Uptown

I have been very silent this semester, at least on this blog. Attribute this partly to the headaches of creating and managing my first service-learning course, doing quite a bit of traveling, and starting some new projects, accompanied by hopping from one sublet to another while renovating our new apartment. Another reason was one I regaled myself with: a colleague and friend in the English Department at CCNY, the writer Salar Abdoh, was gracious enough to let me audit his Creative Writing course, and so I found myself engaged in quite a bit of very pleasant, and indeed creative, writing over the course of the semester. I had forgotten how much discipline and work it takes to successfully complete a course...but it was a fantastic experience all around, and I highly recommend it.

What else is new...I've just made it back from Paris, where I presented a paper with Emmanuelle Vaast at ICIS 2008, entitled "Bringing Change in Government Organizations: Evolution Towards Post-Bureaucracy with Web-Based IT Projects". The conference proceedings are now online, and you can find our paper here. We used an evolutionary perspective to explain how government organizations move toward a post-bureaucratic form of organization. Below is the abstract:

This paper examines the following question: How do government organizations become more "post-bureaucratic" with web-based IT projects? It draws on evolutionary thinking to conceptualize processes of change in government organizations as involving sequences
of variation, selection, and retention as well as to identify various sources of change: internal ones (e.g. administrators), as well as external ones (e.g. technological innovations and institutional pressures). The paper relates findings from four in-depth qualitative case studies of web-based IT projects in different government organizations. The interpretation of these findings helps expand the evolutionary conceptualization by suggesting how different sources of change interact in the change process and variously
affect different stages of the evolution.

I recently accepted the challenge to raise funds to fight breast cancer as part of the 2008 Komen NYC Race for the Cure® on Sunday, September 14, 2008. One in eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in her lifetime and the more we raise, the more the Greater New York City Affiliate of Susan G. Komen for the Cure can give to fund vital breast cancer education, screening and treatment programs in our own community and support national peer-reviewed research programs to find the cures.

Please join me in the fight by pledging in support of my participation in the Race or contributing generously to Komen Greater NYC. Your tax-deductible contribution will fund innovative outreach and awareness programs for medically underserved communities in greater New York City, in addition to national breast cancer research. You can make a donation online by simply clicking on the link at the bottom of this message. If you would prefer, you can also send your contribution to the address listed below.

Komen Greater NYC Race for the Cure
P.O. Box 9223, GPO
New York, NY 10087-9223

Whatever you can give will help! I truly appreciate your support and will keep you posted on my progress.

Thank you so much for your time and support in the fight against breast cancer! Every step counts!

Click here to visit my personal page:
http://www.komennyc.org/site/TR/Race/race2008-wide?px=1597643&pg=personal&fr_id=1150&et=4YOJa_poq0wLzTEdWfhKyQ..&s_tafId=30142

Click here to view the team page for Record Busters:
http://www.komennyc.org/site/TR/Race/race2008-wide?team_id=23650&pg=team&fr_id=1150&et=WVDA66Ok33IE1BaW8al7wA..&s_tafId=30142

In case you missed this, here it is:

"Study: Not Being An Asshole Boss May Boost Employee Morale

July 30, 2008 | Issue 44•31

WAUKEGAN, IL—In what is being called a breakthrough discovery in worker-administrator relations, a study released Monday in the Journal Of Occupational Science found that not being a total asshole supervisor may be linked to improved worker spirit. "In nearly every trial, we found staff morale runs considerably higher when bosses don't read workers' e-mail over their shoulders, complain about their superior salaries, or act in any way like giant, self- centered assholes," said Erica Gorochow, one of the study's researchers. "Similarly, we found that typical dick manager phrases like 'I don't disagree' can weaken worker disposition by as much as 63 percent." Although the study's findings have already sent shock waves through the business community, Gorochow warned that some of the results may have been compromised, as the bitch lead researcher was breathing down her neck the whole time."

(Crossposted at Complexity and Social Networks Blog)

Ines Mergel, David Lazer and I have a paper out in the International Journal of Learning and Change on voluntary engagement in knowledge sharing. Based on data from our study of forensic scientists in government crime labs, we investigated why individuals make the time and effort to answer questions directed at them. In a multi-level framework we identify several influencing factors at the individual, relational, group, and informational level. Here's the abstract:

Knowledge is essential for the functioning of every social system, especially for professionals in knowledge-intensive organisations. Since individuals do not possess all the work-related knowledge that they require, they turn to others in search for that knowledge. While prior research has mainly focused on antecedents and consequences of knowledge sharing and understanding why people do not share knowledge, less is known why people provide knowledge, and what conditions trigger voluntary engagement in knowledge sharing. Our article addresses this gap by proposing a multi-level framework for voluntary engagement in knowledge sharing: individual, relational, group, and informational. We provide illustrations from a particular knowledge-intensive community, DNA forensic scientists who work at public laboratories.

A pdf version is available from the Inderscience website.

(Crossposted at Complexity and Social Networks Blog)

This hardly comes as a surprise: Corporations are increasingly tapping into the social capital of networks such as Facebook and MySpace, as reported in this NY Times article by Laurie J. Flynn today. From a theoretical standpoint, it makes a lot of sense: The ties in these online social networks reflect several layers of homophily (friendship, common interests, membership in various groups, partially self-selected affiliation, etc.) in addition to what usually applies to even the best organizational communities of practice. Several companies are now integrating business intelligence applications with the social Web and the Internet. Such "interrelated pools of information" bring value to business, says Flynn, mainly by fostering communication among employees, but also by better identifying job candidates and target customers. Let's just hope that Facebook will react to this development and allow the creation of different profiles for the various personae we represent on the Internet.

The article appeared in a special section of the New York Times today called "Tech Innovation". The section is filled to the brim with exciting and innovative ideas - one of these coming from the ever resourceful Bernardo Huberman of HP Labs. Together with his team he developed the prediction markets tool "Brain" (Behaviorally Robust Aggregation of Information in Networks), which can be employed to predict the demand of a new service, such as Internet television. I loved Huberman's quote a propos his brainchild: "We want to reduce the wisdom of crowds to the wisdom of 12 or 13 people." Hopefully the right ones.