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.
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…)
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…)
All About Work 