#AcademicRunPlaylist - 10/25/24

It was definitely a bit chillier today, but I was still able to go out for a decent run while listening to books for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was "Becoming Human" by Michael Tomasello. As humans, we like to think that we're radically different than other animals. When it comes to our closest living relatives, however, it is often quite challenging to articulate our precise differences. Tomasello dives into the vast pool of fascinating experimental academic research in this area, taking us through stages of human and ape cognitive, social, and cultural development through childhood to illuminate uniquely human traits and their importance is our rise to global dominance.

Tomasello deftly marries readability with academic rigor, which I've found to be extremely rare. It doesn't hurt that the experiments themselves are ingenious and often accompanied by hilarious quotes from small children. If you're at all interested in child development, evolution, or cognition, this is a must read. Highly recommend https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674248281

Last was "Data Driven" by Karen Levy. When it comes to the promise and perils of workplace surveillance and automation, long distance trucking is the canary in the coal mine. Uniquely positioned as a highly regulated, supposedly easily quantifiable workplace, the mandated rollout of electronic logging devices in trucks has significantly transformed the industry. Through rigorous ethnographic analysis Levy pulls open the curtain on this critical but oft-overlooked industry, exposing the issues with technological solutionism and the problems with focusing workplace measurement and improvements on the easy to measure rather than more systemic issues.

For folks in the people analytics field especially this is required reading, as long distance trucking almost certainly makes these more systemic problems easier to detect than in most other workplaces. While I would've liked a bit more economic analysis here, overall I highly recommend this book https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691175300/data-driven?srsltid=AfmBOopbDQ6aYwjz_97vZS94nCloRi8SJUiCFMFCOAmUQIdVgIO6Klk1