In a previous post, I wrote about how perceptions often have more effect than reality on people’s experiences of organizations. In that post, I discussed how the film Katy Perry: Part of Me deliberately constructed the audience’s perceptions of its subject. As threatened promised, in this followup post, I’m going to discuss another film I recently saw – Room 237 – which is also an example of constructed reality. But in Room 237, it’s the audience, rather than the filmmakers, who are doing the constructing. (more…)
business
Statistics Canada Issues Warning about Quality of Its Own Data
This past week, Statistics Canada released some findings from its 2011 Canadian census data, showing that Canadians are speaking a greater variety of languages at home. Justifiably, this news got a lot of attention, because of the political and societal implications of linguistic diversity in a country with two official languages. However, what was almost completely unreported that Statistics Canada also issued a warning about the quality of its own information. (more…)
The Real(?) Thing, Part I: Katy Perry: Part of Me
The dynamic between perception and reality – both at the organizational and the individual level – is a big theme in the study of organizations. In an organization, factual realities often don’t really matter. What drives people’s and organizations’ actions, and what shapes people’s understanding and experience of an organization, is their perception of how things are or how they should be, not what things really are.
I recently saw two movies that, in very different ways, deal with that same issue of perception versus reality. (more…)
Population Ecology Theory in Real Life: How The Globe and Mail Misunderstood its Environment
This week the Internet has been alive, at least in my part of the world, with the unfolding drama of Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente’s alleged plagiarism. Since one of Ms. Wente’s favorite targets is university professors, who she characterizes as grossly overpaid and lazy, and not teaching anything that’s relevant to the real world, I thought I’d use population ecology theory – one of the allegedly irrelevant topics in my Organization Theory course – to analyze why her and her employer’s real-world responses to the plagiarism issue have been so ineffective. (more…)
Crowdsourcing and Unpaid Workers: When Worlds Collide
A while ago I wrote about crowdsourcing, which is becoming more and more interesting to me as an organizational theorist. Crowdsourcing bypasses traditional organizational structures and processes by creating what organizational theory would likely identify as a “networked organization”, Crowdsourcing creates a network of supporters around an artist or a project, and that organization can be temporary (for a one-time-only project) or ongoing (when the artist calls on those supporters whenever they have something new they want to pursue).
Thanks to the lively minds over at The Afterword, I was recently alerted to a situation that we might call “crowdsourcing gone wrong”. (more…)
Jonah Lehrer’s ‘Imagine’: How Did This Happen?
This past week, I had the opportunity to read Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine – the book that’s part of the controversy about plagiarism and fabrication in Lehrer’s writing. Imagine has been pulled by its publisher as a result of that controversy, so pointing out additional problems with it may now be somewhat redundant. (The copy I read came from my public library.) Nevertheless, after reading it, I want to outline the problems I found with the referencing in the book – an area which other commentators have also raised concerns about. (more…)
Rocky Mountaineer and Locked-Out Workers Reach Tentative Settlement
According to this story, the Rocky Mountaineer rail service has reached a tentative contract settlement with the onboard workers it locked out more than a year ago. The ratification vote on the contract will take place on Saturday. I’ll post information on the settlement as I come across it.
UPDATE: According to this story from Monday, the workers ratified the contract. A message on Twitter indicated that the new contract includes a 10% pay cut, a requirement that onboard workers share their tips with other staff, and a “payout” (I’m not sure if this is a contract signing bonus, a buyout option for employees who want to leave, or something else), but I haven’t seen any official confirmation of any of these details.
Labour Day News Review
Well, if Labour Day is indeed the time of the year when labour and workers get the most media attention, we might as well take advantage of it and take a quick look at some of what was said. (more…)
Wired Magazine “Severs Relationship” with Jonah Lehrer
Earlier today, the Slate website released this analysis of Jonah Lehrer’s work for Wired magazine and its website. Wired commissioned the analysis after previous work by Lehrer published elsewhere was revealed to have been plagiarized or recycled – but, according to the report’s author, Charles Seife, “Wired.com decided not to publish my full analysis of my findings”.
Several hours after the report was posted on Slate, Wired announced that its relationship with Lehrer has been severed. (more…)
(Not so) Happy Labour Day: How Did We End Up Here?
Labour Day, as my colleague David Doorey points out, is the time of the year when labour relations and unions can be guaranteed a bit of media attention. The “state of the union movement” was something I was thinking about not just because of Labour Day, but while following the recent bargaining dispute between the Society of Professional Engineers and Associates (SPEA) and Candu Energy, and hearing about the latest anti-union diatribe from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. (more…)
All About Work 