By Author:
James Chu – Columbia University
Interviewers:
Jinfeng “Phoenix” Chen – Purdue University
Mac Strachan – Washington University in Saint Louis
Article link: https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392231224135
- This interesting case you presented reveals how organizations can achieve normative control through a ritual of integration that integrates beneficiaries as sources of control. Based on your theorizing, which stages of the integration process do you think are relatively more impactful for the success of normative control?
One important factor that led me to frame these findings as a ‘ritual’ is how the stages seem inseparable for achieving beneficiary-driven normative control in an organization. It is difficult to evaluate the relative impact or importance of various cogs in a watch, as they all serve sequentially dependent functions. Similarly, it is difficult for me to speculate on which stages seem more important. The thought experiment is if we ran a randomized controlled trial where firms were assigned to deploy one of each of the four stages. In my view, none of them would successfully achieve normative control, because all four stages in sequence are what matters.
That said, it is true that the first stage of beneficiaries narrating their needs is where everything begins. It is also empirically true that the first stage of narrating needs, as well as the fourth stage of beneficiary validation, were where I observed the greatest divergence in socialization outcomes among teachers.
- We are impressed to learn that you lived and worked in Sunshine School, and maintained a connection with the site for over 15 years. Can you share with us how you got this opportunity to collect data in Sunshine School? Were there any challenges or obstacles you encountered in gaining and maintaining access to your field site? If so, how did you address them?
Because they must operate amid resource scarcity, many migrant schools in China often ask for (and receive) donations and volunteers. To protect the anonymity of the Sunshine School, I cannot provide precise details, but in general terms, I gained access to this organization by advertising myself as a volunteer English teacher. In part because the Sunshine School – and other migrant schools like it — already hosted many volunteers, my request to live and volunteer at the school was legible and perceived as benign. The fact that the organization was a recently founded not-for-profit also reduced the bureaucratic challenges associated with access. By contrast, I also wanted to do a comparative study of a public school in Beijing at the time, but gaining access to that setting was far more difficult and bureaucratically challenging.
- You mentioned in the paper that you were initially interested in another research question. Could you explain more about the origins of this project and the various transformations it underwent throughout your research process? What guided you in reanalyzing the data during each of the four rounds of data analysis?
As part of China’s explosive economic growth over the past four decades, over 250 million people have migrated from rural to urban areas to find higher-paying jobs. At the time, my focus was on how the children of rural to urban migrants were being socialized in these schools. These children were not allowed to attend public schools in Beijing, since their hukou or household registration was not from the city. I wanted to understand the kind of values and traits migrant schools were imparting upon students, how they perceived their standing in Chinese society, and how they made sense of their liminal status as not being fully urban but also no longer growing up in a rural area like “left behind” children in China. I also thought the 2008 Olympics in Beijing would be a fascinating moment to study this problem. I became interested in how teachers were being socialized in the first month I was there. I wrote analytic memos every few days to reflect on what I was seeing and learning, and these memos were largely about teachers. It also became clear that to understand how students were socialized, I needed to know who these teachers were and their own motivations.
When I came back from the field, I spent hours and hours coding my fieldnotes and interviews, hoping that the magic of “inductive analysis” would reveal an interesting story. Looking back, this was not the right way to go about doing analysis, and basically the project ended up collecting dust for several years. For one, I struggled to identify coherent theoretical conversations that my disorganized findings could precisely contribute to. Reflecting my continuing interest in education inequality, I had also begun an all-consuming job managing randomized controlled trials of education interventions in rural China (the Rural Education Action Program). The first spark that reignited my interest in the case was when I began graduate school in sociology and stumbled on the concept of normative control – if I recall, in a seminar taught by Woody Powell in 2016. I had also come across Bendix’s work on ideologies of management. Looking back on all the inductive codes that I had produced, I thought I could contrast the ideology of self-sacrifice in this school with the ideology of bureaucracy-busting mavericks (e.g. Kate Kellogg’s Iron Men).
You asked what guided me in the iterative reanalysis of the data, and in fact, Christine Beckman and the reviewers at ASQ were a major source of continued inspiration. (I’m not being paid to say this!) They did not think I persuasively contrasted martyrs and mavericks as ideologies of control, but they gave me a “long shot” R&R that included 20 single-spaced pages of comments and suggestions. I still remember one of the comments pushing me to think about whether I was trying to explain variation in normative control or perhaps the process by which it was achieved. I remember slapping my forehead, because I had never tried to (now-obvious) analytic move of arraying my codes chronologically. If I had to place a moment where I felt things “click,” it was when I arrayed my codes chronologically and discovered that all the emotion-related codes were clustering in time. All the material that was associated with themes of anxiety was clustering around the same weeks; and all the material on sympathy for parents was clustering at the start of the school year.
- There seems to be a tension between motivating proactive work behaviors among employees and preventing employee exploitation and overworking. Can you share some advice for organizations to manage this tension as they seek to achieve normative control? How might organizations from Western cultures achieve normative control through a ritual of integration? Additionally, what are some stress management tactics employees can use to manage work stress based on your observations in Sunshine School?
There are nested questions here that I will address in turn, in the specific context of an organization that seeks to assert normative control via beneficiaries.
First, I do not think “tension” is the right relation between normative control and exploitation. Instead, it seems constitutive for normative control that employees see work as emanating from within, rather than as forms of exploitation from without. To facilitate this type of sensemaking, it seems clear that receiving beneficiary validation was crucial in my case. Those who were praised and thanked for their self-sacrifice did not appear to make sense of their situation as exploitation. They did not see themselves as chronically overworked, and some have indeed remained at the school even to this day. By contrast, those who did not experience validation came to see school administrators and parents as exploitative – indeed, identifying an altruism paradox whereby demonstrating self-sacrifice to feel good about yourself is, at its core, still an instance of selfish behavior. Of course, an external analyst may still see the Sunshine School as a case of exploitation (as I note in the conclusion of the paper). But, the organization must keep its members from perceiving it as exploitative if it is to maintain normative control.
Second, with respect to overwork, I agree there is tension that organizational leaders might try to address by connecting the importance of rest to serving beneficiaries. For instance, an organizational leader might tout the importance of rest as another way to be more effective at responding to beneficiary need. A Chinese saying I sometimes hear, for instance, is that “rest is for walking a longer distance.”
Third, with respect to your question about generalization to “Western cultures,” I think it is worth noting that the theory is of a process that allows for varying content. Some organizations in the United States tout self-sacrifice as core parts of their culture, but probably to a far lesser extent than those in China. After all, references to self-sacrifice (and parental sacrifice) are legion in Chinese poetry and prose. That said, what I’ve tried to outline is a general process for making these macro-level cultural meanings salient within an organization, which begins by working with beneficiaries to narrate stories. That does not seem wedded to “Western” or “Eastern” contexts. Indeed, I place these in quotes because it is difficult for me to build precise theory with those labels.
Fourth, with respect to “stress management,” I think my response is a variation of my responses to the first and second issues above. It seems that the stage of episodic shaming cannot last in perpetuity and must be capped off by some form of validation, lest the perceived stress and anxiety continue to escalate. Validation is the relief valve that allows organizational members to find a more sustainable equilibrium of work. Of course, validation is meaningful precisely because it concludes a period of high stress and anxiety, communally experienced by organizational members. So, in this sense, the stages I’ve outlined already consider the management of stress and anxiety, not only as problems to address but as inputs into a socialization process.
- We think a major strength of your paper is the clear and transparent description of your research process and methods. What advice do you have for researchers to succinctly and clearly articulate these details that way reviewers and readers can appreciate the rigor of scholarly work?
Participant observation is about as far as it gets from my usual work using survey and field experiments, or quasi-experimental research designs. Conceptualizing rigor in terms of ‘reproducibility’ seems like an impossible bar to meet with qualitative data analysis, but I did find it crucial to give the reader enough context to see how I came to my findings. In concrete terms, I found Michael Pratt’s commentary on how to write up qualitative findings particularly helpful (https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2009-20375-001). In fact, I think he summarized some of these key ideas in your very blog a few years ago (https://asqblog.com/2022/12/08/publishing-in-asq-mike-pratt-reflects-on-his-12-years-as-associate-editor/).
- A glance at your CV indicates that you are a prolific researcher and writer. After navigating your first ASQ publication, what do you think is unique about publishing in ASQ (review processes, feedback, etc.) and what advice would you share with early-stage researchers who hope to publish in ASQ someday?
My experience with the ASQ revision process is that it is tremendously developmental, at least for young scholars. Now that I am far enough in my career to have both submitted and reviewed papers for various journals, it is remarkable how generous reviewers and editors at ASQ were in giving feedback to me. It could be that ethnographic work invites more feedback in general, or that my work was in such need of feedback that my experience is unique. But, from what I hear from the experiences of others, I do think ASQ takes giving constructive feedback seriously (beyond a summative evaluation of the work). While not necessarily unique to ASQ, it strikes me that the journal prides itself on improving every paper that it reviews, even if the papers are ultimately rejected. Unlike sociology journals, I also think ASQ editors take a stronger stand in triaging what comments are particularly important. This is important because the generosity of reviewers can be overwhelming without guidance about the relative importance of these suggestions.
As far as general advice goes for early-stage researchers for publishing (and doing good work more generally), I largely agree with the common advice given elsewhere. In no particular order:
- Model the structure of the manuscript based on an existing paper that you admire.
- Ensure that the manuscript has a clear and focused point of contribution to, or departure from, prior conversations.
- Evaluate – word by word – whether the primary argument advanced in the manuscript is supported by the evidence and analyses.
- Imagine reviewers and editors as partners, rather than antagonists.
- Imagine reviews are about the quality of scholarly work, not about scholars as human beings (even if, in rare cases, reviewers transgress this basic or perhaps even sacred norm).
- Read between the lines of reviewer comments to identify and address the issues that are driving reviewer suggestions, rather than focusing only on addressing the suggestions.
- Approach the decision letter with some degree of emotional remove to objectively assess how suggestions will improve the work.
- Avoid the compulsion to acquiesce to all reviewer suggestions by default.
- Supplement descriptions of revisions with clear rationales for why those revisions are helpful.
Some of these suggestions have been formalized in this document (https://journals.sagepub.com/pb-assets/cmscontent/ASQ/1.+Writing+Tips+for+ASQ+Submissions-1674844749.pdf).
If I had to offer a personal touch to this catalog of commonplace advice, and perhaps some that are more specific to ASQ, I would say that the developmental nature of an ASQ review means that some authors have a chance to rewrite entire manuscript (probably more so when the manuscript is based on qualitative data). Unlike some journals that would only offer revision opportunities when the issues are minor (e.g. improving clarity, adding some robustness checks), ASQ appears willing to go out of its way to support papers that appear to have high potential. That is a huge opportunity for an early-stage researcher, but what this means is that authors must resist the temptation to address reviewer comments in a mechanical or piecemeal manner. It is daunting and emotionally difficult to bin a manuscript that you’ve invested hours and maybe months into writing. But, successful revision attempts likely require a complete rewriting and reorganization.
Interviewer bios:
Jinfeng “Phoenix” Chen is a Ph.D. candidate in Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management at the Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. School of Business, Purdue University. Her research interests involve the work-nonwork interface, interpersonal relationships, and employee well-being.
Mac Strachan is a Ph.D. candidate studying Organizational Behavior at the Olin Business School, Washington University in St. Louis where he studies meaningful work, organizational change, and organizational humanization.