Armen Alchian Econ 490 Fall 2019: Connecting the Dots

Throughout the semester thus far, we have written multiple blog posts about organizations and the different parts of them. While I admit I hadn't fully understood each individual topic as I was writing about them, the professor's comments have been very helpful to put me in the right direction. Many of my blog posts deal with my experience in the work force, as I found what I thought provided the most relevant examples. For example, in my first post (not including my alias), I discussed various flaws in occupations I've had in the past. One of these flaws was lack of effort put in by many employees at my campus job. Many people go to different areas of the gym where management can't see them. In this way, the employees may be attempting to act opportunistically, giving them an easier shift while harming the business as they are receiving no extra compensation for doing a good job. Perhaps 'Illinibucks' could be spent on students that do better work, and they can then spend these around campus to jump the queue in various places/situations. In my 'teams' post, I talked about positive communication as the most important aspect of a successful team. Perhaps if there was a way to communicate better at this job, such as increased radio usage, the employees would have some sort of incentive to be where they are supposed to be and therefore contribute more to the team.

All of these topics that we wrote about explain organizations. It is easier for me know to understand the various moving parts in an organization in order for it to be successful, including the staff members, management, and the choices made by both. At first, I thought more about organizations as a whole, as opposed to the many different parts that go into them. Also, I thought that when discussing organizations, companies and businesses were the only real examples, however, I spoke of other things in my posts, such as a basketball team when talking about a flawed team that I had. I didn't think that I would be reading a chapter in our textbook about what each sports team consists of and the game they play.

My writing process has certainly evolved over the course of the semester so far. I spend more time considering the topic and writing the prompt. I think the reason for this is the comments made by the professor. These help me to further consider the topic I wrote about and to understand it beyond the surface level. Although I spend more time than I did at the beginning, it is definitely true that I do not fully touch on the prompts with as much detail as I could. The comments cause me to think of the prompts and subject matters in more detail, without giving me the sense that I was completely off. It seems that the comments are written to genuinely help us comprehend the subjects as opposed to expressing how wrong we may or may not be.

I don't have many issues with the prompts. I like how they offer multiple questions to consider when writing the post so that there is plenty to write about and touch on. I do think that there should be a reminder that we can write about something other than the prompt. However, I haven't seen any other students do this yet. What else would we write about? I understand that some of the prompts allow us to talk about something, such as an example of a well-functioning theme, or the opposite, a team that doesn't operate at its best. What else would we write about if we didn't talk about teams altogether?