Dear Academy colleagues,
I would like to personally invite you to a caucus that I will be chairing during the upcoming Academy meeting. I believe that many of you will find the project interesting and I would like to hold a lively discussion in order to get as broad a feedback as possible. It is my intension that this caucus will lead to an actual hand-on involvement with the project.
I apologise if you are receiving this message more than once.
Knowledge Transfer Project: From Academy to Africa with Care
Date & Time: Tuesday, Aug. 10, 9:45-11:15; Place: La Palais De Congres, 523B
The goal of this caucus is to discuss and develop a project that aims to transfer research knowledge resources that reside in the Academy membership to young/early-stage scholars in developing countries who may otherwise not have access to such resources. This project started this year and received an Enterprise Award from the Academy of Management. We plan to explore how this project can involve members from MED, MOC, OB, IM and other divisions and to discuss best strategies to connect members who are established scholars with early-stage management scholars in developing countries. Initially, our primary target would be doctoral students in African business schools.
Professional knowledge, maybe as much as money, is often a scarce resource for developing economies. Most of the knowledge in our field is manufactured and developed in Europe and N America, with an increasing role played by scholars from Asia. In order for research to be influential, our field requires dissemination through scholarly venues. Presentation and publication in these venues necessitates not only good ideas and knowledge of relevant literature, but also proficiency in the scientific language and format prevalent in that community. Currently, only 0.35% of Academy members are from Africa with the majority of these members coming from the relatively developed country of South Africa. Large and highly populated countries such as Kenya and Tanzania have only 1 member each in the Academy. There is a huge untapped potential of management scholars in the African continent and we believe that engaging a larger number of African management scholars with the Academy will benefit both the African community and the Academy of Management.
Specifically, we aim to identify Academy members who can contribute time and effort giving feedback on selected early-stage African management scholars' work through internet, VoIP and similar remote communication methods. The goal of this work is to improve the quality of African scholars' work-in-progress with an initial emphasis on doctoral dissertations and papers that could be submitted to the Academy meeting or referred journals. We believe that by providing mentorship around writing style, research methods and positioning of concepts, good raw research ideas from early-stage scholars will achieve exposure within international management research venues, which would be otherwise unattainable.
The importance of this project to the Academy of Management is that it will strengthen and enrich connections to scholars currently outside the existing Academy community, and contribute to the association's aim to extend its reach and membership more globally. Moreover, by building scholarly relationships with those in less resource-rich communities, this knowledge transfer project is consistent with the Academy's theme of its 2010 annual meeting, Dare to Care.
Warm wishes,
Jacob
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Jacob Eisenberg, Ph.D.
Chair, Group for Cooperation & Understanding (ITC-GCU), Academy of Management
UCD School of Business,
University College Dublin,
Belfield, Dublin 4,
Ireland
Tel: +353-1-716 4774
Fax: +353-1-716 4762
Email: Jacob.eisenberg@ucd.ie
http://www.ucd.ie/management/
http://www.aomonline.org/aom.asp?id=203