First Half of Semester Recap

The concepts we have blogged about so far are organizations, opportunism, teams, and transfer prices. These concepts we have addressed in our posts connect to one another greatly. Organization and teams are very similar. They both consist of groups of people that have a common goal or mission. Teams commonly exist in organizations at different levels. Teams however, lack a manager, which is a key player in an organization. Teams can have leaders, but I would argue there is a difference between the two. Managers are found in a professional setting and usually are appointed by higher ups in the company. Leaders of a team usually run for or apply for their position. In relation to organizations and teams, opportunism can be found frequently throughout the groups. Opportunist team members can negatively or positively affect the other members of the group, but if their opportunism positively impacts the organization or team then it could be a benefit. Although, good citizens are thought to be not opportunistic. Then organizations and teams would not want employees and team members that are opportunistic. In addition, transfer prices could benefit members of organizations and teams. For example, if employees had a method of jumping to the front of the line for requesting days off or choosing assignments that they would desire. Although, transfer prices could be viewed as opportunism if not everyone has the same access to the opportunity.

If I were to rewrite previous posts, I would choose to edit my alias and transfer price posts. I have a better understand about what our blog posts are supposed to be and feel more confident writing them now. Because of this, I know I could write a stronger first post about my alias. In addition, I have a stronger grasp on transfer prices after our class discussion. It could be improved greatly and is one of my weaker posts.

My process for writing the blog posts have changed from the beginning of the semester. For the first post, I procrastinated writing about my alias and creating the blog. I believe this resulted from my nerves about blogging. I have never blogged before and I do not think of myself as a strong writer. In contrast, I was excited to write the second post because I felt confident about the prompt. As soon as I read it, I knew what I wanted to write about and had a strong understanding of the organization that I wanted to apply to gift exchange. I originally thought of my ideas in my post when I read the class blog post on gift exchange. It was exciting to me that I could connect my internship experience to the theory. That post sparked my interest and investment in the blog. From there, I started reading the prompts earlier in the week and working on the posts over a few days instead of all at once. I now look forward to writing my blog post each week and enjoy the feedback in the comments.


I think it would be interesting to be given an article to read and then we give an analysis of the article. This would give us an opportunity to read more sources of information from a variety of economist. I’m not sure if this is too closely related to our final project. Another idea would be to have us write a post about our future endeavors. It would be interesting to know what my classmates plan to do with their Economics majors. This would be more for curiosity and less of an academic focused post. This might be a lighthearted blog post for the end of the semester. There is so much an individual can do with an econ major and I would be interested in seeing what direction my peers plan to go towards. This post could also be tied to why we all chose economics as a major and what factored into our decisions.

Comments

  1. Professor ArvanOctober 11, 2017 at 3:15 PM

    In years past, well before I had students engage in blogging, I would set up an area where students could use the space to talk about what they wanted, whether it was social life or anything else. I have not otherwise received a request to talk about what people will do with the Econ major, but if a few more of those come in, then we could surely have such a space. Whether it should be for a prompt is a somewhat different matter. To me, that requires tying the post into course subject matter. It might be more interesting to you if people wrote about the major without the need to connect it to our course. Of course, then, there is whether people would take the time to do that.

    You said a few things about teams that I thought somewhat inaccurate. As the baseball playoffs are happening right now - Cubs versus Nationals - note that both teams do have managers. Indeed, the Nationals Manager used to manage the Cubs. So professional sports teams. definitely do have managers. Now let me give a case where there is no manager. In a few instances I have team taught a course. There were two teachers (I was one of them) and we shared giving the lectures and writing the exams. We worked that through together without any boss. If you go back to Bolman and Deal and look at the teams with a hierarchical structure, the person at the top of the structure is the manager. An all channels team, in contrast, has no manager. It can go either way.

    I would not worry about the Alias post. It will not count in my eventually grading the first half blog posts. It was there just to make sure you could get started. However, I would hope that you can start to make stronger connections between the other posts than you made above. For example, where you discussed opportunism and teams (a good connection to make) you only seemed to consider interaction within the group and didn't consider interaction external to the group at all. Might good team members be opportunistic, for example, with respect to a rival team, or possibly with respect to a vendor they have done business with but who didn't provide good service in the past? In other words, in the external interactions, does the team really want only good citizenship, or not? And then, does it matter whether those interactions are with clients or with other companies that they do business with?

    Thinking about those sort of questions would make your posts better.

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  2. Robert Giffen Econ 490 fall 2017October 16, 2017 at 8:25 AM

    Not sure if I totally understand/agree with what you discussed about managers and teams. However, it is interesting how you tied in opportunism in a team setting and how people who take advantage or opportunism are not viewed as "good citizens." I never thought of it this way.

    I too have a lot of nerves about writing in this format. However, I have also begun to write out posts ahead of time which has been more helpful. This has made me slightly more enthusiastic to write the posts. I did forget this time to hit the publish button on my latest post which was really upsetting and an honest mistake. So I should be more careful in the future.

    I do agree I think it would be super interesting to write and hear about what students plan to do with their Econ major. Personally, I am pre-med so that is pretty different that most people in our major. I do think we should write about this though because it would be cool to read other posts and I think this is something a lot of people would be excited to write about.

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