Collections

99: Gendering in Organizations — Joan Acker

March 14, 2023 Tom Galvin 00:04:14
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.

97: Social Change and Organization – Invictus (2009 movie)

January 24, 2023 Maikel Waardenburg 00:04:15
The 2009 film Invictus tells the story of how the first post-Apartheid President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, used sports as a unifying force to overcome lingering and bitter racial divides in the nation. The movie and the real-life events that inspired it are powerful. We will look at it through an organizational lens and discuss insights related to leadership, team building, change and other management topics.

96: Informating at Work – Shoshana Zuboff

December 6, 2022 Catherine Jackson 00:04:58
We discuss Shoshana Zuboff’s "In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power" that examines several cases of organizations introducing information technologies in the workplace hoping to improve organizational performance, transparency, and collaboration but instead dehumanized the workplace and ushered in new ways of managerial surveillance. In Part 1, we discuss the major themes of the book, her telling of the histories of both blue- and white-collar work, and her incredible case studies.

94: Situated Learning – Lave & Wenger

October 11, 2022 Tom Galvin 00:05:14
This month, we discuss Jean Lave & Etienne Wenger’s Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, published in 1991. This short but powerful book presents a new way of thinking about adult learning as a social activity in which experienced members of a group or community of practice share their knowledge with new members to perpetuate the group identity. They present five case studies – one by Lave herself with four from other researchers – to help broaden the perspective of how situated learning works social involvement in which newer members are initiated through the exercise of low-risk or controlled tasks.

92: Organizational Secrecy — Case of the Manhattan Project

August 9, 2022 Rohin Borpujari 00:05:21
We are examining organizational secrecy using the Manhattan Project during World War II as a case study. The Manhattan Project came about following the discovery of nuclear fission in 1938 and the understanding that Nazi Germany was trying to develop a powerful weapon that could change the course of the war. Naturally, the American effort had to be kept secret to hide both the existence of the project and, failing that, any information about progress and potential employment. How did they do it and what challenges did they face? What could we learn about maintaining secrets in contemporary organizations?

91: Constructive Conflict – Mary Parker Follett

July 12, 2022 Tom Galvin 00:04:13
We return to the works of Mary Parker Follett and expand upon “The Law of the Situation” that we covered in Chapter 5. In this episode, we revisit Dynamic Administration with a look at the first five chapters as a whole – focusing on Chapter 1 (“Constuctive Conflict”), Chapter 3 (“Business as an Integrative Unity”), Chapter 4 (“Power”), and Chapter 5 (“How Must Business Management Develop in order to Possess the Essentials of a Profession”) that introduced Follett’s conception of professionalizing business.

88: Social Defenses Against Anxiety — Isabel Menzies

April 12, 2022 Samantha Ortiz 00:04:53
This month’s episode examines one of the classic studies from the Tavistock Institute, Isabel Menzies’ “A Case-Study in the Functioning of Social Systems as a Defence Against Anxiety.” This famous study of how a teaching hospital developed odd and somewhat dysfunctional methods for protecting its nurses from anxiety and stress by effectively isolating nurses from the patients to prevent emotional attachment. Nursing students witnessing these methods in practice found them in violation of their expectations regarding care and their professional calling, and were quitting. What were these methods and why did they come about?

74: Emergence of Middle Management — Alfred Chandler

March 9, 2021 Tom Galvin
Alfred Chandler’s award-winning book, "The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business" provides an excellent summary of the history of American commerce from the pre-industrial era to the mid-20th century, and how new technologies and a changing society led to the creation of the modern industrial enterprise. The "visible hand" refers to the transparency and prominence of this new class of manager who coordinated and controlled these growing enterprises,

71: Managerial Behavior — Melville Dalton

December 15, 2020 Greetje Corporaal
2020 ushered in a full year of major change and renewed a lot of conversations about how we work, live, and cooperate in organizations and societies. In that spirit, we discuss Melville Dalton's classic 1959 book "Men Who Manage: Fusions of Feeling and Theory in Administration." The study provided an intimate look at how men (as these were all men at the time) entered into the managerial culture of a firm, how the separations between managers are workers were structured and maintained, and how managers felt about their standing -- which ranged from secure to tenuous. In Part 1, we focus on the study itself, which is still very relevant not only for understanding what happens within the circle of managers but also how the boundaries can exclude others, particularly along gender lines.

66: Workplace Isolation – Forester

July 16, 2020 Ella Hafermalz
In this episode (which took place in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic), we explore the social and emotional impacts to the worker on having to work from home. For some workers, the concept of telework is hardly new. But many other vocations place great value on regular social contact with clients and customers. These include teachers, doctors, lawyers, public servants, and many others. The sudden thrust to teleworking for an unknown period of time has raised questions as to how these workers are coping with the new normal.