Images of Change: Anne Smith
Office of Advancement - Faculty
Images communicate in ways that words cannot. Anne Smith, head of the Department of Management at the Haslam College of Business, sees photography as a way to observe management styles.
“I’m very interested in how to use images in the field, getting organizational members to take pictures and talk about them,” says Smith. “For three years, I taught a first-year studies course about photography and making sense of transition. I enjoyed that more than almost anything else I’ve done.”
Smith’s freshman students used photography to explore their transition to campus life. “We looked at finding comfort, missing home, becoming involved and ultimately adjusting to the college routine,” Smith explains. To help students develop their photography skills and find angles to express their thoughts, Smith led them on a behind-the-scenes tour of campus. “I took them to all the out of the way places around campus,” she says. “We went inside the old library, the alumni house, McClung Museum and to the top floor of the law school, where there’s a collection of platinum records on display.”
While Smith’s chief enjoyment of the class came from connecting with students, she had a secondary purpose. “It’s a research project,” she says. “I am interested in images and what they say, and I want to see if what happened in the first semester set the path for those students.” Every fall, she talks to past students to track their progress. About 80 percent of her last class chose to participate in follow-up interviews. “It’s a meaningful project for me. It’s important because it ties into the metrics of the university and our ability to retain students.”
Smith has published more than twenty papers in academic journals. While she prefers fieldwork, stories and images to surveys and archival databases, Smith stresses that qualitative research is tricky. “Europeans and Canadians tend to do more qualitative research as compared to American management scholars,” she says. “Qualitative is seen as a risky research strategy because of the investment in fieldwork and the substantial time figuring out the story and theoretical contributions. Publishing qualitative studies in top journals usually takes many, many years.”
When she’s not finding new ways to connect and research, Smith serves as associate editor of qualitative submissions of Organizational Methods Journal and chair of the Strategizing Activities and Practices Interest Group in the Academy of Management. In 2015, she was named department head when former department head Terry Leap returned to teaching. “I’ve never aspired to administration,” she confesses. “I’m here because I think I’m the right person at the right time. For me, it’s about the department. I’m just here to orchestrate it.”