SECTION 9. Your Career
Types of creativity
Creative people, it is said, go through a characteristic trajectory. When they are young, their work reflects an intense, labor-intensive type of energy. They do not have much accumulated knowledge to build on, so their work expresses pure genius instead. Later in life, though, they change gears. They have built up a great deal of momentum, and they use it for larger, longer-term projects.
The structural theory
When you are young, you are located on the periphery of the research community. As you go along, however, you build a community around yourself. As the previous generation retires, you find yourself at the center. This gives you an ability to set agendas that you didn't have when you were more peripheral. Of course, if you have a fixed belief that you are peripheral then you will probably never acquire that ability. But if your beliefs are positive and you act on them, then you have a better chance.
The constraint theory
This theory is concerned with ratios of risk and reward. When you are a junior faculty member, it says, you should follow fashion, choosing topics whose importance is already well-understood. That way you will get the maximum reward with the minimum risk. When you are in the middle of your career, you should build new institutions, thereby legitimizing the research fashions that the next generation of junior faculty can follow. Instead of catching a wave, you are making waves. And when you are toward the end of your career, you should work on blue-sky topics that will eventually coalesce into new institutions through the work of the mid-career faculty behind you. That is the theory, anyway.
Formulas for a research program
Study how various successful researchers evolve their research programs. You will notice patterns. One such pattern pertains to famous researchers' relationships to their advisors. Often an advisor will write an important paper that sketches a new research area in a programmatic way, without developing the full-blown theoretical machinery that is required to generate a large number of results. One of that person's students, however, will perceive the significance of the new idea, and will draw together all of the literature and social networks required to generate the results, thus leading to large numbers of well-cited papers and a successful career.
The university's theory
The university as in institution is fueled by the peer review process. You are always being reviewed, and you are always reviewing others in turn. From the university's way of thinking, junior faculty members should be relieved of most reviewing duties. They will probably be drafted to referee journal papers and the like, but it is only after you receive tenure that the most onerous reviewing duties begin. The higher you ascend in the promotion ladder, the more likely you are to end up on committees to review tenure candidates, research programs, teaching programs, and whole departments, laboratories, and universities. Many senior faculty members complain about these burdens, and you should avoid this complaint by actively volunteering yourself for the duties that most interest you. That way you can decline the others.
The senior faculty's theory
When you are a new faculty member, senior faculty members often perceive you as raw material for their institution-building activities. You will find yourself being recruited into one activity or another. I have already advised you not to be recruited into anyone else's agenda; go ahead and participate in workshops and other activities if they help you build relationships, but confine your political clique-joining to articulating commonalities with everyone.
In mid-career, senior people will evaluate you in terms of your leadership qualities instead of their own narrow agendas. So it's a good idea that you didn't join any cliques but organized new research communities instead. The strongest leaders will also be those with the broadest, most capacious intellectual reach, and it is toward the end of your mid-career phase when this breadth will be tested.
Finally, senior people evaluate one another based on their ability to network beyond their own field. It is one thing for a biologist, for example, to network among other biologists. But to have a real effect on the largest institutions (the university, the funding agencies, the corporate world, the public sphere, and so on), a biologist also needs to network with humanists, artists, engineers, social scientists, and administrators of many sorts. And networking, once again, means choosing people strategically, articulating commonalities with them, articulating emerging themes, organizing events, and so on.
Iterative alignment
The theories of your career that I have described so far are useful enough. In my experience, however, a more useful theory is the one that I call iterative alignment. To understand it, suppose that you are someone who feels that your current position in the institutions of research doesn't fit with your own intellectual agenda -- "my work isn't welcome", you hear yourself say. Perhaps you are a graduate student whose department's faculty don't care about your research topic. Perhaps you are a new faculty member whose colleagues don't care about your research topic. Perhaps you are a mid-career faculty member in a field whose senior members don't care about your research topic. In each case, the problem is a misalignment between you and the institution. You haven't yet had the opportunity to choose your colleagues and build the institutions that you need to realize fully the potential of your work. Many people overgeneralize from this situation. They say, "it's all about connections, and the insiders have the whole situation rigged to their advantage". This kind of overgeneralization is a big mistake. It wrongly pretends that a temporary situation is permanent, and in so doing it tends to make the situation permanent.
How do you fix a problem of misalignment? By this point, it will not surprise you to hear that the solution lies in networking. One purpose of networking, so far as your career is concerned, is to manufacture a closer alignment between you and the institutions around you. If you are a student whose faculty don't care about your research, then indeed you will have to meet them halfway for a while. If you are a junior faculty member in a department where they don't know or care about half of the twenty people in your field who ought to be writing letters for you, make a list of thirty people that includes both your twenty and theirs. In the meantime, build networks. Get lots of interviews and lots of good job offers. Then get a job that is better aligned with your research interests. Notice that it is a two-way street: the process of alignment doesn't just mean forcing the world to fit with your pre-existing research interests. Rather, the process of dialogue, articulating commonalities, and internalizing the ideas of others will change your research agenda, and your networking, organizing, and institution-building activities will help create an institutional niche within which you can be supported in conducting research within that agenda. By iterative alignment, I mean that each step forward in your career improves the alignment by an incremental degree. One step might get you more sympathetic colleagues. Another might create a journal for you to publish your research in. Another might ensure a flow of research funding. Another might build a widespread network of researchers who consider you a leader in their overall movement. And so on. Each increment of alignment, though, happens in the same basic way: networking, articulation of commonalities and emerging themes, and organizing of activities. That is the basic cycle.
A common misunderstanding is that iterative alignment, or the research community generally, requires you to give up your dreams, conforming to someone else's agenda in order to get along. That is not true. Iterative alignment is a two-way street, that is true. You will change, even as you build and rebuild the institution to fit with yourself. But the fact that you are changing does not itself imply that you are conforming to some alien agenda. If you are doing it right then you are changing simply because you are growing, having better and better ideas, and realizing more and more of your potential. This is a critically important intuition: every time you spontaneously notice an emerging theme -- that is, every time that you go through the cycle of reading people's research, networking with them, articulating commonalities with them, and noticing a theme emerging from all of those conversations -- you are also noticing an aspect of yourself. Someone else who went through the same cycle would probably notice something different -- not because the situation is arbitrary, but because the situation is filled with potentially valuable research directions. When you notice an emerging theme and then organize activities around it, you are knitting yourself into the community. This process of knitting is what iterative alignment is all about. You align yourself and the institution by iteratively, incrementally knitting yourself into it. You should do work that is aligned with who you really are. Why? Because that way you are more likely to notice the entrepreneurial opportunity that the institutions are presenting to you. If you simply conformed to some arbitrary agenda, then you wouldn't have the same intuitive grasp of the ideas. You would probably get stuck in a low orbit that corresponds to the first, least aligned setting in which you happened to have a job. In this sense, the institutions of research are calling forth a certain honesty from you, and you need to have the courage to approach the cycle of iterative alignment in that spirit.
The theory of iterative alignment generalizes everything that I have said already in this article. In producing your dissertation, for example, I argued that you were really producing yourself as a member of the research community. That is an example of iterative alignment: aligning yourself with others by knitting your research topic into the existing literature and the people who wrote it. Articulating an emerging theme and organizing a workshop around it is also an example of iterative alignment. And so is the process of getting deep tenure with your research community. In each case you are choosing carefully the people you want to associate with, and you are using language creatively to articulate commonalities with those people and internalize their ideas. Iterative alignment, then, is a cycle whose details vary depending on where exactly you are located in the institutions at a given moment. And when you achieve perfect alignment, there's a sense in which your career is complete. You have knitted yourself fully into the institutions and communities around you. Your personal agendas align perfectly with the agendas that have been institutionalized for the benefit of others. Your own innovations and accomplishments have been fully incorporated into those others' work. The good you've done is now distributed throughout the people who have come after you. And you can now retire, knowing that you have made your fullest possible contribution to the field.
