Pedro Monteiro

65: Organizational Structure — The Aston School

June 9, 2020 Pedro Monteiro
The Aston Group was based in the United Kingdom and played a major role in the early development of organization theory and management science. Starting in the 1960s, they carried out a program of research that departed from the comparative study of work organizations in the Birmingham area in the UK and contributed landmark works on organizational structure and the development of contingency approach.Read More

64: Disasters and Crisis Management – Powley and Weick

May 12, 2020 Pedro Monteiro
Crises and disasters are regular occurrences in organizational life, putting leaders into the spotlight and organizations under tremendous pressure to respond appropriately -- whether it is to preserve life or salvage reputations. With the COVID-19 pandemic ongoing, we wanted to discuss some important texts on organizational crises and their management, and in this episode we present two -- from Karl Weick studying the Tenerife air disaster and Edward Powley on activating organizational resilience.Read More

62: Consumerism & Meaning at Work — WALL-E

March 17, 2020 Pedro Monteiro
This is another episode where we look at organizations through the medium of film. WALL-E, a 2008 animated film from Pixar, is the story of a robot who at one time was part of a massive clean-up effort on Earth while all the humans left to live on cruise ships in space. In this episode, we talk about the setting and the story for clues about organizational behavior and management. Read More

61: Power & Influence in Organizations — Dan Brass

February 11, 2020 Pedro Monteiro
What is power and influence? Although power appears as a multilevel concept, the early organizational literature tended to view it as wielded by people--measured as skills, traits, or competencies. This would change in the 1980s, in large part to a classic empirical study providing evidence that one's position within an organizational structure was more likely to translate into one's source of power. Dan Brass' article, "Being in the Right Place: A Structural Analysis of Individual Influence in an Organization" from Administrative Science Quarterly is the subject of this episode.Read More

58: Contingency Approach – AOM 2019 Workshop LIVE

November 20, 2019 Pedro Monteiro
This professional development workshop focuses on the contingency approach as exemplary of classic scholarship in organization and management theory. We focus on the historical context of the contingency approach, the main ideas of authors and traditions associated with it, and their connections with contemporary research.Read More

56: Cooperative Advantage – Charles Clinton Spaulding

July 16, 2019 Pedro Monteiro
In this episode, we acknowledge the extraordinary contributions of Charles Clinton Spaulding, an important management thought leader who, like many African-Americans prior to the U.S. civil rights movement, has been sadly overlooked in the management canon. In 1927, with the U.S. in recession, Spaulding wrote a reflection of his experiences as a business leader in the Pittsburgh Courier, a widely-read newspaper, hoping to help fellow African-American business leaders overcome the economic downturn.Read More

53: Taylorism in Motion — Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times

March 14, 2019 Pedro Monteiro
We discuss Charlie Chaplin's 1936 film "Modern Times" balances great physical comedy with powerful social commentary. Chaplin portrayed a hapless Worker on an assembly line who is tormented both by supervisors and the work itself. After being subjected to a humiliating experiment intended to improve the line's efficiency, the Worker runs through a series of rotating jobs, stints in jail, and other misadventures as he tries to find his purpose in life.Read More

52: Management in Practice – Rosemary Stewart

February 5, 2019 Pedro Monteiro
What do managers do in practice? How do they spend their time (or put another way, how does their time spend them)? Are there differences in the demands of managers in different positions, or withiin different organizations? These were the questions that famed management theorist Rosemary Stewart set out to uncover in her research back in the 1960s, resulting in the first edition of this episode's subject--her book Managers and Their Jobs: A Study of the Similarities and Differences in the Ways Managers Spend Their Time.Read More

50: Celebrating 50 Episodes! What Have We Learned?

November 27, 2018 Pedro Monteiro
This is our first "milestone" release, celebrating our 50th episode and providing an opportunity for us to gather all the cast members to reflect on what the podcast has meant to us and how much we have accomplished.Read More

49: Engineered Culture and Normative Control – Gideon Kunda

October 30, 2018 Pedro Monteiro
Originally published in 1992, Gideon Kunda's ethnographic study of a high-tech corporation altered the discourse on organizational culture. "Tech," the firm being studied, was a firm on the rise and saw itself as a leader and ground breaker in the rapidly growing high-tech industries of the 1980s. But as the firm grew, it began indoctrinating its tried-and-true hard-work formula in aggressive and unhelpful ways.Read More

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