Defining academic productivity

At the end of Saturday’s post, I said that I would discuss productivity in a future post. I decided to write a short post about academic productivity today.

I found a useful definition of productivity at the following website, at least in terms of how it can be measured: http://www.investorwords.com/3876/productivity.html

‘The amount of output per unit of input (labor, equipment, and capital). There are many different ways of measuring productivity. For example, in a factory productivity might be measured based on the number of hours it takes to produce a good, while in the service sector productivity might be measured based on the revenue generated by an employee divided by his/her salary.’

Another definition comes from the Merriam Webster online dictionary http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/productive:

‘yielding results, benefits, or profits’.

There are difficulties in applying the first definition in its entirety to an academic researcher, because it is very difficult to directly measure a researcher’s economic productivity. The number of publications and grant funding (money given to the research organization where the academic works) are the standard ways of measuring an researcher’s productivity. A good number of publications often leads to more grant funding. And more grant funding in turn draws in more students. But all of this depends on the hierarchical level of the academic. It stands to reason that a staff scientist without a research group (students) cannot be as ‘productive’ as a professor with a large group of students around him or her. Can they even be compared? Yet they often are, especially when it comes to the numbers of publications produced. This is unfair, because in principle a large research group can produce many more publications than one scientist alone. Whether that is in fact true is another discussion. In any case, not all researchers get grants, which doesn’t mean that they are necessarily bad researchers. It simply means that they didn’t get funded this time around. But is that acceptable to the business administrators who control the research institutes and who insist on measuring productivity on an annual basis?

Most other research activities--e.g. advising, teaching, designing experiments, having meetings with students, and writing--don’t generate revenue. If a researcher/advisor spends several hours per week helping one graduate student who is clueless about how to proceed with his or her research article and data interpretation, how do we measure productivity in this situation? The advisor has invested time, energy and intellectual focus in these activities--meeting, advising, and discussing. What is the tangible product? Over time, the product may be (emphasis on the may) an article or two from a student. Or perhaps not, as this can depend on the whim of the involved student as to whether he or she will write those articles. There is no guarantee of a publishable article for all the hard work invested in the student. If graduate students aren’t productive and won't write articles, it can reflect poorly on the advisor because there will be no papers to publish unless the adviser ends up writing them himself. A lack of articles can lead to not getting grants. Published papers are proof that an academic is productive; proof that an academic has done his or her job, which is to do science and to train graduate students how to do science, as well as to write/help to write the articles resulting from research activity. But how many published articles are enough, and how many are too few? Is it quantity or quality that counts?

And what should be done about the academic researchers whose graduate students leave research for the greener pastures of the business world without finishing their PhD degrees? Who don’t stick around despite the huge investment of the researchers’ time and money for lab consumables, conferences and travel? Is this the fault of these researchers? Was it a waste of time and money to train them? The point is that these graduate students got valuable research training before leaving academia. It has to be accepted that whatever they do with that training afterwards is their business. If they leave the research world, well, then they leave it. No one can stop them from doing so. So here’s the rub. Should academic researchers’ productivity be measured by how many of the trained students go on to become academics themselves? If that is the case, it will take years before productivity can be assessed correctly.

The second definition talks about yielding results, benefits or profits. Research activities such as doing lab work, generating data, reading, advising, teaching and writing articles do yield results, but not necessarily profits, unless ideas are patentable, leading to collaborations with big business, e.g. pharmaceutical firms that can produce a profitable drug to treat a specific illness. But getting a patent approved can take many years. So it’s difficult for me to understand the emphasis on increasing academic productivity. I'm not sure what this really means. Again I ask, who will define this adequately, and will it be fair? It strikes me as rather naïve on the part of business administrators to not even make an attempt to understand the complexities of the academic research world, and yet this is the current situation—administrators who have no real idea of what academics do, yet who insist that academics increase their productivity so that the organizations for which they work can get their 'money’s worth' out of them. 

Musings about change and depression

Nearly a year has gone by since I began writing this blog. I began writing it to help me deal with the many changes that were occurring in my workplace, among other things. The changes themselves would have been difficult enough to deal with in my home country (USA), but the fact that they happened here in Norway made them even tougher. That is because it has been nearly impossible to ‘crack the code’ in terms of understanding how my workplace functions, what leaders want (or don’t want), how to get ahead, how to ‘get around’ some of the ancient rules that govern it, and so forth. It has made me feel somewhat better to know that many Norwegians in my workplace haven’t been able to make sense of the changes either. Cold comfort, but comfort nonetheless. Because unless you’ve lived in another country for a number of years, you have no idea of what can happen to you and your sense of judgment in a different culture. No matter what happens, you will always question yourself and your sense of judgment first when things don’t go as planned. Did I interpret this wrong, was I to blame, did I misunderstand the other person or the conclusions from a meeting, and so on. I have spent many years trying to fit in ‘career-wise’, trying to understand the Scandinavian corporate/business/academic mentality, doing my best, giving my all, in the quest to do a great job and to succeed as a research scientist. It has not been easy. It would not have been easy anywhere else either, but it was doubly hard here to succeed in any way because of the extra effort that had to go into trying to figure out the system. I have not been fortunate enough to have had mentors or sponsors. My husband has been a wonderful support system but he has also had difficulties of his own trying to figure out his workplace (we now work for the same hospital conglomerate, just in different locations of the city).

During the past year I have written a lot about my work life in an attempt to understand what happened to my workplace and by extension, to me and my colleagues during that time. The past three to four years have been transition years involving a lot of reorganization and restructuring associated with a huge merger of four major city hospitals, and when the dust settled, it was time to start the process over again since the powers that be who organized the first restructuring were not satisfied. And so it goes. I’ve written about colleagues who have had difficulty adjusting to all the changes; I’ve written about my own struggles adjusting to so many changes. Not all the changes have affected us directly, but even if they have not, they affect workplace morale generally, because budgets have been cut, the quality of patient care is always being questioned, research grant support has been reduced, and there is a lot of talk about the good old days when there was more money available and less bureaucracy and administration. But there is no point in talking about the old days. They are gone. There is much more bureaucratic control now, and a hierarchy of leadership that did not exist before. Is it a better system? Only time will tell. If it works out, it will be because employees made a concerted effort to make it work. There is no guarantee that it will work out, however, and that is the big gamble. The politicians who decided on this huge merger can be voted out, and the new ones who come in can in principle decide to reverse some of what has happened if they don’t like what they see. Plus there is always something new on the horizon, some new social trend or policy that can be implemented so that the legacies of different politicians will be ensured. In the meantime, huge social experiments go unremarked. I wonder if there are sociologists studying the effects of huge mergers on employees. I am waiting for the data from those studies. But so far, I haven’t heard of any such studies.  

 

Massive changes can make workers unhappy and even depressed, especially when they do not really understand what is happening around them. To be fair, despite considerable effort to keep employees informed, it is nearly impossible for a workplace to prepare them for all eventualities. But what employees want to know is not how fantastic everything is going to be once the dust settles; they want to know how the changes are going to affect them personally. They need reassurance that their jobs are not in danger. They need to hear that they are more than just chess pawns who can be pushed around on the chess board, plucked up from one area of the board and set down on another. They want to hear that they are doing a good job; they want to know that their projects can proceed as usual; they want some normalcy and stability in a highly unstable situation. There are always employees who thrive on continual change. The majority of employees thrive on stability, and that has to be recognized and accepted by workplace leaders. You cannot demand loyalty and obedience from your employees while telling them that their jobs might be in danger. You cannot tell them to ‘get out’ if they don’t like what is happening around them. This was essentially the message from one of my workplace leaders in a lecture she gave prior to a Christmas party (of all things) several years ago. Some people may have liked her style. I found it unappealing and rather tactless, because she was stating the obvious and didn’t need to. It’s aggressive and unnecessarily so. It’s not how you win friends and influence people. A better approach might have been to have said that there will be changes and that some of them may be difficult, but that we are a team and that if we all pull together, we can get through the changes and perhaps come out stronger. But she is a pawn herself in a long line of pawns that have to spout the company line. I doubt she felt comfortable spouting the rhetoric. If I am representative of the average worker, all I can say at this point in time is that the vagueness and ambiguity that existed prior to the merger have gotten larger, not smaller. It is not possible to get an overview, no matter how hard one tries. I find it difficult in any case. Do I need the overview? I don’t know. I’ve been told that I do, that it’s important to understand the workplace and management structure. Some people I know wonder who their bosses are, because in some cases, people now have three or more bosses—some who have administrative responsibility for employees, some who have the professional responsibility. But when employees ask who their new boss is, they don’t get an answer. So is it any wonder that employees get depressed?

Depression, according to the psychiatrist and author Rollo May, is the “inability to construct a future”. For some reason this definition resonated with me. I responded to it viscerally and intuitively. Why? Because it felt true. When you are depressed, you are stuck. You don’t know which way to turn, because you don’t have a clue about the future. You cannot envision your future nor can you see how to go about building or creating it. In order to create anything, you must be able to visualize it first. With depression you lose the ability to visualize the future. You are stuck in the now. All your creative and mental energy goes into figuring out the ‘now’.  It’s as though a fog settles over your head, blocking your forward view. You are forced to stop driving and to sit on the side of the road. You become passive, waiting for instructions or a road map for how to proceed further. Your energy flow gets blocked. Or you may drive around the same area over and over, stopping at the same stop sign, and not getting any further, because you have lost your sense of direction. Depression may not be a bad thing if you manage to deal with it eventually, if you get frustrated enough with being stuck. It is harmful when you give up and give in and those approaches become a permanent way of dealing with the trials that life deals out.

The Chinese talk about chi (qi), the energy flow in a person, as being an important aspect of a person’s health and life situation. It makes sense to me. If that energy flow is blocked, it will affect the health and energy level of a person. Again, I respond to this intuitively; it just makes sense. The blockage must be dealt with in order for the energy to flow. The goal is harmony for the mind and body. Sometimes it is enough just to read an inspirational text; the blockage may dissipate once the mind understands the situation in a new way. That is the beauty and the power of the written word. In other situations, a good film or conversation may achieve the same thing. The important thing is to free the energy. 

The definition of success

I’ve been thinking about the definition of success lately. It’s a subject that has always interested me, and then a friend loaned me the book Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. He is the author of the earlier books The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, and Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. I am nearly finished with the book and I have to say it’s one of the most interesting books I’ve ever read. The author has a way of drawing you into his world; he is a good storyteller, and that makes him a good author. He is also a best-selling author, in other words, a successful author, and I have to wonder as he wrote this book, if he wasn’t wondering a bit about what made him so successful. His books fill a void—call it the void of interesting heretofore unknown facts that become wildly-interesting stories—possibly because he weaves those facts into a coherent story. He sees synergies and connections in those facts that others don’t see. I’d call him a true researcher because of his intelligence, curiosity and enthusiasm for the subjects he studies and writes about. His books are often placed in the genre ‘psychology’. I guess that’s as good a genre as any, but this book is not a self-help book. It is an exploratory philosophical book about what makes successful people successful; there are no 10 steps to follow on the path to success, no guarantees for success.

He defines outliers as people ‘who do things that are out of the ordinary’. In statistics, outliers are usually the data points that are outside other values in a set of data—values that are often far away from the others, and statisticians often don’t like outliers. They would in fact prefer that they were not there, because their existence can mess up an otherwise perfectly good data set. So statisticians have ways of dealing with outliers. Gladwell has decided to focus on them, because they are the people who lie outside the norm. I won’t spoil the book for you, but his premise is that no successful person is ‘self-made’. We hang on to that myth though as though our life depended on it. If I could sum up his view, it would be that successful people achieved their success due to a combination of factors: intelligence; circumstances (family history and social standing); opportunities that were seized, not ignored; happenstance (being in the right place at the right time--also in a historical perspective); and of course hard work (the ten thousand hour rule). We like to think that successful people were ‘discovered’ and that on the basis of one song or one story that they became successful. But that’s not the case, and he demolishes that view very elegantly.

I’ve thought a lot about success during the past year with all the tumult at my workplace. Westernized society’s standard definition of success is clear—top jobs, large salaries, and power— often involving rags-to-riches stories or self-made man/woman stories. But when I look at my own workplace, one thing is completely clear. None of the people who made it to the top and who are successful in the standard sense made it without help. They had support networks, people rooting for them, mentors, call it what you will. They had political connections--they did not make it alone. And those who think that they did are living in a fantasy world. This does not negate the fact that they are intelligent, worthy of their success, have worked hard, and have a lot to offer. It simply says that they also had crucial help at a point when the opportunities for them to move up presented themselves (their personal windows of opportunity). If they were not aware of the opportunities, they had mentors who showed them that they were there. Mentors are important. I would venture to say that mentors are important at all ages. It is not just the young who need them, although they need them perhaps the most. But older people in the workplace need them too. They need impartial, unbiased, objective people with whom to discuss their careers and workplace situations. If you have never had them, you don’t know what you’ve missed until you hit the glass ceiling or find that your career path is moving laterally, not upward. You don’t know that you’ve made critical mistakes until it’s too late. Mentors might have been able to redirect your thoughts or plans. But of course this presupposes that you buy into the standard definition of success—that you are successful if you have a top job, earn a lot of money, or have a lot of power. It’s easy to see why most people want this type of success. It makes living in our society much easier. If you are wealthy, you command respect that poorer people don’t get. And if you think this is not true, think about the last time poor people were really ‘listened’ to, anywhere on the planet. For every Mother Teresa in the world, there are millions of poor people who command no respect.

There is nothing wrong with the standard definition of success. It’s nice to be able to have enough money to do the things you want, to live your life comfortably, to have some ‘say’ in what goes on at your workplace. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it is only when you have achieved some measure of standard success that you are in a position to help others—as a mentor or as a benefactor. But still, I wonder if successful people are happy. I’m guessing that many of them are—because they have reached the top in their chosen field, and that by itself must give them a sense of satisfaction or completion. It’s like a sports star who has won his or her competition—that feeling of winning. But of course once at the top, you can never really rest. You must keep going. There are always others waiting in the wings to replace you. There are also unhappy successful people, and they interest me, perhaps more than the happy ones. I wonder why they are unhappy if they’ve achieved everything they wanted to achieve in their work life. The answer has to be that work life alone is not the be-all and the end-all of life. If you don’t have a good personal life—family and friends who see you through the good and the bad times, you don’t have much. I’ve watched successful men in my workplace get old, retire, and lose their status and power. Some of them tackled it well; others did not. I wonder if those who tackled it well were those with a good family life. Because if workplace success is the only way you define your life, you are bound to be unhappy. And there are the other scenarios that lead to unhappiness that are out of your control. There are unfortunately just as many unhappy twists of fates in the workplace as there are happy ones; I have seen bad things happen to good people who were successful in the standard sense. They were at the top one day and at the bottom the next. Not literally of course, but it seems that way. What did they do wrong? Did they do anything wrong? Is this just how workplace life is? Do you need to learn to roll with the punches as a successful person? Are successful people good at doing this? These are all interesting questions. In any case, the vagaries and mystery of success will keep researchers and writers preoccupied for years to come.