I've been on sabbatical this academic year. One of the side effects of that is I've actually been writing . Thus I should share two "new" papers. The first is a draft that I posted in November and then forgot to mention: Culture as Entropy Reduction: Finding the 'Organizational' in Organizational Culture . Apologies for the lame name. This is my ongoing effort to develop an empirical approach for…
Every so often I get email from people who are working with union-represenation data from the National Labor Relations Board. (No surprise here: I host files and code for the CHIPS and CATS databases .) Upon getting one recent such message, I decided to broaden the conversation, and copied everyone who had written me asking about such data in recent years. I think it has been useful for people to…
I am six weeks into the first academic term in four years where I am not teaching any courses. How good that feels! This frees up time to push projects through the pipeline. With that in mind, a project several years in the making with Victor Bennett , Rem Koning , and my graduate student Masoomeh Kalantari finally has a 1.0 draft. " Demographically Biased Technological Change: Investments in…
Nearly four years ago I posted an update about the (un)availability of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's data. I promised that I would update when I have more information. I finally do. I post here the announcement that went out from Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, from the Sociology department at the University of Amherst, who has long been the point of contact between the EEOC and academic…
I can't be the only academic who spent the pandemic doing extra administrative work, trying to keep the lights on. A depressing number of my current projects were started around 2019 and are only now reaching fruition. After the paper that Rem Koning , Sampsa Samila and I published in Science came out in the summer of 2021, I entered the longest dry spell of my career: nineteen goddamn months…
In the summer of 2021, my research assistant Hasnain Shaikh and I made great progress cleaning up the Unfair Labor Practice data that I have mentioned elsewhere. I have written before about the challenges with making sense of geography in these records , because the National Labor Relations Board switched versions of their coding schemes without documenting that. (Also they had a lot of typos on…
This was originally written on 14 April 2021. This post has many parents. I want to update where I am on the project that started this blog: studying the diffusion of unfair labor practices in union settings. I also recently solved a problem that took far longer than it should have. I want to document what I did, to remind myself and maybe to help others. And I want to get back to blogging after a…
This was originally written on 7 July 2020. Insisting that studies should not have errors or weaknesses handicaps scientific progress in organizational research. Let me explain. Within this field, it seems bad form to point out the errors or limitations in prior studies. This is especially so when it comes to problems with the operationalization of the theory or weaknesses in the study design. You…
This was originally written on 13 May 2020. I get asked this question enough that it seemed worth putting the answer in one place. I work with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's EEO-1 establishment-survey data, which surveys large private employers about the racial and sexual composition of their workforces. Historically, researchers gained access to these data via the Intergovernmental…
This was originally written on 29 April 2020. What I did this spring I'm new enough at blogging that I need to give an explanation if I drop of for a few months. In January, I became the academic director of McGill's MBA Program. That's been busy enough, but of course seven weeks ago everything went sideways with COVID-19. I serve on the executive of the faculty's emergency operations committee,…
This was originally written on 19 January 2020. Segregation research has what is called the "Checkerboard problem." Back in 1983, Michael White pointed out that most segregation measures look at how evenly distributed groups are between sub-units in a larger unit, like neighborhoods in a city, but ignore the spatial arrangement of groups within and between those units. The problem's name comes…
This was originally written on 20 December 2019. As mentioned in the last post (which, dear God, was more than two months ago!), I've been underwater for most of a term. Which is a thing that happens to professors sometimes, and I needn't apologize for letting blogging slip. Not least because today, less than 48 hours after I posted the grades for my last classes, I finished the first complete…
This was originally written on 8 October 2019. I've not updated this blog in more than two months. Have I lost interest? Not at all; life got in the way. Since the middle of August, I have done some stuff: Attended the Academy of Management, my field's annual conference, in Boston Wrote and submitted my promotion packet at McGill Prepped a new (to me) class, the core MBA course on Organizational…
This was originally written on 17 July 2019. I'm trying to calculate a spatially-weighted segregation statistic, one for which there's no canned routine. After fiddling with it in Python, I could output numbers rather than error messages. But were they good numbers? I paused to ensure that I could correctly implement the aspatial version of the statistic. I knew what its values should be, from a…
This was originally written on 18 June 2019. ...No, not that Big O. Behave yourselves. One of my goals with this blog (insofar as a blog has goals) is to write about the work behind social-science research, to discuss the process as much as the product of this thing I do. It is useful to see the process, especially if you are newer to the field; but utility aside there is so much that goes into a…
Basically, dealing with terror.
Learning from what seem like mistakes.
If you care about the results either way, the moral quandary disappears.
In which I eventually find myself face to face with a punched-card typewriter.
Linear algebra for fun and profit.