One of my favourite writers on practice–John Postill–made an interesting reflection on practitioners and academics. He notes that: The conventional divide between ‘theorists’ (e.g. media scholars) and ‘practitioners’ (e.g. journalists who teach at academic institutions) that we find in higher education parlance is unhelpful. Both scholars and non-scholars are practitioners, albeit of different kinds. That is, …
In an interesting post by Peter Norvig says talks about how long it takes to develop expertise. I’ve somewhat quoted him here; with a few tweaks to the contemporary references. Researchers (Bloom & Sosniak, 1985; Bryan & Harter, 1899; Hayes, 1981; Simmon & Chase,1973) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in …
The Chronicle of Higher Education led me to an interesting article on learning styles by Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer, and Bjork (2009). The summary of the article outlines the idea of learning styles: The term ”learning styles” refers to the concept that individuals differ in regard to what mode of instruction or study is most effective for …
“It is exactly in those organizations in which control through the narrowing, trivialization, and decomposition of full participation is most common–in schools and workplaces–that learning is most often an institutional motive and yet, by the argument here, most likely to fail” (Lave, 1991, p. 78). p=. References Lave, J. (1991). Situating learning in communities of practice. In …
In a recent article Varoufakis (2008, p.1259–1260) says: bq.. To give an example, consider the following simple N-person game known as the Race-to-Zero. N players are asked to write on a piece of paper (in isolation from one another) a real number between 0 and 100 (inclusive). The player whose chosen number is nearest the …
Today, I saw “Professor Yehuda Baruch”:http://www.uea.ac.uk/nbs/people/People/Academic/Yehuda+Baruch from the University of East Anglia at Norwich run a workshop called _Opening the black box of academic reviewing and editing _. The session was jointly hosted by the “department of Management and International Business”:http://www.business.auckland.ac.nz/comwebContent/sitemanager/index.cfm?fs=pgv&pageid=23121 and the “department of Psychology”:http://www.psych.auckland.ac.nz/. It was a most informative session, so much so …
I was tracking down some information on methodology (in particular the work of “J-C Spender”:http://www.jcspender.com/ when I came across his web site. It put me on to a good Org. Theory site, called (unsurprisingly) “OrgTheory”:http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/ Anyway, going back to John-Christopher, one of his best works is: bq. Spender, J.-C. (1989). _Industry recipes: An enquiry into …
I’ve mentioned “elsewhere”:http://www.petersmith.org/blog/archives/2004/06/what-is-agency.html Emirbayer & Minche’s great article on agency. In that article they refer to projects of action, and in particular an piece by Alfred Schutz, namely: bq. Schutz, A. (1962). Choosing among projects of action. In M. A. Natanson (Ed.), _Collected papers: Volume 1, The problem of social reality_ (pp. 67–98). The Hague: …
I was at a seminar to day with Anne Huff when she mentioned an old article by Murray Davis. We’ll I’m always a sucker for a good reference, so I dutifully went and had a look at “Google”:http://www.google.com/search?q=davis+%22that%27s+interesting%22. The “first”:http://www.sfu.ca/~palys/interest.htm reference it through up (which has a bit of summary of the article) provided enough …
A romp through: bq. Greenwood, R., & Hinings, C. R. (1993). Understanding strategic change: The contribution of archetypes. _Academy of Management Journal_, 36(5), 1052–1081. The abstract says: bq. We examined the concept of archetype, implicit in a number of contemporary approaches to the study of organizational design and change. Despite an emerging interest in archetypes, …
In his classic article, Arch W. Shaw explores _Some problems in market distribution_ (Shaw, 1912). He describes how production is only one half of industry; having produced the product it needs to be distributed. The choice of method to distribute the product needs careful consideration. Selling direct to customers, using one’s own salespeople, using wholesalers, …
I was talking with “Nigel Haworth”:http://staff.business.auckland.ac.nz/nhaworth today, and he pointed me towards an essay on improving our use of the English language by George Orwell. As far as I can tell, the piece is long out of copyright, so I have reproduced it here.