media

Best Author Acknowledgement Ever

I just finished reading Guy Walters‘ excellent book Berlin Games: How the Nazis Stole the Olympic Dream. I’ve done research on some of the Canadian groups that organized  resistance to the 1936 Olympics, and so I appreciate Walters’ efforts in preserving some more of the very important history around this event. What happened in and around the 1936 Berlin Games has more influence than we’d like to think on the ceremonies and structures of the Olympics we see now.

The book is extremely well researched and engagingly written, and I very much enjoyed reading it. But what I want to share from the book is one of the best author acknowledgements I’ve ever seen. (more…)

Yahoo Canada Insults Elections: Not Smart, and Not Funny

Since I became old enough to vote (which was, er, um, quite a while ago), I’ve voted in every municipal, provincial, and federal election that I’ve been eligible to participate in. I’m a firm believer in the principle of  “if you don’t vote, you can’t complain” – and I know that people in my own country and around the world have fought for the right to vote, which makes voting even more important to me. So I was both sad and angry to see this screen pop up on Yahoo Canada’s website this week: (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…)

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…)

The Lehrer Case, Part III: Being Unethical To Be Successful

I’ve written a few posts already about the Jonah Lehrer story – the case of the writer whose self-plagiarism episode blew up into a case of outright fabrication.  This story fascinates me because of what it says about how modern media organizations operate, how writing careers work, and more broadly, about another theme that I’ve also touched on before – definitions of “success”. (more…)

Shock of the New: Kate Bush vs. Her Fans?

British singer Kate Bush has had a singular, if not unique, musical career. Her first album came out in 1978, and her most recent album was released last year to excellent reviews. Her career has spanned radical transformations in technology, in the record industry, and in how artists interact with the public. But, as a long-time fan, I’m curious whether the reaction to her participation in the London Olympics closing ceremony marks the point where she might finally have to change her business model.

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Update: Twitter at Conferences

In a previous post, I mentioned the initiative by the Academy of Management at the 2012 Academy of Management (AoM)  meeting to promote live Twittering during conference sessions. The listing for each session in the conference program included a hashtag for the session, assigned by the conference organizers, to encourage attendees to send Tweets about the session and the presentations.

The conference ended this past Tuesday (August 7), so I thought I’d look on Twitter to see whether or how the AoM hashtags were used. (more…)

This Week in Communication: The Organizational Control Edition

It’s been a busy week for organizations trying to control how people communicate, but an interesting one if you’re intrigued by issues of how social and electronic media are, or should be, used. (more…)