your job, I do my job, and then we somehow can mix it on a paper. Usually, I think the papers that end up in ASQ tend to not have those frameworks. These papers are trying to propose that framework. To do so, everyone needs to be on board to the extent that they need to be trusting each other to really challenge each other’s ideas and then shape that frontier, rather than piggybacking on the frontiers that are already established. Focusing on the latter half of your question about publishing a collaborative piece, I think it’s much more important to emphasize the level of trust that you have with each other. I knew Martin. I trust that he’s not going to shirk and he’s not going to make this project less of his priority. Although he’s a senior scholar and his neck is not on the line, but mine is, I knew that he was going to be as committed as I was. And he was! So, I think having that kind of relationship was really important for this kind of project, especially because you’re pushing the edge and you’re pushing the frontier. If it is not, maybe you can do it more mechanically. But for this work, it needed to be more trusting.
Martin: I think it’s important to say that for me, this paper holds a special place in my work. I am very concerned with agency, which I think social network analysis needs to pay much more attention to. Why do people do the things they do? Obviously, coming from a network perspective, that should have a strong focus on how structure shapes what they do. I do believe that that paper, in a certain way, is a nod to the things that were very important in network analysis in the early 90s but became less salient thereafter. I think we should renew the push to advance a structural theory of action. If we don’t do that, network analysis, which is the field that is very close to me, can become a general-purpose methodology, but not a paradigm across all the social sciences.
- What are the main takeaways that you won both scholars and practitioners to take out of your research?
Martin: I think it very much has to do with the point that I was making before. I see the paper as a way of pushing scholars to think more about a theory of action; what drives people to do the kind of things they do especially when they go off the beaten path? The interesting thing is when people do stuff that is not what the structure forces them to do. This paper advances our understanding of the conditions that push people off the beaten path. The main takeaway from a theoretical viewpoint is the contribution to a theory of action and by implication, to a theory of agency in networks. One of the beauties of this data is that the songwriters are freelancers, they don’t have structures that take them from one place to another. They need to manage the network. They need to manage their career. Those who do are the ones who do better. The ones who go with the flow don’t succeed. And yet, there is a tradeoff. There is a wonderful graph in our paper that shows that the people who don’t succeed, at some point stop opening up their network because their survival is at stake. So, they need to get back and reconvene to reassemble the troops and perhaps continue to expand their networks in the future. That dynamic between survival and success is a tension that all people in other careers–and certainly scholars– experience. I think our papers provide some ideas about how to manage that.
Yonghoon: Let me add two more things. First, I think one very simple takeaway is that survival can be a trap in the sense that it’s a comfortable place where you can be. This is important, but it may bring too much comfort. If you don’t manage your network to escape that, you may get stuck, and it becomes a trap. The other takeaway is a couple of factors that push people to make risky decisions. In general, I think we need to acknowledge that breaking away from the survival trap is just a tad difficult. You really need a push. You really need to motivate yourself to get out of it, otherwise, you won’t be able to do it. That motivation can come from comparison or learning. It can also come from enhancing your self-confidence or some other ways. So, what I try to give more of to practitioners as well as my students nowadays, is the understanding that we need to first acknowledge that it is difficult. If you really want to break into this type of career or any career in general, you really need to understand that risk and take that risk. Otherwise, you’re going to just get stopped.
Martin: A footnote on that is to surround yourself with people that are doing better than you because that would push you to actually move forward.
Interviewer bios:
Martina Pizzinato is a PhD student in the Organisations & Innovation group at UCL School of Management. She uses inductive, qualitative approaches to understand and unfold the work experiences of minorities and creators. In one stream of her research, she studies the lived experiences of migrants at work. In particular, she and her co-authors are examining how migration shifts migrant employees’ status, stigma, and identity and how they make sense of these. Her second stream of research investigates the development and elaboration of creators’ identities and ideas at work. For instance, she and a co-author of hers are studying stand-up comedians and disentangling their idea elaboration process.
Neveen Saied is currently pursuing a PhD at Vlerick – and her research is focused on independent workers. More people are choosing to work independently instead of as regular full-time employees – and their professional experiences can be very different. They usually suffer from precarious work conditions that often lead to social and financial insecurities. As part of her research, Neveen is investigating how workers shape their identities in this new world of work, as well as how the relationship between workers and their clients can affect outcomes like performance and client satisfaction.