AFSNews Careers Column October 1995

Careers

Ten years after graduating from college, Malachi O'Connor went from working as a "back to the land" carpenter to teaching junior high school--from building houses to building minds. Then he decided to enter graduate school. Unsure of what he wanted to study, he said, "I wanted to build my own curriculum, to think in different ways, to find some lenses on the world." Because of his interest in narratives and fairy tales, Mal's sister, an anthropologist, suggested he consider enrolling in a folklore program.

"When I began the program at the University of Pennsylvania, I had no idea what folklore was," he said. "But I thought the theoretical approach would give me a framework for seeing things in different ways, as I wanted to--the flexibility to cobble together a program tailored to my interests."

Mal concentrated on material culture, personal experience narratives, and minor narrative genres. Studying with Ray Birdwhistell and Henry Glassie, he focused on the communicative aspects of folklore rather than the generic. He wrote his dissertation on tools and "guys who play with steam engines," exploring the intersection of play and work.

"As I was finishing my dissertation, I realized that there were two traditional avenues open to folklorists--teaching and the public sector. I had been doing both and wasn't that fascinated with pursuing either one at that time. Then I had one of those 'Aha!' experiences. I talked with a Career Services person with an M.A. in folklore--Julia Miller Vick." [Vick is co- author of The Academic Job Search Handbook. See June 1995 AFSN, p. 2.] "We cobbled together a project interviewing people who got Ph.D.'s and were doing other things--not working directly in their majors. I listened to people tell their stories to figure out my options. In the process, I bumped into my current colleagues. One had a Ph.D. in psychology. She had gone back to school for an M.B.A. at the Wharton School of Business. Another had a Ph.D. in economics from M.I.T. and was focusing on the psychology of organizational life. Another had a master's in architecture and had become an expert in sociotechnical system thinking."

Like Mal, these people were interested in the intersection of play and work. "We wondered how play could be applied in organizational settings to promote creativity. Not play in the 'ha ha' sense but in the strategic sense. The part I didn't know was business--the language. But I knew enough that we could have conversations with each other. We explored many questions, including how consulting is and is not like fieldwork and ethnography."

Mal is now a principal with the Center for Applied Research, an independent management consulting firm associated with the University of Pennsylvania. The company works with organizations as systems. "Managers are parts of systems. We try to help organizations that are facing quite serious changes because they need to, or want to, or are thrust into it. One way we help them manage change is to think strategically about who they are now, where they are, where they want to be through organizational development, management development, team building, finding new ways to think about their work, and learning how to use all their resources in more effective ways.

"We always try to link organizational development to the concrete tasks people face every day. We don't generally do training. We help people manage boundaries in their organizations--not just organizational boundaries, but also social and psychological ones. We work a lot at the point where an individual's life relates to group life, as well as with the rituals that shape people's experience of organizational life. We try to help them bring some sort of dignity to the work place.

"My colleagues want to learn more about how the things we think and do as folklorists can help them in their work. I spent years trying to figure out how to maneuver in their organizational world. My training as a folklorist has made it much easier for me to identify with the bottoms and the middles than with the tops, but as I see how the layers are linked interdependently, I see the value and importance of leadership."

Mal points out that 80 percent of such strategic alliances as mergers, acquisitions, and joint ventures fail because issues of organizational culture are not taken into account. "What happens when one organization with a very distinct set of values and a long history and tradition acquires another without obliterating their culture? A lot of the struggle to build a successful alliance is about identity and things we as folklorists are used to thinking about."

How does Mal apply these concepts in his work? "We're involved in a project with a company that is moving from a hierarchical command-and-control model to a team orientation, where employee teams will be based in the field. We'll be doing ethnographic work with the organization as the new structure is introduced. We will take this opportunity to look at the components of the teams and the boundaries where they interact with other employees and customers. Based on the lessons we learn during the implementation phase, the company's training will be redesigned to deal with actual cases based on people's day-to-day experience. We're trying to identify the 'native' categories of how people see, believe, and understand where they are. One of the things folklorists are good at is learning what people do in their own terms. But at the same time we often insulate ourselves in ways that aren't effective or helpful by focusing on what we do, know, or think rather than on the knowledge of others."

Mal said that it is very important for us to be aware of the ways in which folkloristics can assist and enhance whatever work we are doing. In his work, Mal relies heavily on his ethnographic skills. Among the most important he lists listening and "joining" skills. "Being able to understand the questions and concerns a client has and being able to play that back to them as a starting point is fundamental. It's also important to understand context and how it influences the ways people interact and how they construct the world they live in. By first describing the organization in cultural terms and then interpreting what's going on, we can look at organizational activities and events through different lenses and attempt not to confuse our mapping devices with the territory we're examining."

When asked what advice he would give a folklorist looking for work, Mal said, "The person who gets in my way the most is me. I wouldn't trade my graduate experience, but as folklorists we're often too insulated from the world. We look at things in certain ways and not others. It took quite a while for me to imagine there were other things I could do. Our flexibility and willingness to continue learning is fundamental. I need to use the skills I have to find out what I don't know that I don't know.

"Treat the job search the way you would treat ethnographic work--looking for ways of understanding whole pieces of the world and the way it works on its own terms. Because our field is so small and we have to explain what we do so often, we tend to hang around with folks like us. It's a case of the cobbler's kids not having any shoes. One of the advantages we have with the skills we have is that we can work our way past that constraint if we want to."

The downside to Mal's choice of a nontraditional career has been the negative reaction of some other folklorists. "I faced a painful realization that my friendships and the respect people had for me could suffer because of my decisions." As he thought about this, Mal said, "The politics of folklore go unexamined while we examine the politics of others. Those politics affect membership, inclusion, exclusion, the ways in which our own assumptions often go untested and unquestioned. The old dichotomies won't hold. We're all inextricably tied together and jointly responsible for our joys and sorrows. We need to think in more creative and less adversarial ways to ensure our future as a society." Although Mal was referring specifically to AFS, his comments also could apply to society as a whole.

If you have suggestions for future columns, please contact me at Career Services, Lucina Hall, Ball State University, Muncie, IN 47306 (tel: 765/285-2430; fax: 765/285-3757; e-mail: 00jpgoodwin@bsuvc.bsu.edu).