Current research: Guild leadership practices

Despite claims I've made to the contrary one of the functions of this blog is in fact academic research. With that in mind, I'm a bit overdue to get a post up here about the project which is occupying most of my attention this academic year, namely my dissertation research. As the post title indicates, this branch of my work is focused on guild leadership practices.

If you want to know more, you need only read past the break.

In the last few years there's been an explosion in serious academic studies of virtual worlds from a variety of disciplinary angles. I'm not about to give a complete summary of these works here since that would require multiple pages of text. If you're new to the topic and want to find out more about the scope of research folks have done, you might want to go browse around on Terra Nova. If you're just interested in my work for one reason or another, all you really need to know for background is that Professor Constance Steinkuehler* here in the School of Education at UW-Madison has been advancing work on the topic of learning in MMOs for some time, and that my work leverages her prior research to look at leadership in World of Warcraft.

To be specific, I'm asking the question: What are the leadership practices that are enacted in raiding guilds in WoW, and how can they inform leadership in other organizational contexts? Due to the fact that my own department is focused on leadership in schools, my research is especially concerned with how understanding guild leadership can help us to reconceptualize what leadership might look like in virtual schools, or how digital tools can change practices like performance feedback and conflict management in educational organizations.

In order to figure out what's going on in guild leadership, my work proceeds in two stages. I'm working on the first stage currently which involves interviewing guild leaders (mostly GMs, but sometimes raid leaders and others when it seems appropriate) to get a sense of what all the leadership tasks are that need to be enacted in raiding guilds. I'm focusing mostly on guilds that are exceptional or interesting in some way (this is what is known as theoretical sampling, although this Wikipedia entry doesn't really describe what the method is about very effectively) so as to get a picture of the possible range of practices that guild leadership requires. Although I'm primarily interviewing GMs, I'm using a distributed perspective which means that I'm concerned with the practices themselves regardless of who it is in the guild that handles them. In the event that a GM thinks someone else in the guild can better describe a certain aspect of their guild's leadership practices (perhaps that guild has a recruiting officer), then I'm following up on their recommendation by setting up an interview with that guild member if possible to get a better understanding of the tasks and how they are enacted.

I should also mention here that due to human subject limitations, I'm only interviewing players who are 18 and older. If this statement seems like nonsense to you (which it should if you're not a researcher), all you need to know is that I would essentially need parental consent to interview folks under age 18, and that this is far more trouble than it's worth given the scope of my work in this instance.

The second stage of this work will involve an online survey to get a sense of what kinds of leadership practices are engaged in by the broader population of raiding guilds. I'll be promoting it here and other places when the time is right (probably sometime around February 2010). In the mean time, if you think you're guild's leadership would be an interesting addition to my work or you want to find out more about the study, feel free to ping me.

* While Constance is on my dissertation committee, I wanted to note here that my awesome advisor Rich Halverson is the one who has supported me in pursuing a line of research which is highly unusual for a department of educational leadership.

Comments

[Not enough orcs they said &laq]

[...] it seems that my previous post advertising my need for more guild leaders for my research was less effective than I might have [...]

[backlog continued « Mose]

[...] I may have made an oblique reference to this in one of the posts I’ve written regarding my WoW guild leadership research (a.k.a. my thrice damned dissertation), but I wanted to get that established at some point and [...]