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.

As I meander deeper and deeper into the (not so secret) secrets of academia, I notice an astounding number of quite seasoned female associate professors. I mean, folks who by their institutional age should have been promoted to full many years ago. And their publication records don’t look much different from their male colleagues. I only have anecdotal evidence, but there must be some stats out there to prove this phenomenon. Why is that? Because women are still picking up the slack at home? Because we are notoriously bad negotiators/self promoters?