I really enjoyed presenting at Ignite Liverpool on Thursday night – to me, this was a new format, presenting 20 slides in 5 minutes with an automatic slide change every 15 seconds.  It’s best described by WimpyKing.  I took the bullet and went first – hopefully getting over some of my passion about working with creative artists in the digital economy.  My presentation is below – I just used a few words and clipart to get the message over  quickly – or try to!

Thanks to Frances Bell for organising this event yesterday for ISOS, Salford University’s Information Systems, Organisations and Society Research Centre in the very well appointed Think Lab.  I really enjoyed the discussion afterwards, thanks to the group for some food for thought.  Presentation below:

I often write about entrepreneurial identity in  my academic work, challenging the idea of the ‘entrepreneur hero’ stereotype.  I was amused to read on the back cover of Alexandra Kollontais’s Love of Worker Bees (Virago Modern Classics, 1999), that  “Offering a graphic and rare portrayal of Russian life in the 1920s it unfolds against a backdrop of the ‘ordinary’ Russian people of the time – the party workers, entrepreneurs, prostitutes, manipulators and idealists.’  An interesting mix!

Pleased to say that I’ll be working with some colleagues at Southampton on a set of four forums supported through Roberts funding over the next year, on the theme of Energising Technology Entrepreneurship.  Really, this is about pipeline development – getting some of our STEM PhDs to consider commercialising the outcomes of their research, perhaps using the excellent SetSquared incubator here at Southampton.  The forums will be based around guest speakers who have been there and done it – people who can motivate and inspire through example.  Look forward to announcing more details later.

Haawwooo <sound of dog/wolf howling in true Blues tradition>

Woke up this morning
On the world wide web
Tweeted my identities
To make one a celeb…   [blues courtesy Ted Fuller, unpublished email]

I thought I’d start this blogpost off with a musical note, although my colleague Ted hasn’t recorded this classic blues piece [yet].  Although it does sum up the debate pretty nicely

In my last post, I talked about the relationship between privacy, identity and status, following on from some great connections with Kieron O’Hara and Tim Greenhalgh.  My main point of career interest thus far has been entrepreneurial identity.  Like many authors, I have recognised the importance of entrepreneurial identity, that is, the need to construct, or perform a role that conforms with society’s expectations of what ‘being an entrepreneur’ is all about.  One strand of the literature acknowledges entrepreneurs as skilled cultural operators manipulating perceptions of the entrepreneurial self to achieve desired outcomes for their new ventures (Lounsbury and Glynn, 2001; Down and Reveley, 2004; Down, 2006; Reveley, Down and Taylor, 2004; Downing, 2005; Warren and Anderson, 200; Down and Warren, 2008; Warren, 2004).

Through these studies, I have come to realise that identity is a much-debated concept in various fields, including sociology, psychology and social psychology.  In all the detail there seems to be  a consensus that identity is not located in the personality of the individual, but instead is constituted through interaction between the individual, society and culture.  Giddens’  (1991) ‘project of the self’ is significant here, as is Goffman (1959), who describes how individuals ‘work’ their roles in relation to social expectations.  More recently, in the 80s/90s, authors such as Turkle (1995), Haraway (1991) and Castells (1997) took the debate into the digital age.  As Steve Wheeler summarises very effectively in an engaging set of blogposts, computers have now become pervasive and ubiquitous, identification through digital mediation has become the new cultural capital (Bordieu & Passeron, 1990).

Of course, the internet ensures that identity production and manipulation has never been easier.  As Reid (2000: 35) points out:

“The freedom to obscure or re-create aspects of the self on-line allows the
exploration and expression of multiple aspects of human existence. The
research on virtual communities is filled with tales of masks for age and
race, gender and class; masks for almost every aspect of identity”.

There is a plethora of discussion on multiple identities from many disciplinary perspectives, not just the technical, and how identity manipulation may be carried out for many motives, good and bad.  Taking twitter as an example, there are many instances of multiple account holding, often for quite valid reasons – the separation of business and personal identities makes obvious sense from the point of both business and personal reputation and privacy. This is an area that would benefit from further study, not just entrepreneurs, but as a broader issue for society, given the links between privacy and status I discussed in my last post.

References

Bordieu, P. and Passeron, J-C. (1990) Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. London: Sage Publications

Castell, M. (1997), Power Of Identity [Vol. 2: Economy, Society, And Culture], Wiley, New York.

Down, S. and Reveley, J. (2004) ‘Generational encounters and the social formation of entrepreneurial identity – “young guns” and “old farts” ’, Organization 11(2): 233-250.

Down, S. (2006) Narratives of Enterprise: Crafting Entrepreneurial Self-identity in a Small Firm, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Down, S. and Warren, L. (2008) Constructing narratives on enterprise: clichés and entrepreneurial self-identity, International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour and Research, 14/1, pp 4-23

Downing, S. (2005) ‘The Social Construction of Entrepreneurship: Narrative and Dramatic Processes in the Coproduction of Organizations and Identities’, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice March, 29(2): 185 – 204.

Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life, Harmondsworth: Pelican Books.

Haraway, D J. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge. New York

Lounsbury, M, Glynn M.A. (2001) ‘Cultural entrepreneurship: stories, legitimacy, and the acquisition of resources’, Strategic Management Journal 22: 545-564

Reid, E. (1998). “The Self and the Internet: Variations on the Illusion of One Self.”
In Gackenbach, J. (ed). Psychology and the Internet: Intrapersonal, interpersonal,
and transpersonal implications. San Diego: Academic Press.

Reveley, J., Down, S. and Taylor, S. (2004) ‘Beyond the boundaries: An ethnographic analysis of spatially diffuse control in a small firm’, International Small Business Journal 22(4): 349-367.

Turkle, S. (1995) Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet
New York: Simon and Schuster.

Warren, L. (2004) ‘Negotiating entrepreneurial identity: communities of practice and changing discourses’, International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, 5(2): 25–37.

Warren, L. and Anderson, A. R. (2009) Playing the fool? An aesthetic performance of an entrepreneurial identity, Chapter 9 in The politics and aesthetics of entrepreneurship, New Movements IV, eds Hjorth, D and Steyaert, C., 148-161, Edward Elgar

I’ve often said when I’ve been advocating Social Media that I find it useful for connecting with industry, spotting trends, looking outside my sphere of influence and noting what’s out there on the periphery. This is useful not only for keeping my own research alive but also for keeping students abreast of where the best upcoming entrepreneurial and innovative opportunities might be. I’ve been asked to explain this further, so here’s an example. As I set out in an earlier post, I do have an affinity for ICTs – although I never worked as a systems developer, I have an MSc in Computing which means I’ve always kept up with new technologies and can at least keep up a conversation with those in the field. So it’s here where I look to for ideas as to what might come next – and I pass on my guessology to students who might be looking to set up their own businesses, or maybe hoping to impress potential employers with a bit of future-proofing. So, a couple of years ago, I would have been pointing them in the direction of i-phone apps. While my students aren’t developers either, they should be able to think about new markets, new product development, business planning, new venture creation and so on, thus aiding others with better technical skills and forming teams with mixed expertise. Where does social media come into it? Just keeping my eyes open and following some of the livelier industry analysts and developers on Twitter. Firstly there’s my mate @Jas , http://www.jasdhaliwal.com/, who in return gets to laugh at my attempts to get stuff working on my laptop. Secondly, @monkchips, James Governor, who occasionally produces quick takes on trends. Both sources are really useful – and I don’t have to understand everything – on the ‘trends’ list for example, I only really ‘get’ the first three, because they link in some way to my work on www.creatorproject.org. I don’t need comprehensive coverage, I could read an industry newspaper or feed for that, but I wouldn’t have time – so tweets are ‘good enough’ as fans of Christensen are likely to say. It doesn’t have to be ‘correct’ or come true, it just has to be interesting, possible, geared to start a dialogue or a conversation. So, that’s how it works for me!

I wasn’t able to go to the ISBE conference this year http://www.isbe.org.uk/, so it was great to see some expert live tweeting from Kelly Smith, aka @KellyJS.  To put the cherry on the cake, I saw that my paper [co-authored with Ted Fuller and Sally-Jane Norman had been selected as best in our track – another twitter first!  Anyway the slides are below – just pleased to see that the EPSRC Creator project is starting to attract attention.

It’s been a busy month in many ways, including lots of theatre trips and concerts, quite a bit of time spent on the train to London.  As well as that, my colleague Lisa Harris and I, www.lisaharrismarketing.com, have been getting what we’ve started to call our ‘Roadshow’ up and running.  The Roadshow has arisen from our own mixture of theory and practice around new technology and social media.    As well as working together on a range of publications, we’ve found that our colleagues are very keen to find out how they can use social media in both research and teaching.  I blogged about this in an earlier post (22/09/09), Building an Online Academic Presence, where you can see the presentation I gave at The Robert Gordon University, in Aberdeen.  Since then, we’ve done a similar presentation for our Masters students, and today we will be delivering a shorter version of that for the University’s Digital Economy Strategic Research Group.  You can see the slides for these sessions on Lisa’s blog, http://www.lisaharrismarketing.com/research/presentation-to-the-digital-economy-research-group/ and http://www.lisaharrismarketing.com/events/how-your-digital-presence-can-help-you-get-onto-the-career-ladder/ .  Early next year, we’re hoping to give versions of this at Salford and, more exotically, the Norwegian University of Science and technology in Trondheim with my new colleague Ole Jonny Klakegg, http://www.ntnu.no/employees/ole.jonny.klakegg.  Our strapline for our academic colleagues is ‘Making Your Work WORK for You NOW’, which was actually coined by my old friend and colleague Rob Smith at RGU Aberdeen Business School, http://iws.rgu.ac.uk/abs/staff/page.cfm?pge=50368.  Peer-reviewed publications are all well and good, but can take 3-4 years to get into print which means they may well be out of date in fast-moving areas such as social media.  So if you want to have any influence now, you need to make your online presence work.  Anyway, must dash – got a presentationto give!

Outcome of the request below: well, we didn’t get a direct offer from the Twitterverse, but we did spot a likely possibiity while we were looking!  And it seems like there may be another possibility on the horizon too!  So things are looking good for the chapter — and thanks for all your help folks :>)

I’m asking the social media community for help in this post! In brief, some colleagues and I have written up a piece of research into the risks, ethics and other issues raised by using social media in the classroom. Through circumstances beyond our control, it looks like the book that we were intending to publish in may not be coming out after all. It’s an academic piece, but very readable, around 7K words, completed not in draft. And we are looking for a good home for it either in another book, or perhaps a journal in the learning and teaching area, maybe a special issue: an important factor is that we want a fast time to publication. Why are we making this request instead of just casting around our selves and resubmitting to another venue? Because we want people to see the piece now, while it’s current and while we want to engage with others interested in similar topics. One of the reasons I started to engage with social media far more widely in the first place is that it helps me make my work work for me NOW! And if this works, it would certainly demonstrate the power of the social media community!

How does social media make a difference? Journal publication timescales mean that after submission, the very best you can hope for is six months to print, and that’s unusual — more often than not, the process of review and revise can take over a year, and perhaps much longer. Most papers require more than one revision and probably two trips to the reviewers overall. So by the time your work comes out, if you are in fast-moving fields, you are almost certainly out-of-date before anyone has even read the final version. Of course conferences help, but they are expensive and audiences can be limited. So, even when publication in journals is going well, timelines are long, and using social media in the meantime can help increase the impact of research, with short blogposts and twitter shortcutting the communication pathways to those who both influence and might be influenced by your thinking.

Of course, the pathway to journal publication does not always run smoothly. Your work might be rejected, even at quite a late stage and you might have to start the process all over again with another journal. Or, and this is particularly annoying, a vehicle that you are targetting may fall through. This has happened to me twice this year. Firstly, a special issue of a journal did not come to fruition as not enough sound papers were generated to justify the specific focus. Fortunately, I and my co-authors were bailed out by an understanding Editor who aided us in quickly shaping the article for the ‘main’ journal, because he recognised that we had lost a year through no fault of our own. In this new case, it seems that the intended publishers have had second thoughts as their circumstances become more constrained. Well, that’s pretty unfortunate for our chapter – but really, we just don’t want to lose the energy that we’ve built up in our team! We’re of course happy for the piece to go through any peer review processes – we just don’t want to wait for ever! If you can help, please get in touch and I’ll send you the copy!

To me, it’s really obvious that an academic needs to build a sound online academic presence – in fact, that’s why I’ve spent most of the summer building this blog, with the help of @Jas.  In fast-changing times, academics are in a global marketplace and you need to be able to make your work count for you as quickly as possible.  Of course it’s imoortant to publish in a range of outlets on and offline, but the timescales to publication offline can be so long that by the time the work comes out, it’s long past it’s sell-by date.  I’ve been having some good conversations with @lisaharris about this recently.  From a practical standpoint, we’re both up and running (see www.lisaharrismarketing.com) and are also  ready to take the show on the road, as I did in an embryonic form at Aberdeen RGU this year (see the presentation below).  Conceptually, I bring my work about entrepreneurial identity to the fore, while Lisa brings her thinking concerning digital marketing. I’m really looking forward to getting some good work together in this space soon – more later!

neurial identity to the fore, while Lisa brings her digital marketing expertise into the frame.  More later, but I think we can start to get some good theory/practice linkages going in this space.