To
the IAAP BOD, meeting August 13/14 2004
By
Michael Frese, President
The International
Association of Applied Psychology has had a two year period of high activities,
growth in membership, and consolidation in finances. During the last two years
our association has done a lot to advance the function of the divisions, to
increase our presence internationally, particularly in the United Nations
system, and in advancing important issues, particularly in the area of policy
orientation. I think of IAAP as a particularly important association to
overcome mindless parochialism, to establish important networks of scholars
around the world, and to be a voice for the function of applied psychology in
the world.
It is now the midpoint
of my presidency and this makes it useful to take stock and to report what IAAP
has done. I hasten to add that IAAP wouldn’t be where it is without the
activity of the other officers (Jose Maria Prieto, Mike Knowles, and Charles
Spielberger, and particularly Ray Fowler, who has shouldered an enormous amount
of important activities), the Board of Directors members (including the
Presidents of the Divisions), the various members, who have taken up the task
to participate in standing committees and ad-hoc committees, and the two
representatives (Judy Kuriansky and Moshe Banai) from New York City, who have
been active in the United Nations. We are also very grateful that Elizabeth
Nair has taken over the Newsletter and has done an extremely good job in
publishing it. Let me also say, how much the officers appreciated the enormous
activities that already went into the preparation of our Athens conference in
two years (July 16-21, 2006; particular thanks are due to James Georgas, Marina
Manthouli, Anastasia Efklides and Thales Papadakis, Elias Besevegis and Vaso
Boukouvala, the committee members of Greek psychologists, and the liaison
scholars from our divisions). It is impossible to thank all of the many people,
who are participating in this endeavour and who will make the congress in
Athens very successful and will make it one of the most significant scientific
international events. We want this congress to be the most important congress
since the inception of IAAP in the year 1920.
The two most important
events for IAAP of the last two years are the facts that we became a
non-governmental organization (NGO) with the United Nations (Department of
Public Information) and that we now have an active and important Student
Division. Moreover, IAAP has organized several membership drives that led to a
significant increase in the number of members. However, we are still a small
organization and really we shouldn’t be. In these days and age in which
research should be based on international cooperation and in which
international relations are so important, it is somewhat ridiculous that IAAP
is not five or six times bigger than it is at the moment. I think we all have
to work together to transform this highly influential but small elite
organization into a highly influential, but much bigger organization over the
course of the next years. I am surprised again and again, how often people tell
me that they would love to be members of the association, but have never been
asked. It is particularly important that each member asks potential
Ph.D.-students to become members of the association. We have reduced the
membership dues for the students tremendously but their membership helps to
keep us viable. I hope, our student group continues to grow (the number of students
quadrupled within the last two year in which we inaugurated a Student Division,
very ably led by Pedro Neves).
When I became
President, I advanced eight important goals (IAAP Newsletter, Volume 15, Issue
1). I want to organize my report along the lines of these 8 goals:
1)
Every
division should be a true network of likeminded researchers, scholars, and
students
We have been very
lucky with the support from the Divisional Presidents of most divisions. A
particularly good example of an active division is Division 1 (Organizational
Psychology, with its very able president Virginia Schein). Division 1 had a
very specific and very clear plan of action for the period 2002-2006. It has
developed a Division 1 Newsletter, produced a membership survey, developed a
Leader-Links Program, stimulated scientific discussions, facilitated publishing
in scientific journals via workshops, hosted round-table sessions at SIOP and
EAWOP conferences and subsidized annual dues for tenure members from developing
countries. Other divisions (notably Division 7 – Applied Gerontology, Division 8 – Health Psychology,
Division 9 – Economic Psychology,
Division 12 – Sport Psychology, and Division 13 – Traffic Psychology) have
recruited prominent members, have held and co-organized conferences with other
organizations and produced workshops (notably Division 6 – Clinical and
Community Psychology, Division 7 – Applied Gerontology, Division 8 – Health
Psychology, Division 11 – Political Psychology, Division 13 – Traffic
Psychology). It was just delightful to see the amount of activities. Sadly, we
also lost one prominent and active president, due to sudden and unexpected
death; Professor Paul Pintrich passed away on July 12, 2003, and we hold him in dear memory.
2)
Small
divisions should be supported and encouraged to get more members. Non-active
divisions should be encouraged to become more active
There is no clear
correlation between the activity of a division and its size. As a matter of
fact, the Division of Economic Psychology, the Division of Sport Psychology,
and the Division of Counselling Psychology of Divisions have been very active
although they are small. The officers have attempted to encourage all divisions
to become more active. Unfortunately, some (very few) divisions did not react
to repeated pleas by the president to develop a plan of action and to follow it
through.
3) Make applied
psychology more policy oriented
Making applied
psychology more policy oriented is one of the most important activities during
my presidency and some of the subcommittees on policy orientation have been
very active. Some other ones have not yet been active enough but I am sure they
will all produce Memoranda by the time of the conference in Athens 2006. John
Berry and I have called into being a set of subgroups:
Human capital (headed
by: Milton Hakel, USA)
Stress and health
(headed by: Stevan Hobfoll, USA)
Immigration (headed
by: John Berry and David Sam, Norway)
AIDS/HIV prevention
(headed by: Susan Pick, Mexico)
Unemployment (headed
by: Thomas Kieselbach, Germany)
Indigenous people
(headed by: Linda Waimare Nikora, New Zealand and John Berry)
Role of women (headed
by: Florence Denmark, USA)
Ethnopolitical
violence (headed by: Clark McCauley, USA)
Quality of life
(headed by: Juan Sanchez-Sosa, Mexico)
Active ageing (headed
by: Rocio Fernandez-Ballesteros, Spain)
Environmental
psychology (headed by: David Canter, UK, and Mirilia Bonnes, Italy)
Entrepreneurship
(headed by: Michael Frese, Germany)
These subgroups will
report some results of their work in a double symposium headed by John Berry at
the Beijing conference and we hope that all of these subgroups will report
substantial advance on their activities at the ICAP in Athens 2006.
It cannot be
emphasized enough: Psychology has tended to stay away from policy implications.
We have allowed other disciplines (such as medicine, sociology, and economics
to give recommendations on issues that are uniquely psychological). It is
surprising that psychology has not dominated the debate on racism, the debate
on poverty reduction, on ethnopolitical violence, on the ageing society, and on
changing structure of qualifications for work, etc. We hope to make it a
hallmark of IAAP to change this tradition and to make applied psychology a
fertile producer of policy recommendations to international associations, to
national societies, to companies and labor unions, to law makers, and to other
relevant bodies of public and company policy. I think it is time that we
drastically enhance and increase policy oriented activities by international
scholars of applied psychology.
4) Increase of IAAP
activities in developing countries
Increasing IAAP
activities in developing countries, is obviously an issue of highest
importance. As usual, IAAP is supporting and organizing regional conferences,
the ARTS, and other activities. We have supported the organization of the
regional conferences in Dubai in 2003 (primarily responsible for this regional
conference was IUPsys), and I was lucky enough to get Professor Ubolwanna
Pavakanun from Thammasat University in Bangkok, Thailand to volunteer to
organize a regional conference in Bangkok, Thailand, in the year 2005 (we will
determine the exact date within a month). Regional conferences are a good way
to build capacity and to develop regional competence and regional cooperation
and IAAP is very proud of its participation in these endeavours.
We have also attempted
to increase the number of workshops that IAAP members hold. I personally have
given workshops in Thailand and Mexico, and Susan Pick has taken over the
organization of a number of IAAP-sponsored workshops in Mexico and Latin
America. One was given by Susan Pick herself, another one by Ype Poortinga; a
third one is planned. Both workshops that took place already were very
successful. While regional workshops of this type may not be the only avenue,
they increase the visibility of IAAP, and they make it possible to improve the
competence of students, who are participating. They are in keeping with our
mission to make it possible to produce
well-functioning networks of scientists and students. We hope that we can
increase this tradition.
Our Action 100
(brought about by Bernhard Wilpert many years ago) is another avenue through
which we are active in developing countries. Action 100 implies that libraries
in developing countries get our journal free of charge. While there are a
number of such free subscriptions, there is still space for additional free
subscriptions if you know a library that could use our flagship journal Applied
Psychology: An International Review (edited very ably by Robert Wood,
Australia).
5) Develop a
Student Division
The BOD in 2002 agreed
to found a Student Division and Pedro Neves (University of Lisbon, Portugal)
agreed to work as president of this division. The first wave of students joined
the student division at the conference in Singapore itself and then several
waves of students joined so that the student division is now one of the bigger
divisions and that we were able to quadruple the number of students in our
association. Ray Fowler was particularly important in making a big drive to
increase the number of students from the ranks of the APA Graduate Students
Association. Many IAAP members have been enthusiastic of getting their graduate
students to join IAAP. We have drastically reduced the price for student
members to 10$ in the first year. Although we make a loss on each student
(because the journal costs us 20$ per member), we are proud to have a very
fast-growing and very active student division in our midst.
6) Working with the
United Nations system
It was not easy and at
certain points it looked like we would fail: However, in the end we were
successful and now have the NGO status with the DPI (Department of Publication
Information) at the United Nations. We were lucky to get two representatives in
New York City, who follow up United Nations activities: Judy Kuriansky (e-mail:
DrJudyK@aol.com) and Moshe Banai (e-mail: moshe_Banai@baruch.cuny.edu). They
have been extremely active and have very quickly become important participants
in the United Nations system. We have also been fortunate to have very good
relations with the United Nations representatives of IUPsyS, Division 52 of APA,
and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, as well as ICP
(International Council of
Psychologists). We think it is very important to raise the level of
awareness on psychological issues and on psychological knowledge within the
United Nations system and we are well aware that we have to do this together
with other organizations and NGOs.
Of course, we continue
to be further aligned with the International Social Science Council (which is
associated with the UNESCO).
7) Professionalize
the work of IAAP
In all, IAAP has
become a faster, and more quickly moving organization, mainly because of the
enormous ease of decision-making within the officers and because of the
extremely valuable activities of my personal assistant in Giessen, Heike
Clasen. I am particularly happy to report that the officers have had continuous
e-mail contacts (often daily, most of the time weekly and at least once or
twice a month) to deal with issues and to make decisions. José Prieto has
helped us to master the internet and this has proven to be extremely useful in
our work with each other; the spirit of collaboration has been very positive.
8) Membership
Drives
One of the more
important goals that I had was to increase the members of IAAP. While most general-purpose
organizations loose members, IAAP is gaining members, albeit not as quickly as
I would like it to be.
We did the following
membership drives:
a) We sent out letters to all non-members who
participated at ICAP Singapore.
b) We sent out letters to lapsed members, who had
not renewed their membership in 2000, 2001, 2002 or 2003
c) We asked the Divisional Presidents to write to
30 prominent people active in the field and ask them to become members of IAAP.
d) When I sent out a letter to all members of IAAP
at the end of last year (which I will do more regularly in the future), I have
asked the members to recruit an additional member within their faculty.
e) We sent letters to past authors of Applied Psychology: An International
Review of the last five years, who are not yet members, asking them to
become members.
f)
We sent letters
to Austrian psychologists so that we should increase the membership in Austria.
g) In addition, I personally recruited many
members on my meetings and travels with psychologists around the world.
9) International Associations
We continue an
excellent and extremely fruitful cooperation with our partner organization
IUPsyS. I have maintained regular contacts with Michel Denis, the President,
and exchanged information via email and face to face. We also have worked
together taking care of the International Forum of International Associations
of Psychology. In a similar vein Ray Folwer and Michel Sabourin, as treasurers,
have exchanged information and names
for specific activities backed together, such as regional meetings, ARTS and
the credentialing psychologists across countries in an International meeting
held in Montreal. Also J.M. Prieto as SG and Pierre Ritchie have exchanged
information and contacts to facilitate specific actions regarding 28ICP. Mike
Knowles, president elect, also has maintained regular contacts with Michel
Sabourin before and during the Regional Congress held in Dubai. A climate of
friendly interactions prevails. Several BOD members are also EC members of
IUPsyS or delegates to the IUPsyS Assembly and in this way bilateral
communications move in both directions.
We have renewed contacts to other associations, like the International Council of Psychologists (ICP) and we shall deepen our already excellent relationships with IACCP during the 28ICP. The president has been invited to participate in our BOD meeting as observer.
Charles Spielberger
has worked very energetically on the Encyclopedia for Applied Psychology that
is an IAAP endeavour and which increases the returns to IAAP.
In the same spirit I
have asked Blackwell to initiate a series of International Handbooks of Applied
Psychology. We shall start to appoint editors for the first few handbooks that
will start the series. We envision that we will have 10+ handbooks within the
next 6-7 years. The Handbook series is in cooperation with Blackwell, but the
series belongs to IAAP and thus is an IAAP activity. We hope to make this a
definitive series of handbooks that stand out, both in terms of their
international approach as well as in terms of their scientific Excellency.
There are so many
other activities. We were given the task by the General Assembly in 2002 to
rework the constitution and Ray Fowler and Mike Knowles have done that very
effectively. Ray Fowler and Charles Spielberger have developed a set of
guidelines for determining the new membership category of Fellows in our
association.
Thus, we think that
our association has done quite well, but I think we can do much better and
that, given the importance of IAAP, we should also do much better. We should do
more to educate society about the function and importance of applied
psychology, and we should do more to help deal with societal, educational, and
company problems. We should also grow to be able to distribute the load of
activities on more shoulders and to be available and significantly present in
more countries. We should also lure more scholars into our association so that
scientists are naturally international in their outlook. We should showcase
more best practice examples for good applied psychology. We should be proud of
our contributions that we already make and transmit this pride to our students.
We should include ourselves in more significant debates nationally and internationally.
We should use our methodological knowledge to produce better and cumulative
knowledge for areas of importance. We should do research in applied psychology
areas that are of future importance, etc., etc. I hope that you, the members of
IAAP and the BOD members, will help the association to shoulder the many things
that we in principle can and should be doing.
Michael Frese
(President of the International Association of Applied Psychology)