Following up on my earlier post about the new website MARC (Men Advocating Real Change), the MARC administrators were kind enough to ask me to participate in MARC’s “Ask A Woman” question-and-answer forum. The question I answered was about the impact of pregnancy or motherhood on a woman’s ability to succeed in an executive job. You can read my answer here.
Thanks to MARC for the invitation to join the discussion, and for paying attention to these important and timely issues.
A few weeks ago, Canadian scientists went to Parliament Hill to hold a protest rally that they dubbed “the Death of Evidence“. The speakers at the event outlined the effects of the federal government’s research funding cutbacks. They pointed out that research supported by government funding actually saves money, because it produces reliable evidence that helps government make sound decisions. They also emphasized the difficulty or impossibility of restarting their work if it ends.
My own research isn’t in the “hard” sciences, so the cutbacks protested at the Death of Evidence rally don’t directly harm my work. But my colleagues whose research will be affected are mad and very frustrated, because they know the value of the work they do.
And personally I’m angry about the disrespectful way that these researchers learned they were losing their funding. (more…)
In the last few weeks, science writer Jonah Lehrer has been under fire in media circles for “self-plagiarism”. A number of investigators have discovered close similarities or identical wording in the texts of articles and speeches he’s written or delivered. However, there’s another aspect of the Lehrer situation that I find more concerning than the allegations of “self-plagiarism” – and that’s the alleged errors in his reporting about scientific research. (more…)
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…)
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…)
June is the month for convocation (graduation) ceremonies at a lot of post-secondary institutions in Canada. And this year, I was delighted that one of the award winners at my university graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English with a minor in business, along with a business diploma. This made me happy because my own undergraduate degree from Simon Fraser University is a Bachelor of Business Administration with majors in business and English. Business programs should encourage their students to take more non-business courses, and it’s not just because of my own experience that I say that. (more…)
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…)
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…)
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…)
All About Work 