Pedro Monteiro

112: Hierarchies & Promotion – The “Peter Principle”

April 9, 2024 Pedro Monteiro 0:04:04
The diligent administrative assistant moves up to supervisor but fails. The assembly line worker is promoted to foreman but cannot do the job. A teacher earns a deputy principal position in a school but falls flat on their face. Why is that? Why does this seem to happen across organizations? In The Peter Principle, Lawrence J. Peter and Raymond Hull not only provides answers to these questions, they delve into all the possible implications. The Principle goes like this, “In a hierarchy, everyone rises to their level of incompetence.” How they derived this principle the subject of our conversation that explores one of the funniest but more insightful book on the perils of organizational life ever written.Read More

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111: Visible & Invisible Work – Susan Leigh Star

March 12, 2024 Pedro Monteiro 0:03:05
In this episode, we focus on the emerging discourse from the 1990s on how automated systems would potentially change the very meaning of work. The discussion is on a seminal work of Susan Leigh Star and co-author Anselm Strauss, “Layers of Silence, Arenas of Voice: The Ecology of Visible and Invisible Work,” published in CSCW’s flagship journal, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, in 1999. The article focuses on the challenges and risks of automating work processes without due consideration of all the invisible work done in an organization that systems designers might overlook.Read More

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110: Organizations and Law – Lauren Edelman

February 13, 2024 Pedro Monteiro 0:04:11
In this episode, we explore two articles from Lauren Edelman, “Legal Ambiguity and Symbolic Structures: Organizational Mediation of Civil Rights Law” from 1992 and “The Endogeneity of Legal Regulation: Grievance Procedures as Rational Myth” from 1999. These studies showed a wide variety of organizational responses to the enactment of civil rights legislation, but that certain responses were legitimated due to their success in symbolically showing effort in addressing discrimination and thus institutionalized across other organizations.Read More

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109: Emergence of Mental Health Professions – Abbott

January 23, 2024 Pedro Monteiro 0:03:12
In this episode, we return to Andrew Abbott’s The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor from 1989 to study in depth one of his case studies that may illuminate the present-day mental health crises gripping many nations from the COVID-19 pandemic. “The Construction of the Personal Problems Jurisdiction” chronicles how social changes from the Industrial Revolution led to the maladjustment and isolation felt by many newly industrialized workers who could no longer reach back to the stable social structure from whence they came. As a result, several professions emerged and competed for jurisdiction over the diagnosis and treatment of personal problems.Read More

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107: Institutionalized Rules and Formal Structures — Meyer & Rowan

November 14, 2023 Pedro Monteiro 0:03:57
We discuss John Meyer and Brian Rowan’s famous 1977 article “Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony.” In it, they argued that “institutionalized products, services, techniques, policies, and programs function as powerful myths, and many organizations adopt them ceremonially” (p. 340), even if they result in organizations becoming less efficient or effective in their intended missions or purposes. In fact, these myths can become so powerful as to stigmatize organizations that reject them. Read More

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106: The Study of Organizations Across Disciplines

October 10, 2023 Pedro Monteiro
We sit down with Woody Powell and Bob Gibbons who, since 2016, have been organizing the summer institute on organizational effectiveness at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) in Stanford, California. We ask them to reflect on the history of CASBS and the summer institute, the value of fostering interdisciplinary conversations on the study of organizations, and the way in which they design and conduct the summer institute to allow young scholars across economics, sociology, management, public policy, political science, information and communication studies, and other fields, to learn from one another.Read More

104: Social Structure & Organizations — Stinchcombe

August 8, 2023 Pedro Monteiro 0:04:26
In a famous chapter in James G. March’s 1965 book, Handbook of Organizations, Arthur L. Stinchcombe laid out a case for expanding the study of organizations outward to include social structure bringing attention to innovation as well as imprinting and inertia. He posited that societies had significant effects on how organizations emerge and operate and that organizations, in turn, impact relations among groups in society. He presented his arguments in three parts. First, that social structures had an imprinting effect on the formation of new organizations, such that these initial forms often persisted despite efforts to change them. Thus, to the second point, each type of organization reflected the history of its creation both in terms of the organization and social structures that dominated at the time. Finally, organizations also reflect the social divisions in society, such as between higher and lower classes. Read More

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100: Special Episode — The State of Organization Studies

April 18, 2023 Pedro Monteiro 1:07:27
For our 100th episode, we look outward toward the various fields of study that have fed into our podcast – organization studies, organization theory, management science, and others – and ask how strong or healthy those fields are. The disciple has, after all, gotten very big with thousands of scholars around the world doing important field work, research, and consultancy projects. But it has also become more fragmented and is experiencing the stresses and strains of a mature profession. So in this one-part reflection, we think about what we have learned so far in 100 episodes stretching over 7-1/2 years and where we might like to see the field go in the coming years.Read More

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99: Gendering in Organizations — Joan Acker

March 14, 2023 Pedro Monteiro 0:04:14
Joan Acker’s 1990 article “Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations” was a significant work in feminist theories of organizations. She charged that prior feminist research had wrongly assumed that organizational structures were gender neutral. Instead, everything about organizations from structures to symbols are inherently gendered, and until that was acknowledged and studied, organizations would continue to reinforce long-standing gender inequalities. The article is significant for its synthesis of a growing body of research that questioned the claims of gender neutrality in organizational practices that creates and sustains barriers to women’s equality in the workplace.Read More

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98: Managing Innovation — Burns & Stalker

February 14, 2023 Pedro Monteiro 0:04:01
Why do firms seemingly have difficulties converting new ideas into goods or services? The answer is in the classic book The Management of Innovation from Tom Burns and G. M. Stalker that explored the difficulties that firms, industries, and even nations had in innovating due to the disruptions that it brings to power structures and social fabric in organizations. They also explored key misunderstandings about innovation (such as that the false narrative that bureaucratic structures inherently cannot innovate) and the source of of conflicts across different departments and work groups trying to innovate. Read More

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