Academic Networking

Lincoln Mullenr wrote this sophisticated little piece, which you’ll have to read in full to get the foundation, but here are his implications of the networking nature of the academy:

Collins’s sociology goes a long way towards explaining the unpleasant side of the academy, such as the emphasis on academic celebrities and the plight of scholars who are never embedded in the academic social network. But it also offers ways of thinking about the academy that can help you hack your own career:

• Get a mentor. This is hardly a unique observation, but it bears repeating. Good mentors don’t just teach you what you need to know to be a scholar, they teach you how to be a scholar.
• Participate in small groups—meeting face to face—to refine your work. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century debating clubs might be out of style, but writing groups aren’t. Small, frequent gatherings can provide the kinds of social thinking that produces great scholarship. If possible, reach outside your own institution when forming your group. And participating in an intensive, collaborative group, such as the month-long seminar that I’m engaged in now, will help you generate ideas that a month of reading and writing alone never could.
• Making a place for yourself at academic conferences. As universities become increasingly budget-conscious, there is more and more skepticism that face-to-face conferences are worth the money. But it is at conferences where you can discern the social shape of your discipline.
• Reach out to scholars whose work you admire. On the whole, senior scholars have been overwhelmingly generous whenever I’ve contacted them or introduced myself to them. (Forget the few exceptions.)
• Be the collegial colleague yourself. This point might not be as susceptible to empirical proof as the others. But if scholarship is essentially social, then you owe it to your fellow scholars to behave with courtesy and generosity, which will help your work as it helps others.

Do you have strategies for working within the social networks of academe?