Author: Fiona McQuarrie

a few words

Indefinite Leave

After a lot of thought and consideration, I’ve decided to put All About Work on indefinite leave.

I started writing this blog in March 2012. I wanted a place where I could write about topics related to my academic work, but in a less formal, more accessible style. Business media are dominated by conservative voices that generally support employers, so I also wanted to provide an alternative, worker-focused perspective on work and organizations.

I’m very mindful that the education I’ve been so fortunate to acquire has all been acquired in publicly-funded institutions. In my view, that creates a responsibility for me to give back to the community and the public. All About Work is one way for me to do that: by sharing news, information and opinions that might help people, or encourage them to think about things in a different way.

All About Work was not set up to generate income. I pay for the site hosting and for WordPress features like an ad blocker, so ads won’t be randomly inserted into posts that you’re reading. But I don’t include affiliate links in my posts, or use any of the other methods of monetizing blogs. All About Work is very much a labour of love, and I’ve continued running it because I enjoy doing it.

However, in the last six months or so, I’ve seen increasing numbers of referrals – the sources of clicks on posts – from AI-driven tools such as ChatGPT and Perplexity. These tools scrape and synthesize information from publicly available sources on the Internet, without any compensation to authors and creators. Sorry, AI tech bros, but “exposure” is not enough – and the amount of content from this site that shows up on AI searches goes far beyond any reasonable definition of “fair use“.

The content on All About Work is publicly available for free, but it’s also copyrighted. I strongly object to for-profit sites and services using my copyrighted work without my permission, without credit, and without payment.

In my limited experience with AI, I’ve also seen my work misrepresented. I’ve seen posts on All About Work cited as sources for information that is misleading, or even worse, completely wrong.

Unless WordPress comes up with an AI blocker, I can’t stop AI from stealing my work. But I also don’t have to feed AI by creating even more content for it to steal.

I thought about closing the All About Work site and deleting all 373(!) posts, but I’ve put a lot of effort into this blog and am proud of what it’s accomplished. Also, there is content on the site that as far as I know is very difficult to find anywhere else (such as the diagrams of figures from figure skating tests that no longer exist).

So the All About Work site will stay online. The posts that are already posted will still be available, and I can still be contacted through the site. And I’ll continue to run my other blogs, which for some reason attract almost no AI activity. But until there are some significant changes to how AI operates, I won’t be posting anything new on All About Work.

Thanks to all of the blog’s many supporters and readers over the past 13 years.

 

Business Bullshit and CEO Cosplay

I was a guest on the podcast The Bunker, where I talked with host Andrew Harrison about how “grindset” culture and self-promoting CEOs are damaging businesses and society. We also talked about Fountains of Wayne. You can listen to the podcast here.

Authorships for Sale

I’ve written several posts about predatory journals –  journals that present themselves as academic journals, but which have no meaningful peer review and are published by questionable organizations. These journals exploit authors by charging excessive publication fees, and also give undeserved legitimacy to misleading or deeply flawed research. Now, thanks to the ongoing excellent work of Retraction Watch, I’ve become aware of another academic research scam: authorships for sale.

The opportunity to buy being listed as an author of an academic paper was something that was entirely new to me. Now, after looking into it, I believe it deserves a lot more attention. Like publishing research in predatory journals, selling authorship raises some very serious questions about the integrity of some academic publishers and researchers. And as has been pointed out elsewhere, financial grants intended to support research – especially government-funded grants – should actually be spent on research, not on dubious publishing “opportunities”.

I’m going to explain the basic model of selling authorships, and show some examples that were alarmingly easy to find.

When legitimate academic research is published, the authors of the research paper are assumed to have actually participated in the research that the paper describes. Traditionally, the authors’ names usually appear in a ranked order, with the first name being the author that contributed the most to the research or to writing the paper, the second name being the author that contributed the second most, and so forth. Thus, being “first author” or “lead author” carries more prestige, and sometimes more value in an evaluation, than being a second or third or fourth author.

The companies and individuals that sell authorships work this way. First, (more…)

Conformity

This is the week of the 2025 world figure skating championships. Since the next Winter Olympics are in 2026, this event is going to be particularly intense, because the placements here will determine how many competitors each country gets to send to the Olympics. I won’t be at Worlds, as much as I love Boston – it would have been an expensive trip, but now the anti-Canadian attitudes of the US government are making a lot of Canadians nervous about crossing the border.

Instead of going to Worlds, I went to a different kind of skating event this weekend. It was a performance by Le Patin Libre. Several members of this Montreal-based “contemporary skating company” are former competitive skaters who became frustrated with (more…)

David Lodge: Business and English

British writer David Lodge passed away in January, at the grand age of 89. I was sad to hear of his death, because his work meant a lot to me. He balanced two very different careers – academic and novelist – which had its challenges but also gave him a broad perspective on the world. And one of his novels particularly resonated with me as an undergraduate student, because I was trying to navigate the two different worlds depicted in that novel.

My undergraduate degree is a Bachelor of Business Administration, with majors in business and English. There was exactly one other person among the several hundred students in my BBA program who was also enrolled in business and English (he was doing a minor in English). The business students doing majors or minors in other subjects – and there weren’t many of them  – were enrolled in psychology, economics, or statistics.

I don’t exaggerate when I say that business students despised English students and English students despised business students. The business students thought the English students were (more…)

New Book Announcement

Happy New Year! I’m delighted to announce that my new book, a biography of the band Fountains of Wayne, will be released by J-Card Press on March 13. It can be pre-ordered directly from the publisher, and from online retailers around the world.

All About Work’s Winter Break 2024

As 2024 winds down, it’s time to look at which posts on All About Work were most popular this year. In order, they are:

– Mapping Temporary Foreign Workers in Canada [the map that this post discusses has just been updated, and now includes data from April through June 2024]

– Vocational Awe

– Bob White and “Final Offer”

– Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 Hour Rule” Doesn’t Add Up

– Compulsory Figures: Technical Guidelines, Diagrams, and Tests

I wish I could share a lovely photo of snow-covered scenery in my neighbourhood, but all we’ve had so far this winter is rain. So instead, here’s a photo of one small part of the spectacular holiday light display in my city.

Lights at Lafarge (credit: @TourismCoquitlam on Instagram)

I’ll be taking some time off to mark the end of the year, and I hope you’ll be able to do the same. Thank you to everyone who has read, commented on, or shared posts from All About Work in 2024. All the best for whatever winter festival you celebrate, and for a happy and prosperous 2025. See you next year!

A Closer Look at Malcolm Gladwell’s “Magic Third”

Twelve years ago, I wrote a post on this blog about the “10,000 hour rule” that Malcolm Gladwell promoted in his book Outliers. Gladwell claimed that 10,000 hours was the “magic number of greatness” – that 10,000 hours of practice was required to excel at an activity.  The author of the study that Gladwell cited as supporting this claim said that Gladwell misinterpreted the study’s results. Others have pointed out that the “10,000 hour rule” is misleading in suggesting that the total time spent on an activity is the only predictor of success. It doesn’t take into account other variables that might affect skill development, such as deliberate practice, innate or acquired talent, the age at which someone begins the activity, and access to appropriate equipment, coaching, and training sites.

While there are debates about exactly how much effect some of these variables have, it’s clear that Gladwell took the 10,000-hour figure out of context, and also skimmed over some important details that are necessary to fully understand how skill development works.

The post I wrote on the “10,000-hour rule” is by far the most popular post ever on this blog. That shows how interested people are in what Gladwell says. It also shows the importance of looking closely at his claims – to see what evidence he cites to support them, and to see whether experts on the subject agree with his interpretations.

This is not to say that only experts can discuss these kinds of topics. Sometimes an outsider can see details or trends that experts don’t notice. And there’s always a place for a writer who’s not a scientist or researcher to explain research and its outcomes to a general audience. But the writer needs to get the details right, and not simplify things to the point where important pieces of information are omitted.

Gladwell has just released a new book, Revenge of the Tipping Point. One of its chapters is about a new “magic number”: the “Magic Third”. This, Gladwell claims, is the number of minority members in a group that’s necessary for the minority to be accepted as part of the group. I’m going to look at this claim in detail because this general subject (organization and group dynamics) falls into my own area of professional expertise, so I have some familiarity with the relevant research.

The chapter subtitle of “The Magic Third” is a quote from one of Gladwell’s interviewees: “I would say, absolutely, there is some tipping point in my experience”. Notice that the quote doesn’t mention the “magic third”, or any number for that matter; it only says that there is a demographic tipping point which causes group dynamics to change. This type of change is well-documented in research on the effects of group composition. The fact that group dynamics change if group membership changes also won’t be a surprise to anyone.

Gladwell starts out by discussing (more…)

The Power to Change

When I was researching the article on the “right to disconnect” that I recently wrote for The Conversation, one of the studies that I referenced was one exploring over-connectivity and gender equity in the legal profession. The Australian researchers interviewed 63 lawyers about the effects of newer digital technology tools (e.g. email, Zoom, Teams, texting, mobile phones) on their work. The legal profession is a good place to study these effects, because lawyers do complex work in time-sensitive situations that can unexpectedly change. They also simultaneously manage multiple clients, cases, and commitments.

The interviewees appreciated the work flexibility that digital technology gave them – particularly women with family or household commitments outside of work. But they reported that they were experiencing more challenges around setting boundaries between work and non-work times, due to their increased availability. Many also said that easier communication had intensified clients’ expectations for fast turnarounds and responses.

The interviewees discussed individual and firm-level strategies they used to deal with “digital overload”. These included clearly defined work hours, limiting the methods by which clients could contact them, and organizational policies with guidelines such as expected response times to messages from client. However, this part of the discussion really stood out to me. (more…)

The Right To Disconnect

I wrote an article for The Conversation website about “right to disconnect” laws (laws that give workers the right to ignore after-hours communications from employers) and why these are an opportunity for organizations, rather than a constraint. The full article is available here.