Anthropologists at Work: Challenging Business “Common Sense”

Flipping ORs: does this common practice make business sense?

Book Review: What Matters? Putting Common Sense to Work

In What Matters? John Flach and Fred Voorhorst offer an approach to understanding everyday cognition that stands in contrast to the standard approach that has generated interest in logical puzzles, bias, and formal approaches to rationality. More on that question mark in the title later, but the words presage a concern with what matters to us as cognitive agents as we engage purposefully with o...

Common Sense

I like your columns, but they’re really all just common sense,” a client told me. He didn’t have a software background, and my columns were his first introduction to systematic ways of understanding software projects. To my chagrin, the net effect of a well-written column appeared to be that he thought software engineering was trivial! The idea that good software engineering “is all just common...

Social Interaction at Work: Common Stock Investments∗

Stock market investment decisions of individual investors are positively correlated with stock market investment decisions of their co-workers. This holds even after accounting for plant, zip code, and stock fixed effects. Sorting of unobservably similar individuals to the same workplaces is unlikely to explain our results, as evidenced by the investment behavior of individuals that move betwee...

Challenging Conventional Wisdom & Gender Work