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The Future of Work Is Already Here—Will Bureaucratic Organizations Survive It?

Every crisis paves the way for change—call it progress, growth, or recession—but the question remains: how many steps back are taken for every step forward? Whether a financial crisis or a global health crisis, the fallout manifests in how people live and work differently, affecting organizations’ once-traditional priorities. What directions are organizations, their management, and their employees headed in today? Several recent Delve podcast episodes and articles investigate these questions to look deeper at: changing business ethics in a hybrid world, the role gender plays in word-of-mouth job recruitment, why overqualified job candidates are seen as a flight risk, and how new digital management structures are changing the nature of the firm.

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Micro-Investing for A Sustainable Future

Professor Ernan Haruvy found that micro-investors who cared about sustainability were more likely to accept financial losses. This goes against conventional knowledge about market participation. Returns are, after all, the whole point. If the goal is to grow your wealth, why are green micro-investors so willing to give it up?

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The Trust-Building Power of Task-Assignment Algorithms

How do you build trust between management and warehouse workers? Algorithmic task assignment could help. Professor Bing Bai measured workers’ reactions to receiving tasks from an algorithm-based work assignment process. Her findings show us how algorithms affect perceptions of fairness and worker productivity, and they open the door to an exciting area of algorithmic research in business logistics. Here’s how.

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How to (and not to) Regulate Crypto

Cryptocurrency can transcend borders. That’s part of its promise, and one reason it’s so challenging to regulate. But the notion that crypto is completely unregulated isn’t accurate either. “Despite the rhetoric, most jurisdictions do somehow regulate crypto assets, though it's not always clear how,” says Ananya Kumar, associate director at the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC. “There are some glaring gaps, but experimentation with regulation is happening in real-time, and it’s happening everywhere.” At the 2023 Cryptocurrency Conference at Desautels, Kumar led a session on the state of the regulatory landscape. The theme of this year’s event was ‘How to (and not to) regulate crypto’, and with the high-profile collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX still headline news, it spoke to the zeitgeist. Staged on September 29 and organized by Desautels professors Katrin Tinn and David Schumacher, the conference brought together participants from twenty-eight different organizations, including universities, regulatory public policy institutions, and the private sector.

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The Future of Work Is Already Here—Will Bureaucratic Organizations Survive It?

Every crisis paves the way for change—call it progress, growth, or recession—but the question remains: how many steps back are taken for every step forward? Whether a financial crisis or a global health crisis, the fallout manifests in how people live and work differently, affecting organizations’ once-traditional priorities. What directions are organizations, their management, and their employees headed in today? Several recent Delve podcast episodes and articles investigate these questions to look deeper at: changing business ethics in a hybrid world, the role gender plays in word-of-mouth job recruitment, why overqualified job candidates are seen as a flight risk, and how new digital management structures are changing the nature of the firm.

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What Digital Technologies Are Reshaping the Future of Business, Finance, and the Agri-Food Sector?

Advances in digital technology have changed the world as we know it—and show no sign of slowing down. As research investigates the longer-term risks, rewards, and systemic effects of technologies like Artificial Intelligence, development speeds on, altering the landscape of how we work, talk to each other, buy and sell, and even what we eat. How is new digital technology, like AI and cryptocurrency, driving change in certain sectors, from customer-service interactions to getting food from farm to table? Delve talks with researchers at Desautels who investigate the impact of new digital technologies on the world of work, multiple global industries, and financial markets.

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Where Is Entrepreneurship Headed Next?

Entrepreneurship—and entrepreneurs themselves—typically look to fill gaps in the market and meet previously unmet needs. But in the past few years, financial crises, supply chain interruptions, and social and environmental concerns have disrupted business as usual. How is entrepreneurship evolving to meet the changing needs of all stakeholders, from investors to community members? And what do sustainable strategies, informal economies, and deviant identities have to do with the changing face of entrepreneurship today? Desautels researchers discuss alternatives to scaling up, small-business practices in informal economies, and when to deviate from the rules.

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Cashing In or Losing Big on Cryptocurrency Yield Farms?

If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. Add cryptocurrency yield farms to that list. A complex investment strategy in decentralized finance markets, yield farming advertises eye-popping passively earned returns. While some investors boast impressive returns, for others the risks are unclear or even undisclosed before they invest, and the advertised returns never materialize. Research by Desautels Professor Patrick Augustin investigates the risks to investors chasing high yields in decentralized finance markets, finding that the risks in yield farming are not transparent, farms that advertise the highest yields systematically underperform, and that most investors don’t stake claims on the blockchain so don’t see their risks pay off.

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Reworking Bureaucracy: A Look Inside the Delve Spring 2023 Digital Magazine

Few of us like bureaucracy. Will the firm of the future—and the future of work—look less bureaucratic or embrace bureaucracy even more so? In the face of societal and generational change, will organizational hierarchies fall flat? The McGill Desautels Faculty of Management investigates such critical management and business questions in Delve’s Spring 2023 digital magazine: Reworking Bureaucracy.

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When Unconventional Power Shifts and Flat Firms Become More Than a Trend

In the face of societal and generational change, will organizational hierarchies fall flat—and could the end of hierarchies spell the future of work? Delve investigates such critical management and business questions in the cover story of Delve’s Spring 2023 digital magazine Reworking Bureaucracy. Changes to work life in the post-pandemic era are well known and intimately felt. Lately, the workplace zeitgeist has also shifted to questioning the purpose of workplace hierarchies, revealing implications for staff retention, employee loyalty, career trajectories, and company culture. The prospect of a post-hierarchical workplace is a double-edged sword.

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