Persevering down the rabbit hole
Graduate school teaches you a lot. One of the things you learn is that we really don’t have any new ideas. Every great thing we think we came up with someone else already said/wrote/did. It can be really disheartening to think you have a brilliant idea only to realize there is already research on the same thing from forty years ago. When this happens you have to get to the original source and find out if they really said what you are trying to or if there are ways to expand the idea in some way. Sources and citations are key in research for better or worse. They are our currency. The impact/importance of our work is often considered in terms of how many other authors cite you.* Not giving credit to someone via citation in a paper is plagiarism. That is bad. As a Professor of Business Ethics I do not want to be the person who didn’t properly cite someone (#unethical).
When I started working on tightroping I did my research. I looked at Google Scholar, I tried every key word similar to tightroping and I didn’t find anything. I looked at social psychology and sociology as well to see what those researchers were up to and I decided that I was on to something. Yes, there are other concepts that make up part of tightroping (i.e., impression management) but they are not the whole story. So off I went!
About sixteen months into my research and writing I was reading an awesome book called Delusions of Gender (2010). And there on page 58 I saw this written: This catch-22 positions women who seek management roles on a “tightrope of impression management.” This sentence took me to a citation that says this: A phrase (tightrope of impression management) coined by Janet Holmes, author of Gendered Talk (2006), cited by Cameron, 2007, p. 141.
As you can see from my thoughtful margin notes this threw me for a loop.
From the way this is written, it seems like this is a phrase people know. How did I miss it? “Coined by” makes me think this is something people say often!!! Was I stealing some other woman’s idea? Had I heard it and (accidentally) just repackaged it? Am I an idiot? Should I stop writing about tightroping? This was all followed by a flurry of texts to friends, a little bit of crying, some Scotch, and trash television to get it together.
I needed to find the Holmes citation to see what she was talking about. So I looked up the book and saw that Dr. Holmes was a sociolinguist (I am not) so I felt better about not bumping into this phrase. I also saw that the complete title of her book was Gendered Talk at Work: Constructing Social Identity Through Workplace Discourse. That’s a wobbly start. This told me that it was likely that Fine cited Cameron who cited Holmes and Fine may not have read the original quote. Still with me? Ok. No big deal so now that I had the Holmes book, I will see where she COINED this phrase. But guess what? She didn’t. On page 35 Holmes said: Joanna Brewis cites research on senior women who trod a tightrope of impression management. I looked up that citation in the index and found that, Dr. Joanna Brewis (Professor of People and Organizations), wrote: Telling it like it is? Gender, language and Organizations theory. This is a chapter in a book titled The Language of Organization (2001). By some miracle our library had an e-copy of this book. There, on page 299, Brewis said: Sheppard makes reference to the fact that her women managers had to be careful to tread a ‘tightrope” of impression management.
At this point I believe I literally lost just a bit of my mind. WHO IS SHEPPARD????
Off to Brewis’ bibliography where I found that Sheppard was a sociologist in Canada. She wrote a chapter titled Organizations, Power and Sexuality: The Image and Self-Image of Women Managers that appeared in a book from 1989 titled The Sexuality of Organization. I had to request an actual physical copy of this book from the library, wait for a human to find it, and then go to the library to pick it up. Like the olden days. Now, with The Sexuality of Organization in my grubby little mitts, I started reading her chapter. On page 145 this phrase appears: They (women) live in the spotlight, highly visible, and they are very much alone up there on the corporate tightrope. CORPORATE TIGHTROPE! Wait, WHAT??? After several long, slow, deep breaths, I checked to make sure Sheppard didn't cite anyone. She didn’t. I had come to the end of the citation rabbit hole. And what did I learn?
No phrase was “coined”
Sheppard is not using “tightrope” in the way other citations say she is
There is no direct mention of impression management
People don’t read the things they cite
I wasn’t stealing some other woman’s idea
The library pick up desk is on the ground floor
Academia is maddening (I knew that this was just a reminder)
If you made it to the end of this harrowing tale you, my friend, have perseverance. It has a lot of different names: grit, determination, moxie (that is a fun one!!), tenacity, stamina and it is absolutely vital to achieving your goals. When this is how you operate, you muscle through even when things suck. The initial research on grit indicated that it was the key element to success, but new studies show that you also need passion about what you are doing to truly get you through the muck. That makes sense to me. I always say I don’t have my PhD because I am a some genius, I have it because I am determined. Even when I was wallowing in statistics-related self-doubt I was writing a dissertation I believed in and that drove me to keep going. That little dash of passion definitely helped.
If you are thinking that this just isn’t something you have, it turns out you can work on it. Perseverance is a skill. There are some specific things you can do to develop your perseverance over time and part of making these changes is a growth mindset. If you aren’t currently feeling the growth mindset and don’t want to persevere through any of these readings, let me offer you Dr. Duckworth’s TED talk. Baby steps count on the road to developing this skill!
Now that I have confirmed no ideas were stolen, I am going to keep writing about tightroping. I made it a verb and filed my trademark application. This website is the initial citation and I coined the term. I hope it becomes popular enough to get mis-cited.
*If you ever use Scholar.Google for research look @ the citation count of a paper. That is usually an indication of the degree to which other researchers find it valid and useful. Alternatively, the count is high because this researcher is already “academic famous” and everyone cites them without actually reading what they wrote.