Links: Women professors at UT-Austin, Management theory

1. Scott Jaschik in Inside Higher Ed: Recruiting Women As Full Professors:

   The University of Texas at Austin this week announced the results of faculty hiring for the coming academic year, showing notable gains for women. And in the College of Liberal Arts, the results show that -- in addition to making institutions welcoming for young female scholars -- a top research university can change the dynamic at the senior level, too. The college hired six women as full professors -- when the greatest number ever hired previously had been three and the norm in most years has been one or none.

2. Andrew O'Connell in the HBR Blog: Why Business Theories Are A Waste Of Time -- a review of Matthew Stewart's book The Management Myth: Why the "Experts" Keep Getting it Wrong:

   ... [H]ow about the Five Forces of Cooking? They are: Quality of ingredients, attractiveness of presentation, the threat of overcooking, the threat of undercooking, and rivalry among recipes. [...]

   Like a business framework, the fictitious forces of cooking might be highly useful to certain chefs -- students in particular, Stewart says with mock seriousness. Just as MBA candidates pore over Porter's Five Forces, student chefs might study the cooking framework to master whatever secrets they imagine to be hidden within. If there were such things as academic chefs, they would inevitably be moved to dispute certain aspects of the cooking-forces framework and propose their own amendments, as do so many business school professors in reaction to existing conceptual frameworks.

   But, of course, most chefs would "immediately sense that the whole endeavor is an atrocious waste of time. A framework, they will point out, has never fried an egg."

3. While on Matthew Stewart, his article in The Atlantic -- The Management Myth -- is a classic take-down of "management theory". I did link to it when it appeared in 2006, and it's worth another link now -- especially because the old one doesn't work!