Whenever I go to a bookstore, I always take a look at the section with business books, and inevitably I walk away feeling discouraged or mad. I couldn’t really put my finger on why, until I read this article by political scientist Andrew Gelman and this response by his blogging colleague Henry Farrell. Gelman and Farrell have identified some of the things that really annoy me about popular-press business books, and I’m going to (more…)
writing
A Note from Your Host: On blogging
Announcement of an excellent new blog from David Yamada, over at Minding the Workplace. Bravo, David!
Hello dear readers, just a quick note sharing some thoughts and news of a new personal blog that I started:
Learning from the testimony of others
My last post, Why targets of workplace bullying need our help: A rallying cry from the heart, reprinted a comment left by a reader, recounting her attempts to recover from a horrific, sustained campaign of bullying and mobbing. Her eloquent words inspired a lot of thoughtful comments, and I’d invite you to read them.
This exchange reinforced for me the value of social networking and this particular form of online communication as a way of sharing experiences and ideas. I know that it was especially validating for others who have experienced this form of abuse.
A new personal blog: Musings of a Gen Joneser
For some time I’ve wanted to write more about “my” generation, that group born roughly between 1954 and 1965 and dubbed by…
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Randall Sullivan’s “Untouchable”: The Business of Music and the Art of Using Sources
Randall Sullivan’s Untouchable: The Strange Life and Tragic Death of Michael Jackson was released in November of last year. It’s an epic piece of work – 776 pages long, including nearly 175 pages of references – and it got some less-than-positive reviews, including the New York Times, which called it “dreary”, “bloated”, and “thoroughly dispensable”. I just finished reading it, and I think it deserves much more credit than that, because it’s a remarkable work on several levels. Sullivan has constructed an extremely complex narrative that is more than a biography – it’s also a very sobering look at how the music business operates. And it’s an excellent case study in how writers can manage challenging or difficult source material.
I get the sense that (more…)
Do Men Need Women To Call Them Out? Some Thoughts on Adam Grant’s Controversial Article
Last week, the New York Times published an article by Adam Grant that set off more than a few firestorms of debate. The article, titled Why Men Need Women, proposed that women have a “warming effect” on men, causing them to be more generous and compassionate. It cited a number of research studies suggesting that men behaved more selflessly when they had female relatives or co-workers, and concluded,
It’s often said that behind every great man stands a great woman. In light of the profound influence that women can have on men’s generosity, it might be more accurate to say that in front of every great man walks a great woman. If we’re wise, we’ll follow her lead.
The article received more than 300 responses on the New York Times website, and was the subject of a lot of harsh criticism on Twitter. From my reading, there seemed to be several major themes in the criticisms (more…)
Vancouver Sun Story Has Similarities to Other Online Sources
I wasn’t planning to have “Bash the Vancouver Sun Week” here at All About Work, but it seems like many questionable things are slipping through unnoticed at the beleagured daily Vancouver newspaper.
The July 19 edition of the Sun includes an announcement of a Sun-sponsored “architecture tour” to New Orleans. Accompanying this announcement (on page C9 of the print edition) is a sidebar story with the headline “A guide to the storied architecture of New Orleans“. No writer’s byline is attached to this guide. And no sources are credited for the information in it, either in the print or online versions.
If you Google “New Orleans architecture”, the second link that comes up (more…)
Good Content, Bad Design: Not What A Struggling Newspaper Needs
When I last wrote about recent events at my former place of employment, the Vancouver Sun newspaper, I commented on the leak of a doom-laden memo from newly appointed publisher Gordon Fisher, warning of financial crisis, threatening staff layoffs, and telling employees to be “part of the solution”. Since then, 62 Sun employees have taken a voluntary staff buyout and left the paper, while Postmedia (the Sun‘s corporate owner) reported a financial loss of $112 million in its most recent three months of operation.
On July 3, Fisher issued another memo, this time to the print subscribers of the Sun and the Province, the other Vancouver daily newspaper owned by Postmedia. In full-page ads published in both papers, Fisher announced that on August 1 print subscription rates would be “adjusted” – as in, increased – and promised “platform-specific content”. He wasn’t too clear on what exactly this would look like, or how this “content” would be produced with a significantly reduced workforce. But I’m really hoping that one part of last Saturday’s print version of the Sun is not representative of what the Sun’s print readers will get in the future – especially if they have to pay more for it. (more…)
Is Peer Review Truly Unbiased?
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…)
The Uncomfortable Truth: The Lack of Creativity in Discussions of Creativity
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…)
Adios, Amigo: More Problems at Library and Archives Canada
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…)
Hackers and Trackers and Slackers, Oh My!: Adventures at MIT’s “Media in Transition” Conference
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…)
All About Work 