unc∞rdinated

I submitted my dissertation to external examiners last week. It sort of occurred to me several days later that this was probably a meaningful milestone. I have written something (hopefully) minimal edits from my second doctoral dissertation. Cool. AI as a concept is central to the dissertation, and one of the threads I set up in the literature chapter is the idea of instability in meaning of emerging technologies, which get stabilized at the social level. AI can be so many things because people imagine it to be many things. And so what is AI? Or perhaps more accurately, what do people imagine AI to be? I'd like to argue for systems characterized by learning , autonomy , and communicativeness . I'm reflecting on a vignette I captured from attending a meeting between the developers and people from the hospital. It didn't make it into the dissertation, but it stuck with me. One of the developers describes some cascading prioritization logic that was built into the OR scheduli...

Samer recently posted about our just-accepted Strategic Organization paper on LinkedIn. The usual likes, congrats, and promises to read followed. Some comments engaged with the content of the paper (he linked to the pre-print, as I have here) and discussion ensued. Got me thinking, here we have professionals who collaborate with each other, engaging in public discourse about problems in the world while using shared and similarly embedded core vocabularies (same words same meanings). Sounds very much like my operationalization of a research conversation . Interesting. Feels different, somehow, from old academic twitter. Maybe because we imbue LinkedIn with some institutional meanng, its where jobs are posted, its more "serious" than twitter was, its more like a conference than a public square.  Less hoi polloi more formal strutting. Interesting. More to the point of the subject line of this post, I’m referring to Joel Baum’s comment on Samer's post and the subsequent rep...

Watching the curve bend toward AI. I am seeing qualitative work drift toward computation across my field of managment research. Certainly a lot of it at the academy in Copenhagen this year. This is not a surprise. As organizational digital traces become increasingly abundant and in some ways essential to inquiry what kinds of questions become thinkable that were previously out of reach, and what kinds of questions become harder to keep going? Is there even a future where we can get away with not using AI? In this blog post I want to noodle on some thoughts on using AI while keeping the traditional qualitative research process at the center. If one thinks of  research with AI as a spectrum that starts on the one hand from “computationally entangled research” meaning a more-or-less traditional scholar using off-the-shelf tools to enagage with a corpus, to the more invovled prompt-based structuring of qual reserach (see Matt Grimes or Henri Schildt 's efforts), all the way to “inter...

 I've been noodling around with the idea of modeling knowledge processes at the level of the field for a few years now.  It didnt start this way; this is something I started a couple weeks before I started the PhD at McGill, as a way to start to make sense of the community I was joining- an exploration of the "A" management journals in the 21st century. As the core network data has grown to encompass all ( ALL you say? how dare you. ) of management research since its roots in the 1930s, it has become impossible to resist further examination.  Kuhn's notions of normal/revolutionary science never quite fit what I saw out "in the field" or in this data, and I was always looking for alternate analytic metaphors to describe our field of management or whatever you want to call the soup of social science and/or economics flavored sub-disciplines organized under the various B-schools of the world.  I dont want to bore everyone with the details (also maybe I want to...

I'm in the 5th year of my doctorate now, just finished my dissertation proposal last week. That's when you propose the shape of your final doctoral deliverable to your committee. For me, its also when I pivot in my fieldwork from mostly data collection and a little analysis to mostly analyses and a little data collection.  I now need to start thinking about what comes next.   Over this summer, I'm going to go "on the market" as it were, attending conferences, presenting my ongoing research papers, helping organize things, and generally be seen by people who make hiring decisions. I will probably apply to many universities, wherever the jobs are, in Canada, the US, Europe and India.  I am torn, in a sense, about where to focus my efforts. On the one hand: go broad, put together a good application packet, apply to many places in many countries. I think I may have a shot at a good school in the UK or Europe, perhaps even in the US if they're in the market for som...

 Its been a while since I've written here. Its been a summer of ethnographic fieldwork and much of my "writing energy" has been consumed in memo-ing.  However, I happened to find an old essay I wrote for my comprehensive exams around about a year ago, and wonder of wonders - I don't hate it. So here it is. First, the question in response to which this essay was written:  What reasoning strategies exist for advancing from empirical generalizations to theoretical arguments? When researchers advance from empirical generalizations to theoretical arguments, they are in effect making two moves: making inferences or advancing from empirical generalizations to theoretical claims, and constructing theoretical arguments or rhetorically persuading an audience that said theoretical claims are valid (Ketokivi & Mantere, 2010; 2021). These moves are not strictly sequential- arguments are not necessarily constructed before or after the inferences have been made, although in some...

I recently had to write a short bio of myself (an autobio?) because Samer convinced me to throw my name in for student rep for the Academy of Management (AoM)  Communication, Digital Technology, and Organizations (CTO) division. In writing that bio,  I got thinking about the labels that academics give themselves to establish their domain of expertise, and to signal the community to which they belong (which in turn signifies in some ways how they see the world and engage in studying it.  I study how organizations use technology, think about technology, talk about it. I used to work in the Communications, Media, and Technology (CMT) division of Accenture within the Applied Analytics practice. So I think I'm a good fit. But I have no real experience with the AoM's CTO. I also happen to have the odd distinction of having a previous PhD. In the original draft of my bio, I had mentioned my prior PhD in Ecology. Samer, knowing in some detail about the content of my prior PhD, ...

 I find it hard to write or talk about coffee online. For good coffee discourse, I can think of no better venue than James Hoffman's YouTube channel . My blog right here is more if you like incoherent rambling. The problem for me is that coffee is ultimately a matter of taste. Without the taste, the actual experience of a good coffee, text about coffee is, well, bland. And so I love to talk about coffee, over a coffee. During work hours, I will prepare a coffee for pretty much anyone who wants one (+ one for me), if they come by my office (545 Bronfman, McGill U). I prefer a ristretto but I do also offer regular espresso, pourover and moka. It's mostly my fellow grad students, though occasionally I get local and visiting faculty too. We don't have to talk about coffee (though I won't say no to that).  The joy of the coffee service, to me, is the pleasure of discovery. Every service is unique. I usually have 3-4 types of beans on offer at any given time, and I blend them...

The weight of the wisdom that had just been bestowed on them weighed heavily on their shoulders. The sacrifices made by the small group of students to be able to gather at this school radiated as uncomfortable heat from these burdens.  For nearly an hour the master has spoken about the movement-forms, their powers, the confluences of energies, the dangers. A small, gray figure, seated, in flowing robes.  The master returned from reverie, noticing the askance glances of the gathered groups.  "Hmm, now I will show you."  A flash of robes, and the master was standing at a short distance, subtly hiking up the flowing the robes so that the details of the footwork may be visible. First, the right foot rises slightly, and is then firmly planted into the ground, a movement both silent and thunderous. From here, the movement-forms begin. A flurry of movements. The master swiftly transitions from form to form, pausing for just a second on each, power and precision radiating fr...

 My current coffee daily home setup. Featured in this photo:  A Presso manual espresso machine, circa 2010. This model is made by ROK now, and it’s parts are backwards compatible with the Presso. I replaced the original plastic piston system with the ROK glass composite system in 2020. I’ve used this nearly everyday for one stretch of about 5 years during my last stint in grad school, and I have been using it nearly everyday since early 2020. I mostly use it by feel, I sort of know the amount of pressure I’m achieving based on the feedback I’m getting when pressing down and my knowledge of the grind and dry weight of the puck. I can for the most part consistently and deliberately pull anything from a single ristretto to a double normale on this.  An ROK coffee grinder, 2020. I added a piece of thick leather as dust cover. I like that this allows me to quickly switch between grinds and that I can control the dose that I put in the hopper. The long arm transfers a lot of fo...