Industrial and Organizational Psychology Journal--Vol 6, Iss 1

Well, I just got some disappointing news: Industrial and Organizational Psychology, the journal that I wanted to look into, isn't available online and isn't available in our databases at Mizzou.  Fortunately. on the I/A website, they do post PDFs of the most recent journal issue for free, so I will be able to look at something.  However, I won't be able to look at as much as I wanted to.

I was able to access Volume 6, Issue 1 of the journal.  One of the focal articles for this issue is about marginalized employees and experiences with discrimination.  There are then 3-4 page commentaries paired with this focal article that discuss race, sexuality, age, religion, and intersectionality.  Huh, this looks like it might be interesting.

I'm going to spend the next little bit downloading all these articles so that they won't disappear from access when the new issue comes out, and then I'll read and write about them in the coming week!  Maybe these will help me find something from I/O that can be used to discuss contingent faculty and marginalization.

Here's a link to the journal issue, if you're curious: Industrial and Organizational Psychology.

CCCC and Writing as Psychological Intervention

At CCCC this year, I kept an ear out for psychology-related projects.  I didn't see many, but one stuck out to me.  At the Feminist Workshop on Wednesday, Eileen Schell talked about a project she's working on related to the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives.  The project she discussed was Women's Lives in the Profession.  With the Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession, Schell is collective narratives about women's experiences in Rhet/Comp.

When discussing this project, she also brought up a community-based writing project dealing with Veterans (but I don't have many notes on this).

Schell connected these projects by stating that they're both about using writing as a way of healing or processing.  By writing, the Veterans have a chance to think through what they experienced and put that to words.  By telling their stories, women in the profession can deal with emotional trauma.

This doesn't really relate to my exploratory project this semester, but I thought it was interesting, and it's making me look forward to our Third Topos: Writing with/as Psychological Intervention.  And, I figured that if I get feedback saying that my I/O Psychology and Rhet/Comp labor might not work, I could pursue something more in this direction.

Choices, choices.

Exploratory Proposal

This semester, I'd like to begin my exploratory project by puzzling through the following question: What is Industrial and Organizational Psychology  and what might it have to offer Rhetoric and Composition and labor studies in Higher Education?  I hope to at some point get to this question: What from Industrial and Organizational Psychology could be brought into Rhetoric and Composition programs to help resolve some of the conflicts and issues that have arisen due to labor practices?  Might I/O Psychology offer us a solution or part of a solution?

I think a good place to start is by getting to know the field of Industrial and Organizational Psychology better.  I've found a journal put out by the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology.  I might begin there with my researching, looking at titles of articles from the last few years and reading things that sound relevant and interesting.

There's also a book in our library called Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Research and Practice by Paul E Spector (2006).  And there's another one called Historical Perspectives in Industrial and Organizational Psychology by Laura Koppes (2007). It looks like this is a reader which includes some selections about the history of the field as well as persistent themes.

I think this is a good place to start with a journal and two books to work from.  Do you have any further suggestions for me in terms of how to narrow or expand or frame my question or what to look at?

Industrial and Organizational Psychology

I'm starting with the Industrial and Organizational Psychology wikipedia page.  It has quite a few links to other articles and books at the bottom of the page, so I think I'll use this as a starting place for a basic overview of this field.

So, here are some notes:

• This is also called work psychology;
• "scientific study of employees, workplaces, and organizations";
• focuses on "improving the workplace" and "performance, satisfaction, and well-being of its people"
• a form of applied psychology along with clinical, consumer, educational, environmental, etc.;
• deals with job performance, recruitment, admissions, testing, performance appraisal, motivation, ethics, etc.;
• field developed during WWI;
• use "surveys, experiments, quasi-experiments, and observational studies";
• also rely on "human judgments, historical databases, objective measures of work performance, and questionnaires and surveys";
• research is quantitative and qualitative;
• qualitative methods include "focus groups, interviews, case studies";
• and also enthnography! and participant observation!;
• "job satisfaction reflects an employee's overall assessment of their job, particularly their emotions, behaviors, and attitudes about their work experience.  It is one of the most heavily researched topics in industrial-organizational psychology with several thousand published studies"'

Sources to pursue next?:

• Guion (1965)
• Blum and Naylor (1968)
• Building Better Organizations

What intrigues me? 

I'm interested in the variety of research methods that this field utilizes.  It is encouraging to see something that is considered "science" include ethnography and qualitative methods like case studies and interviews.  It's not that I think these methods are better, but they're more attainable for someone like me who has never taken a stats class.  (Like Eric, I feel like I need to take more research methods courses).

Parts of this remind me of Dorothy Smith's Institutional Ethnography.  This might be something worth revisiting.

I'm also interested in the focus on workers and how to improve their experiences with work. 

My fear is that this is ''hyper-managerial'' and might result in some of the problematic working conditions (like jobs at Walmart) since managers might know how to motivate workers and keep them on task, somehow also resulting in the workers overlooking their low wages.  I suppose that most systems intended for good can be used for bad, though.  Sigh.

Anyway, I think I'm going to continue pursuing this.  Onward and forward!  What is industrial and organizational psychology all about, and what might it have to offer to Rhet/Comp and contingent labor studies?

Industrial/Organizational Psychology

....NOT institutional psychology.

Remember this Jes, okay?  Thanks!

Topic Proposal?

The couple-weeks-in doubts are starting to over come me.  Initially I was really excited about connections between institutional psychology and Rhet/Comp/Labor studies, but now that I look at the syllabus, I can see that there's not going to be much about this.

So, now I'm wondering if I should go with something else that relates more to our readings and the lectures we're listening to.

For example, the Jennifer Crocker lecture got me thinking about compassion and collaboration in the writing classroom, and it reminded me that in my master's thesis on Collaborative and Cooperative Learning, I relied on cognitive science a little bit.  Part of my argument (although quite undeveloped) was that college freshman aren't all that different cognitively from high school seniors.  So, the divide that I saw in the literature that suggested that cooperative learning was for K-12 and collaborative learning for Higher Ed was really just artificial.  So, I advocated for starting with cooperative learning in Freshman Comp and then teach students how to work collaboratively without as much supervision.  I could go in this route again, perhaps delving into psychological research more than I did for my thesis.

Or, after reading Hayes and Flower, I could do some exploring with protocol analysis.  It might be fun to figure out who's used it and when, and then try some 2013 protocol analysis research on my own.  I could even just study myself and a peer or two and see what happens...?

I could also look more into Rhet/Comp history and read articles from the 1980s.  This might even help me with my Comps.  My goal could be to understand the complexities of the cognitive turn int he 1980s and puzzle through why it fizzled out?

Bagh, I'm not sure.  I am still interested in institutional psychology, but I'm not sure where to go from here.  Maybe read the wikipedia page for it in detail and start to follow links?  Get a bigger picture of what it is and what I could do with it?

I think I might do that for my next post.  Maybe that'll clear up whether I should stick with it or move on to something else.