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.
careers
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…)
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.
Mapping Temporary Foreign Workers in Canada
UPDATE: Regrettably the creator of the map described in this post has discontinued the map website. Thank you for your hard work, anonymous map-maker. The federal government data that were used to make the map, and that are regularly updated, are posted here.
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In the last few weeks, there has been a lot of discussion around the Canadian federal government’s Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) program. This program allows eligible employers to hire temporary workers from outside Canada. To be eligible to hire a TFW, an employer usually has to obtain a “positive” Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA), which is a confirmation that the employer cannot find qualified Canadian workers to fill its vacant job. A worker entering Canada on a TFW permit can only work for the employer that received the LMIA for the job.
Part of the reason for the increased attention to the TFW program is the release of a new report commissioned by the United Nations’ Human Rights Council. The report calls the TFW program “a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery”. It alleges that employers having control over TFWs’ immigration status in Canada leads to worker exploitation and abuse, with workers afraid to report mistreatment for fear of being fired and deported. It’s also been suggested that Canadian employers turn to using TFWs when they aren’t willing to pay the higher wage rates that Canadian workers expect.
Other critics of the program have alleged that the LMIA process is being corrupted by unethical employers and immigration agents. These employers create non-existent jobs, get positive LMIAs for those jobs, and then, with the help of the agents, “sell” the LMIAs to individual immigrants. The immigrant pays the employer a fee – allegedly often in the tens of thousands of dollars – and the employer hires the immigrant to fill the vacant “job”. The immigrant can then (more…)
Ship of Fools
As some of this blog’s followers will know – especially those that follow my other blog – I have two careers: one in academia, and one in music writing. The two don’t often intersect, and that’s partly because I try to keep them separate. Having a Ph.D. and being a university professor doesn’t mean a lot in the music writing world, and being a music writer doesn’t mean a lot in the academic world. There might be some overlap if my degree was in a subject related to music, but although my area of study is very useful in helping me to understand how the music industry works, it’s not explicitly music-related.
This week marks the anniversary of the day I defended my doctoral dissertation – March 17, 1995. The defense comes after you’ve written your dissertation, which is an original piece of research, and your academic supervisor (supervisors, in my case) has signed off on it. You verbally present your research and your findings to a panel of professors, including an external assessor from another university. The panel members ask you questions about what you’ve done, and then you wait outside the room while the panel decides whether you’ve passed.
The defense is extremely nerve-wracking – you’re defending several years’ worth of work to a panel that has the power to say “no, not good enough, go back and try again”. But I was exceptionally nervous about my defense. At an earlier step in my doctoral program, the progress of my dissertation was suddenly derailed because (more…)
Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud
This week, Barry Biffle, the CEO of Frontier Airlines in the US, gave a speech at a private event in which he said “we got lazy in COVID” and called post-COVID working from home “silliness”. Biffle is certainly not the only CEO to speak out against employees working from home, but his characterizing workers as “lazy” drew a considerable amount of criticism.
It’s an interesting time in a lot of workplaces. Full-time working from home was an emergency response to an emergency situation (although we should remember that between 60% and 70% of jobs cannot be done remotely), and as such, the pandemic experience of fully remote work shouldn’t be considered an example of how remote work can be optimally structured and operated. However, even in that emergency situation, some at-home workers discovered that they liked features of remote work such as (more…)
Count It Up
With the cost of living on the rise in many parts of the world, I’ve been thinking a lot about the unseen advantages – sometimes called social capital or cultural capital – that give some people or groups the ability to weather economic challenges better than others. These advantages aren’t necessarily explicit or visible advantages such as education or employment, although individuals with more social or cultural capital will likely have better access to those kinds of advantages. Social and cultural capital are more the implicit knowledge and skills that someone acquires from living in a specific part of society – and they may not even know that they benefit from having that capital.
Rather than me explaining this in more detail, instead I want to share a song that captures this idea perfectly in its lyrics, and challenges you to think about the advantages that you have that you may not even realize. Please have a listen to Field Music’s ‘Count It Up’.
Vocational Awe
Earlier this week, US Education Secretary Miguel Cardona Tweeted a photo of himself visiting an elementary school classroom, with the caption “Teaching isn’t a job you hold. It’s an extension of your life’s purpose”. Numerous responses to the Tweet pointed out that teaching is indeed a job, and that characterizing it as “your life’s purpose” is questionable.
One of the more liked responses to the Tweet said: “No. It’s a job. When we view it as some sort of holier than thou calling, it makes it easier for those in power to justify paying us crap salaries because “we signed up for it” or expecting martyrdom because “That’s the life of a teacher” or “it’s for the kids””.
Some of the other responders to Cardona’s Tweet mentioned a concept called “vocational awe”. This is a term that was new to me. I looked it up, and I was extremely impressed. “Vocational awe” is relevant to many occupations, and I honestly can’t believe that I never encountered it in several decades of teaching and research about work and workplaces. That says a lot about the limited and biased ways in which work and organizations are understood.
The term “vocational awe” originated in an essay by librarian Fobazi Ettarh. She defines it as:
the set of ideas, values, and assumptions librarians have about themselves and the profession that result in beliefs that libraries as institutions are inherently good and sacred, and therefore beyond critique….I would like to dismantle the idea that librarianship is a sacred calling; thus requiring absolute obedience to a prescribed set of rules and behaviors, regardless of any negative effect on librarians’ own lives.
Ettarh characterizes the negative effects of vocational awe on the worker this way: (more…)
Just Say No
In every workplace there are tasks that aren’t enjoyable to do, or that aren’t part of formal job descriptions but are important for building positive relationships and community. However, research has shown that these kinds of tasks – which some researchers have labeled “office housework” – tend to be done more often by women and by members of demographic minorities. It’s also been suggested that doing these tasks can have a negative impact on the careers of those who regularly take them on.
The new book The No Club: Putting A Stop To Women’s Dead-End Work, by Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingart, is a very thoughtful analysis of this phenomenon. Coincidentally, I came across the book when I was thinking about how “office housework” functions in academic workplaces. I recently left an academic job, but I still regularly get requests to (more…)
All About Work 