When a movement for social change is struggling, what’s the best strategic response? Is it to protect and nurture what’s been achieved? Or is it to attempt to become even bigger, and risk undermining the progress that’s already been made?
A few weeks ago, former union organizer Rich Yeselson wrote a provocative article titled Fortress Unionism. In the article, (more…)
During conference season, when you’re rushing from session to session, peer review is something you often hear about in snatches of conversation as you’re running by. “[Professor X] must have reviewed that paper, otherwise it would have been accepted”. Or “I knew getting in at [Journal Y] was a problem because they don’t like [Theory Z]”.
Peer review can have a really big effect on someone’s academic career, because (more…)
Earlier this week, I saw a online mention of an article by Thomas Frank in the June 2013 issue of Harper’s Magazine, with the mention indicating that the article took some pretty harsh potshots at the literature on creativity. After my own reading of some of the popular press books about the creative process – including Jonah Lehrer’s now-withdrawn Imagine, one of the biggest sellers on that topic – the idea of a critical look at this literature intrigued me, especially a critical look by someone whose main job isn’t writing about or researching business.
I managed to find a copy of that issue of Harper’s, and when I read Frank’s article, I wasn’t disappointed. (more…)
The Canadian media have been very busy in the last few days trying to keep up with the story about members of Canada’s Senate making suspicious expense claims. However, at the same time, another dispute involving governmental expenses has been largely overlooked – the one involving Daniel Caron, the head of Library and Archives Canada (LAC). This past week, he stepped down when it was discovered (more…)
New trends now start not from exhibitions or publications but from conferences. It was, after all, the 1966 conference at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, ‘The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man’, attended by [Jacques] Derrida and other Parisian savants, that first put the ideas of poststructuralism into circulation in America, where they were developed, institutionalized, and ultimately re-exported to Europe and the rest of the academic world.
(David Lodge, “Through The ‘No Entry’ Sign: Deconstruction and Architecture”)
The start of May is usually the start of my academic conference season, and as my previous post indicated, I recently spent a few days in the Boston area. I went there to attend MiT8, the “Media in Transition” conference that happens every two years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The conference is sponsored by MIT’s Communications Forum and the wonderful MIT Comparative Media Studies (CMS) program.
You might wonder how or why someone who works in a school of business administration ended up at a conference that has presentations on topics like slash fiction, snark websites, Farmville, sexting, and reality television. (more…)
Daniel Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us is being mentioned more and more as a good introduction to understanding workplace motivation. I’m not familiar with any of Pink’s other work, some of which has been fiercely criticized. But I was motivated (so to speak) to read this book because I teach about motivation in some of my classes, and some of my research deals with it as well. So I am always interested in what someone has to say about this particular topic.
Drive isn’t a textbook or an academic book. It’s a popular press book, and as such it’s clearly intended as a Malcolm Gladwell-style book – research experiments explained in an understandable way, and useful practical advice based on that research. The spare design of Drive’s cover even mimics the design of the covers of Gladwell’s books, and Pink’s writing follows Gladwell’s style of grandiose declarations and confident assertions. But, unlike Gladwell, Pink accurately describes the research he writes about, and I commend him for that. I also applaud him for explaining how motivation is both intrinsic and extrinsic (and pointing out that each kind has different effects), and for emphasizing that just throwing money at workers isn’t going to make them work harder. These are realities of motivation that often get ignored and which are always worth talking about.
Unfortunately, though, there’s more wrong with Drive than there is right. (more…)
My doctoral dissertation was about workers in semi-professional occupations, and how their identification with their profession’s values affected how they felt about their work. So I’m always fascinated by stories about professionals faced with difficult situations that challenge the values of their chosen occupation.
This article about Geir Lippestad, the Norwegian lawyer who defended mass murderer Anders Breivek, appeared in the Globe and Mail last month. A few weeks later, Doug Christie, a Canadian lawyer who also defended controversial clients, passed away. I’ve been thinking about the contrast between the two and their reasons for doing what they did – and I’m kind of sorry that the article on Lippestad did not get more attention, because to me he represents why professional work is so important. (more…)
A few weeks ago, I wrote about Jonah Lehrer’s book How We Decide being removed from sale because some of its contents were plagiarized. This occurred just after Lehrer had made his first public appearance in several months, giving a speech apologizing for his previous journalistic misdeeds, including self-plagiarism and fabricated quotes.
In his story on How We Decide being pulled off the market, journalist Michael Moynihan – who uncovered the fabricated quotes which led to Lehrer’s book Imagine also being removed from sale – reports that How We Decide‘s publishers also reviewed 2007’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist, the first of Lehrer’s three books. The review “did not uncover any problems and…[the book] ‘will remain in print’ “.
After examining some parts of Proust Was a Neuroscientist more closely, I think that the book does have “problems”. (more…)
(credit: own photo)
Today marks the first birthday of All About Work. In one year, it’s received over 10,000 hits, and working on it has been a lot of fun for me.
The five posts that received the most hits during the year are: (more…)
Around this time of the academic year, the enthusiasm of last September has been almost completely exhausted. Deadlines for big class projects are fast approaching, everyone is sniffling with a cold or has gigantic lack-of-sleep circles under their eyes (or both), crankiness is running rampant, and the end of the semester seems a looooong way away. So maybe that’s why my eye was caught this past week by two different discussions of academic bad behavior. (more…)
All About Work 