Miranda Lewis

50: Celebrating 50 Episodes! What Have We Learned?

November 27, 2018 Miranda Lewis

Talking about organizations has reached 50 episodes!

 

Pedro and the mythical signed poster!
Ralph and Miranda in BIrmingham, UK around the time of Episode 15
Brian Pentland performing live on Episode 21
Dmitrijs and Pedro working hard at the TAOP Symposium

 

To mark this occasion, we gathered all seven of us hosts to discuss what we like (and perhaps not) about the podcast and podcasting, what our favorite or most remembered episodes were, and what we have learned along the way. 

Turns out, one of the key things we learned was how much such a small number of dedicated scholars and practitioners can do with a lot of motivation and energy. As we discuss, there were many in the beginning who scoffed at the idea of podcasting on classic and emerging organization theories and concepts of management science. But with over 12,000 active listeners worldwide, Talking About Organizations has proven to be useful and entertaining all at once.

We hope you enjoy this brief retrospective. Also, click on the below graphic to view all the places where we have podcasted from in our many travels — sometimes having to find unique and interesting places to record to avoid noise and other problems!

Did you know THAT…

  • the podcast grew out of intellectually fertile soil of the Innovation, Knowledge and Organisational Networks Research Centre at the Warwick Business School. Thank you Jacky Swan, Davide Nicolini, Dawn Coton and many others for your early support and feedback!
  • while TAOP is no longer the sole academic podcast of its kind in management and organization studies, it is by far the largest one? Enjoyed by over 12000 regular listeners, Talking About Organizations is a reminder to all of us of the value of conversations to intellectual development and of the interest that our community has in foundational texts.
  • by the 50th episode we have had the pleasure of welcoming 25 guests on the show 27 times? And this is excluding guests and keynote speakers for our special events!
  • Speaking of special events, December 2017 marked the very first time we independently hosted an event – the Symposium on the Continuities and Disruptions of Management in the Gig Economy, featuring a whole bunch of wonderful people! Also big thanks to Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and University of Sussex for providing the resources that made it possible!
  • Katharina Dittrich (E4 and E21) and Mats Alvesson (E28 and E32) are the only two guests to make more than a single appearance on the show? Katharina also holds the honor of being our very first guest!
  • the podcast has been referenced in two peer-reviewed journals? See du Gay and Vikkelso (2018) and Bridgman, Cummings and Ballard (2018) for examples of two articles showing exceptionally good taste in their choice of sources.
  • there is a myth that rare collectable artefacts from the early days of the podcast exist scattered throughout the land… these range from the five original coffee mugs to a unique signed poster from the time of E21. Rest assured – we don’t know where most of these are either.

42: Carnegie Mellon Series #5 – Organizational Learning

May 3, 2018 Miranda Lewis
We discuss Barbara Levitt and James G. March’s article “Organizational Learning,” published in the 1988 edition of the Annual Review of Sociology. Although the authors hailed from Stanford University in California, we have included this episode in our Carnegie-Mellon Series because of James March’s involvement and perspectives on organization that clearly influenced the article. This work was a literature review across various streams in organizational learning up through the 1980s. Topics include learning from experience, organizational memory, ecologies of learning, and organizational intelligence. Of particular interest is how organizational learning was defined as not an outcome but a process of translating the cumulative experiences of individuals and codifying them as routines within the organization. From this, the authors applied the brain metaphor – such as memory and intelligence – to explain the phenomenon.

39: Carnegie Mellon Series #4 – Organizational Choice

February 8, 2018 Miranda Lewis

The podcasters discuss a fascinating article, “A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice,” published in Administrative Science Quarterly back in 1972 by Michael Cohen, James March, and Johan Olsen. This is another episode from the Carnegie-Mellon University tradition, alongside Episode 4 on Organizational Routines and Episode 19 on Organizational Learning. This third installment addresses organizational decision making and choice and, like the others in this series, it changed the way people think about organizations and organizational behavior.

cohen_michael_5x7_1 bw

Michael Cohen

This episode is the fourth in our series on the Carnegie Mellon School. The first was way back in Episode 4, in which we discussed the works of James March, Herbert Simon, and Richard Cyert regarding organization routines. The second was Episode 19, with organizational learning as the topic as we explored James March’s work on exploration and exploitation, and the third was Episode 29, where we spoke to Denise Rousseau about Herb Simon’s problematization of business education. Now we move to another important work from this School regarding organizational choice, which contributes to our present understanding of decision making in organizations.

Scholars at the time viewed decision making from a very rational perspective—a problem arises, the organization mobilizes, a solution emerges, and everyone moves on. This flew in the face of the author’s experiences, showing that matching solutions to problems was considerably messier in practice. Instead, the decision making processes appeared to be anarchic. At the time this idea of organized anarchy was quite radical. Although present organizational scholarship has grown to accept anarchy as part of the workplace… addressing organized anarchy as a serious research theme was potentially radical back in the early 1970s, especially in light of the previous work of these very authors!

The purpose of the article is to lay the foundational for a behavioral theory of organized anarchy. Using what they refer to as the garbage can model, organizations are described as “a collection of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer, and decision makers looking for work” (p. 2). ‘Garbage can’ represented a useful, if unsettling, metaphor as it described organizational behavior where problems, choices, and decisions were merely tossed about into and recycled. At the center of the article is a model, presented as an iterative mathematical program, that demonstrates these behaviors in practice. Although clearly not an empirical study, the exploratory model did an excellent job of displaying some surprising behaviors as the podcasters discuss. They also showed a practical use of the model to demonstrate how various types of colleges and universities might exercise different paradigms, resulting in radically different organizational behaviors.

Join us as we discuss the garbage can model and its implications for our contemporary understanding of organizations and their management! Also available is a sidecast by Tom inspired by this episode.

 

You may also download the audio files here:  Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Appendix (Text version here)

Read with us:

Cohen, M.D., March, J.G. and Olsen, J.P. (1972). A garbage can model of organizational choice. Administrative science quarterly 17(1), 1-25.

To know more:

Lomi, A. and Harrison, J.R. (2012). The Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice: Looking Forward at Forty. Research in the Sociology of Organizations 36, 3-17.

 

 

38: Socialization and Occupational Communities – Van Maanen

February 4, 2018 Miranda Lewis

John Van Maanen

In this episode, we examine John Van Maanen’s classic ethnographic study of police recruits from an urban police department in the U.S. “Police socialization: A longitudinal examination of job attitudes in an urban police department,” published in Administrative Science Quarterly in 1975, presents Van Maanen’s study on the socialization process of new police officers from their training and indoctrination at the police academy to their early months on the beat. What he found was intriguing. Some recruits joined the force “highly motivated and committed,” but over time their attitudes changed and commitment dropped sharply and swiftly. On the job, supervisors preferred the lesser motivated patrol officers over their more committed counterparts. Officers showing initiative were seen as creating more work and inducing higher risk to others. Over a short period of time, police officers learned to “lay low, don’t make waves” through the department’s systems of rewards and punishments and a climate that encourages teamwork over individuality. The result was a major step forward in understanding socialization processes in organizations.

The study is notable for Van Maanen’s role as participant-observer. He underwent police training at the academy while interviewing other recruits and spent time on patrol with new officers. This helped him understand the recruit’s perspective, however it required him to function in a covert role. While his activities were well-understood and permitted by leaders and supervisors in the police department, they weren’t necessary understood by all officers whom he observed. Nor were they necessarily understood by the civilians whom he encountered. While Van Maanen did not find himself facing difficult or ethically challenging situations during the study, questions have since arisen about the value of using covert techniques in research. Hence, part of this episode is devoted to discussing the ethical questions and controversy on using covert methods to access populations for study that might ordinarily not provide informed consent.

Join us as we explore this terrific ethnography and understand the process of socialization from an insider’s perspective!

You may also download the audio files here:  Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 

Read with us:

Van Maanen, J. (1975). Police Socialization: A Longitudinal Examination of Job Attitudes in an Urban Police Department.  Administrative Science Quarterly Vol. 20, No. 3 (1975): 207-228.

Referenced in the Episode:

Roulet, T., Gill, M., Stenger, S., & Gill, D. Reconsidering the value of covert research: The role of ambiguous consent in participant observation. Organizational Research Methods Vol. 20, no. 3 (2017): 487-517.

34: Sociotechnical Systems – Trist and Bamforth

October 4, 2017 Miranda Lewis
We discuss important article by Eric Trist and Ken Bamforth, “Some Social and Psychological Consequences of the Longwall Method of Coal-Getting,” published in the journal Human Relations in 1951. Eric Trist was a British social scientist best known for his contributions to the field of organization development and one of the founders of the Tavistock Institute. Ken Bamforth was a miner and industrial fellow of the Tavistock Institute. The article’s subtitle is an examination of the psychological situation and defences of a work group in relation to the social structure and technological content of the work system, and explores how a technological change in the coal-mining industry tore apart the social structure of the workers who were supposed to have benefitted from the change. The technological change in question was the mechanization of the process of mining and extracting coal along a very long face, as opposed to the previous ‘hand-got’ methods where small teams would dig out coal from smaller faces.

33: Foreman – Master and Victim of Doubletalk

September 13, 2017 Miranda Lewis

To open Season 4, this episode covered Fritz J. Roethlisberger’s classic 1945 article from Harvard Business Review (HBR), “The FOREMAN: Master and Victim of Double Talk.” The article resulted from a study concerning the dissatisfaction of foremen in mass production industries at the time. Foremen suffered under low pay and poor wartime working conditions. Meanwhile, management addressed the foremen’s concerns through short-sighted “symptom-by-symptom” corrective actions to little effect. As a result, foremen were leaning toward unionization, while management found itself unable to keep pace with the social implications of rapidly advancing technologies on the supervisory structure.

Fritz Roethlisberger

Roethlisberger’s essential question was this: “Can management afford not to take responsibility for its own social creations – one of which is the situation foremen find themselves?” The foreman had to lead workers toward fulfilling production requirements under increasingly complex conditions, requiring greater knowledge and skill than foremen past and yet under intensifying restrictions to their autonomy and decision making, along with a wider network of supervisors and administrative staff that the foreman must report to.

The result were conditions where the foremen became insecure due to micromanagement and being held liable for problems or issues beyond their control. The foreman could not avoid these interactions, and thus was forced to “become a master of double talk,” advising superiors of the situation at the front in ways that avoided or mitigated criticism from them. Thus, the foreman also became a victim of double talk, of a ballooning culture that saw employees as little more than cogs in the machine and foremen as barely more, yet the foremen still had to “deliver the goods.” Roethlisberger’s account of the foremen’s conditions and the roles they play in the firm are compelling and troublesome indeed, and led him to recommend an entirely new form of administrative structure with administrators being far more connected to the workers and serving as enablers to the foremen.

 “The FOREMAN: Master and Victim of Double Talk” continues to be popular in reprints and HBR considers it a classic of the journal. It also represents a recurring challenge for firms facing disruptive technologies or their rapid evolution – how do administrators keep pace with the social changes that result, so that direct supervisors remain enabled and empowered?

Join us as we talk about the article and its implications for present-day managers and firms!
Note: Scroll down further to see a Figure from the text that we referenced often.

You may also download the audio files here:  Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 

Read with us:

Roethlisberger, Fritz J. “The foreman: Master and victim of double talk.” Harvard Business Review 23.3 (1945): 283-298.

To know more:

Storberg-Walker, J., & Bierema, L. (2006). “Another look at a historical foundation of HRD: F.R. Roethlisberger’s foreman.” Paper presented at the AERC, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Figure 1. Forces Impinging Upon the Foreman (from the original text)

 

 

24: Learning by Knowledge-Intensive Firms

February 21, 2017 Miranda Lewis
We discuss another of the classics from the Journal of Management Studies, a paper from 1992 by William Starbuck, entitled “Learning by knowledge-intensive firms”. This time, we are very happy to be joined by the author of the work, Professor William Starbuck, one of the leading experts in Organization Theory, whose research covers an incredible number of areas of expertise, as shown in his biography. This paper is the first to discuss knowledge intensive firms, concept based on the economists’ notions of capital and labour intensive firms, and which are defined as those firms where “knowledge has more importance than other inputs” (p.715).

22: Human-Machine Reconfigurations – Lucy Suchman

January 17, 2017 Miranda Lewis
We discuss Lucy Suchman’s book “Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Action” that studied the interaction of humans with a state-of-art photocopier designed to be more user friendly and more helpful in solving user problems. Yet videos showed that people found it complicated and difficult. Suchman shows that these interaction problems are greatly due to the underpinning assumptions about users’ behavior, more specifically, due to the idea that humans’ actions are based on the following of plans, which she refutes.

19: Carnegie Mellon Series #2 – Exploration and Exploitation of Knowledge

November 8, 2016 Miranda Lewis

James March

In this episode, we read the widely cited article, “Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning,” published in 1991 in the journal Organization Science. In the paper, March considered the relationships between exploration of new ways of doing things and the exploitation of accepted, standard practices for organizational learning.

James G. March is Professor Emeritus at Stanford University in management, sociology, political science, and education at Stanford University. He has been on the faculty since 1970. He is known for his contributions to organization and management theory. Together with his “Carnegie School” colleagues Richard Cyert and Herbert A. Simon, March developed a theory of the firm that incorporated aspects of sociology, psychology, and economics as an alternative to neoclassical theories. The focus of the research was on organizational behavior and the application of decision analysis, management science, and psychology in addition to theories such as bounded rationality to the understanding of organizations.

March created two basic models of organizational learning in order to consider the challenges managers face while allotting resources between exploration and exploitation: distribution of costs and benefits across time and space, and the effects of ecological interaction among members of the organization. The first model examines the case of mutual learning between members of an organization and an organizational code (also known as organizational memory) within a particular organization. The second case examined learning and competitive advantage in competition among firms for primacy. As noted in the abstract, “the paper develops an argument that adaptive processes, by refining exploitation more rapidly than exploration, are likely to become effective in the short run but self-destructive in the long run.”

March attempted to show that learning in organizations is still possible even in the presence of causal ambiguity. While the paper has been criticized for its very simplistic model of organizational learning and lack of empirical data, a strong point of the paper may be the general insight in provides about collective learning under ambiguous conditions.

What are the tradeoffs and challenges associated with balancing exploitation and exploration? What does it mean for organizational learning? Read the paper and listen to your intrepid podcasters, as we grapple with March’s ideas.

You may also download the audio files here:  Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Read with us:

March, J. (1991). Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning, Organization Science, 2(1), pp. 71-87

To Learn More:

Levitt, B. and J. G. March. (1988). Organizational learning. Annual Review of Sociology, 14: 319-340

Gupta, A.K., Smith, K.G. and Shalley, C.E., (2006). The interplay between exploration and exploitation. Academy of Management Journal, 49(4), 693-706.

15: Doing Interesting Research with Jorgen Sandberg LIVE

August 9, 2016 Miranda Lewis

With Special Guest Dr. Jorgen Sandberg

This episode suitable for everyone, but should be especially useful for PhD and early-career researchers!

Jorgen Sandberg

What is it about research that makes it interesting? Or, rather, at which point does a study become interesting (or not)? The more common answer to these questions would most certainly place emphasis on the results and outcomes of a study – i.e. the research is interesting if the findings are interesting. In their 2013 book – Constructing Research Questions: Doing interesting research – Mats Alvesson (Lund University, Sweden) and Jorgen Sandberg (University of Queensland, Australia) propose that the focal point of what contributes to something being interesting is found way before any results or implications. The focal point of what makes a research interesting has to do with the assumptions that go into the design of that research. 

This book is just as relevant for new researchers and research students as it is for more seasoned academics (albeit for different reasons). First and foremost it highlights the need to be creative and self-aware when formulating research questions. Alvesson and Sandberg, however, go beyond mere critique and also specific ways of how to overcome some of the issues that make research less interesting.

In the book, Alvesson and Sandberg develop a problematization methodology for identifying and challenging the assumptions underlying existing theories and for generating research questions that can lead to more interesting and influential theories, using examples from across the social sciences. They highlight that established methods of generating research questions tend to focus on ‘gap-spotting’. While they emphasize that there is nothing inherently wrong with this method, the overuse of it does mean that existing literature remains largely unchallenged. Alvesson and Sandberg show the dangers of conventional approaches, providing detailed ideas for how one can work through such problems and formulate novel research questions that challenge existing theories and produce more imaginative empirical studies. Joining us for this disc is Professor Jorgen Sandberg, one of the authors of the book! We sat down with Jorgen to talk about his work and get some clarifications about what is it that makes research interesting (and for whom), how is this relevant to new and experienced academics and what is the purpose of writing a book such as this. 

All researchers want to produce interesting and influential theories. A key step in all theory development is formulating innovative research questions that will result in interesting and significant research!

You may also download the audio files here:  E15

Read with us:

Alvesson, M. and Sandberg, J. (2013). Constructing research questions : doing interesting research. London: Sage Publications, 2013.

Alvesson M. and Sandberg J. (2011). Generating Research Questions through Problematization. Academy of Management Review, 36(2), 247-271.

To Learn More:

Okimoto, T. (2014). Toward More Interesting Research Questions: Problematizing Theory in Social Justice. Social Justice Research, 27: 395-411.

Alvesson, M. and Sandberg, J. (2014). Has management studies lost its way? Ideas for more imaginative and innovative research. Journal of Management Studies, 50: 128-152.

Alvesson, M. and Sandberg, J. (2014). Habitat and habitus: Boxed-in versus box-breaking research. Organization Studies, 21: 967-987.

Book Review: Constructing Research Questions: Doing Interesting Research by Mats Alvesson & Jorgen Sandberg by Joanna Lenihan

Book Review by Professor Jean M. Bartunek, Department of Management and Organization, Boston College.