The Georgia Straight, a local weekly alternative paper, recently ran an opinion piece by Michael Mann about bands that use crowdsourcing to raise money to subsidize tours or records. The title might give you a clue as to its perspective: “Boo hoo, broke bands, quit asking for charity“. The story generated 425 comments, most of them extremely negative – not too surprising when the article contained statements like this: (more…)
organizations
Business School Research That Might Surprise You: Part 2
In this second installment, I’m going to talk about two research papers that were presented at the recent Administrative Sciences Association of Canada conference. Conference papers are often the first time that a researcher presents a particular piece of work in public, so a lot of ideas in conference papers are in an early formative stage – but it’s exciting to hear these ideas and to see how they might develop further. I like these two papers because they both investigate relevant and timely workplace issues, but do so from unconventional perspectives. (more…)
Business School Research that Might Surprise You: Part 1
I’ve been teaching in university business programs and doing research for more than 20 years, and obviously I enjoy my work or I wouldn’t still be doing it. But I’m always annoyed by misconceptions about the kind of research that goes on in business schools.
A lot of people think business school research is only trying to find better ways for managers to exploit their employees, and/or to reinforce the hierarchical capitalist system. There’s also a common misconception – one that’s often mindlessly spouted by academics in other disciplines – that researchers in business schools just have to ask and their corporate masters will hand over tons of money to support their work. I know I’m not the only person who wishes this were true so they didn’t have to spend so much time writing grant applications. In reality, business school researchers struggle just as much as researchers in any other discipline to get funding for their work.
In this post and its sequel, I’m going to highlight some research from business schools that goes against these misconceptions, either in the choice of research subjects or in the research questions that were investigated – and which, as far as I know, wasn’t funded by any corporation. (more…)
Professional Licensing and the Labour Market: Not That Tightly Braided
I’m usually a fan of the New York Times Magazine column “It’s The Economy”, some previous installments of which I’ve written about before. I like this column because it uses real life examples to demonstrate that economic and organizational theories don’t just live in some isolated ivory tower, but are actually very useful in explaining why things in the real world work the way they do. That being said, however, this week’s column on licensing of professional work is really disappointing and superficial. (more…)
About Time: Men Speak Out for Workplace Equality
Catalyst, a research organization that has been around for more than 50 years and whose work focuses on “expanding opportunities for women and business”, has recently launched MARC, or Men Advocating Real Change – an online community encouraging men to support equality in the workplace. MARC has eight male bloggers, a discussion forum, and literature and resources for men “committed to making real change”.
It says something about how “workplace equality” gets interpreted that most media covering this initiative, as far as I can tell, did so in the context of women’s workplace issues. (more…)
Award
I’m delighted to announce that Organizational Legitimacy and Identities in Canadian Post-Secondary Education: Investigating Students’ Perceptions, a research paper I co-authored with Dr. Kai Lamertz (Concordia University) and Dr. Alex Kondra (Athabasca University), has been named Best Paper in the Organization Theory division of the 2012 Administrative Sciences Association of Canada (ASAC) Conference. (more…)
Organizational Citizenship and the BC Teachers’ Dispute
The BC Labour Relations Board case about whether teachers withdrawing their volunteer work constitutes strike action got me thinking about organizational citizenship – a concept that doesn’t get much attention outside academic research, but which explains a lot about the impact of behaviour on workplaces. (more…)
Is Twitter Killing Discussion at Conferences?: Notes from the Field
In my work world right around now, the regular academic year winds up and the rush toward convocation begins. And it’s also the start of conference season. The hard work of getting to conferences started long ago – early January is usually the deadline for submitting papers to summertime conferences. But now it’s time to agonize over your Powerpoints, jump on the plane, and stand up in front of your peers and talk about your research. (more…)
Help Save the Kitsilano Coast Guard Base
My father is a tugboat captain, as was my grandfather, and I grew up with a great deal of respect for maritime safety. I also understood how important it is for help to arrive quickly if you get into trouble on the water. So I was astounded, to put it mildly, when Canada’s federal government announced the closing of the Kitsilano coast guard station in Vancouver in September. (more…)
Is It Work if You Don’t Get Paid for It?
The British Columbia Labour Relations Board is struggling this week to answer a deceptively simple question: what is work?
That question is part of the ongoing bargaining dispute between the BC Teachers’ Federation (BCTF) and BC’s provincial government (represented in this situation by the BC Public School Employers Association (BCPSEA)). (more…)
All About Work 