All Episodes

  • 111: Visible & Invisible Work – Susan Leigh Star

    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…


  • 110: Organizations and Law – Lauren Edelman

    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…


  • 109: Emergence of Mental Health Professions – Abbott

    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…


  • 111: Visible & Invisible Work – Susan Leigh Star
    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.
  • 110: Organizations and Law – Lauren Edelman
    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.
  • 109: Emergence of Mental Health Professions – Abbott
    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.
  • 108: Presentation of Self in Everyday Life – Goffman
    Erving Goffman’s 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life was an important attempt at explaining both apparent and hidden human behaviors across social and organizational settings. Through a comprehensive framework employing theater as a metaphor, he describes the roles of people as performers and members of an audience who try to shape the unfolding situation in ways suitable to their aims. Meanwhile, there is a backstage where people return to being themselves and proceed to set conditions for the next performance, and rules and protocols seek to protect such backstage behaviors from unwanted observation or disclosure. The aim for each person is to be seen in the best or most purposeful light.
  • 107: Institutionalized Rules and Formal Structures — Meyer & Rowan
    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.
  • 106: The Study of Organizations Across Disciplines
    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.
  • 105: Manifest & Latent Roles — Alvin Gouldner
    Alvin Gouldner wrote the article, “Cosmopolitans and locals: Toward an analysis of latent social roles” in 1957 to propose that through the 1950s latent roles had been seriously overlooked by scholars. Manifest roles, described as those roles and role identities that are directly related to one’s defined position in the organizational structure, had been the sole focus. Latent roles comprised the complementary roles that members made salient but were not officially recognized. Instead, managers might dismiss such roles as “irrelevant, inappropriate, or illegitimate” to recognize formally despite them being essential in the organization’s social fabric
  • 104: Social Structure & Organizations — Stinchcombe
    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.
  • 103: Bringing Work Back In — Barley & Kunda
    In their 2001 Organization Science article “Bringing Work Back In,” Steven Barley and Gideon Kunda lamented how the study of work, its organization, and its performance shifted after the 1950s. Work was the center of attention among the classic era of organization studies beginning with Frederic Taylor, but afterward, the focus shifted to post-bureaucratic concepts such as boundaryless organizations and networks. Barley and Kunda argues that these new ideas are not grounded in rigorous studies of how people perform work in such new organizations.
  • 102: Executive Leadership — Sloan’s “My Years at General Motors”
    Alfred Sloan was President, Chairman, and CEO of General Motors from 1923 to 1956. His memoir “My Years at General Motors” tells his story about how he took a corporation consisting of several disparate and competing companies and shaped them into division that manufactured cars tailored to different segments of society. He constantly pursued and integrated new technologies into the automobiles themselves while also shaping the buying experience through the introductions of different styles, improved relations with dealings, and financial services that rivaled banks.
  • 101: The Motivation to Work — Frederick Herzberg
    Frederick Herzberg’s “The Motivation to Work” presents the results of over 200 interviews with engineers and accountants working in the Pittsburgh area regarding what satisfied and dissatisfied them on the job. They would find that factors leading to satisfaction, such as achievement and performance, were very different than those leading to dissatisfaction, such as company policies or relationships with co-workers and managers. The result became known as Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory of Job Satisfaction, also known as the motivator-hygiene theory.
  • 100: Special Episode — The State of Organization Studies
    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.
  • 99: Gendering in Organizations — Joan Acker
    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.
  • 98: Managing Innovation — Burns & Stalker
    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.
  • 97: Social Change and Organization – Invictus (2009 movie)
    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
    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.
  • 95: Labor-Management Relations – Tom Lupton
    This month, we discuss examine Lupton’s famous study of worker-management relations, “On the Shop Floor: Two Studies of Workshop Organization and Output” published in 1963. Tom Lupton spent 12 months as a factor worker in two different settings examining why workers intentionally worked at a level below management expectations. He found that social structures formed that protected workers from overuse or abuse by management and ensured a stable pay. These structures discouraged workers from working too hard or not hard enough. In Part 1, we will examine the cases in depth and present Lupton’s findings.
  • 94: Situated Learning – Lave & Wenger
    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.
  • 93: Approaches to the Study of Work — Classics AoM PDW LIVE
    This year’s professional development workshop (PDW) on Classics of Organization and Management Theory explored key approaches to the study of work and was held at the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management in Seattle, Washington in the U.S. It represents the fourth edition of a standing series showcasing the enduring relevance of early organizational research. Steve Barley, Gina Dokko, Ingrid Erickson, and Davide Nicolini presented central insights on research traditions related to the study of work and related topics such as careers and technological change. They also addressed various ways that these insights can shed light on the changing nature of work.
  • 92: Organizational Secrecy — Case of the Manhattan Project
    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
    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.
  • 90: Organizations in Action – James Thompson
    We will examine James D. Thompson’s “Organizations in Action: Social Science Bases of Administrative Theory” from 1967 that established a new direction in organization studies. Beginning with a recapitulation of the theoretical work of the time, Thompson expanded the dominant rational model of organizing with the emerging ideas about human behaviour, complexity, and the relation between organizations and their environments. The result was a proposed theory of administration that remains relevant to this day.
  • 89: Administrative Behavior in Public Sector — Herbert Kaufman
    This month’s episode examines a classic study in public administration, Herbert Kaufman’s “The Forest Ranger: A Study in Administrative Behavior,” published in 1960. The U.S. Forest Service was a widely distributed organization with its many Rangers individually assigned to manage large tracts of public land. It would have been easy for the Forest Service to lose control and fragment, but it did not. Kaufman’s study showed how and why the various techniques used by the Forest Service kept the Rangers integrated under a common vision.
  • 88: Social Defenses Against Anxiety — Isabel Menzies
    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?
  • 87: The Art of War (and Management?) — Sun Tzu
    This month’s episode examines war and how principles derived from it are presently applied to other organizational and management contexts. Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is an ancient text that emerged from the Warring States period that lasted from the 5th through 3rd centuries B.C. and engulfed most of modern mainland China. It embraced the complexity of the environment of war, which therefore has allowed it to be adapted for navigating other forms of complexity such as business competition. We examine the text in its original context to illustrate the need to understand the purpose and utility of classic texts.
  • What’s Coming for the Podcast in 2022!
    As we enter our seventh year, we recognize the treasure trove of material that we have collected in our podcast episodes. And so, we are actively looking for ways to turn our program and website into a sort of digital library open for anyone interested in organization theory and management science. Take part in our survey to tell us what is important to you, and you could win a prize!
  • 86: Networks and Network Theory — Mark Granovetter
    Granovetter’s 1973 article, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” introduced whole new ways of thinking about seemingly simple and straightforward topics and changed the direction of social research. He showed how “weak” ties, occasional connections between individuals among different networks, were powerful means for providing opportunities and new ideas not otherwise available. He also charted a way for researchers to connect micro-level interactions with macro-level patterns. Given how social networking has changed so much between social media and the pandemic, we decided to give this article a fresh look.
  • 85: Carnegie-Mellon Series #6 — Organizations
    In this episode, we discuss the second edition of James March and Herbert Simon’s classic text ‘Organizations.’ In addition to the well-known concepts such as bounded rationality and satisficing, the book introduces an important critique of the mechanistic view that “classic” organization theory to that point approached organizations and its members. How do decisions get made? What causes individuals or join, stay in, or leave organizations? What about the causes and effects of conflict? We explore all this and more.
  • 84: Professionalizing Business — Louis Brandeis
    We discuss the life and works of Louis Brandeis who originated the term ‘scientific management’ that aimed at conserving effort and making work life more predictable, reducing worker stress and increasing satisfaction. He also advocated for a more altruistic and professionalized form of business leadership that served both the needs of customers or clients and those of the workers under their supervision. A collection of his lectures entitled Business – A Profession expounds on these ideas, and he includes a number of case studies and illustrations to show both the human and financial potential of his professed forms of management where profit would not be the only measure of a business’ success.
  • 83: Organizational Design — Jay Galbraith
    We discuss several works by Jay Galbraith on the theory and practice of organizational design, which is about creating organizations to provide better outcomes and serve the organization’s purpose and strategy. This episode begins with a focus on one of Jay Galbraith’s earlier publications, an article titled, “Organizational Design: An Information Processing View” for designing organizations to make better decisions in times of high uncertainty, and then brings in his more recent works promoting his five-point “Star Model,” a design tool for use by managers.
  • 82: Women of Organizational Scholarship — Classics AoM PDW LIVE
    Presents a professional development workshop we hosted at the 2021 Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management. It sheds light on the foundational texts of female scholars for the field of organization and management theory but whose work is often overlooked. Includes presentations by Emmanuelle Vaast on Jean Lave, Marta CalĂĄs on Edith Penrose, Martha Feldman on Susan Leigh Star, Maja Korica on Rosemary Stewart, Maria JosĂŠ Tonelli on Isabel Menzies Lyth, and Lisa Cohen on Rosabeth Moss Kanter.
  • 81: Diversity and Inclusion — EGOS 2021 Special LIVE
    The COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on societies and the workspace have demonstrated the importance of open conversations on matters of diversity and inclusion. The theme for the 37th Colloquium of the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS), hosted virtually in July 2021 by the Vrije Universiteit (VU) in Amsterdam, was “Organizing for an inclusive society: Meanings, motivations, and mechanisms.” In this special episode, we offer the keynote address of that colloquium by Mirjam van Praag, “The Value (Drivers) of Diversity: A Perspective from Research and Management Practice.” She provides insights from her research on the added value and imperative of sustaining diversity in the workplace.
  • 80: Management Theory & Practice — Sumantra Ghoshal
    We discuss a critique of business education — Sumantra Ghoshal’s article from the Academy of Management Learning and Education, “Bad Management Theories are Destroying Good Management Practices.” He describes a feedback loop between schools and practitioners that has led to theories based on a “pretense of knowledge” that assumes causality and predictability of the business environment and a “gloomy vision” that assumes the worst of human nature. In effect, theories are built around ideas that managers cannot be trusted and matters of complexity can be managed through mathematical models, setting ethics and morals aside. A great think piece for considering the roles of business schools and professional education!
  • 79: Labor Relations – Jane Addams
    We discuss a famous speech by Jane Addams titled, A Modern Lear, her reflections on the events leading to and during the infamous Pullman Railway Strike of 1894. Using ideas drawn from the emergence of classic pragmatism and Shakespeare’s King Lear as an analogy, Addams took both the ownership and workers to task for the violence and provides a way to avoid a recurrence of such a tragedy. What insights are applicable to today’s contemporary situation? Can pragmatism provide a way forward?
  • 78: Patterns of Bureaucracy — Alvin Gouldner
    We discuss a classic 1954 book by Alvin Gouldner titled, Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy. This describes the results of an ethnographic study conducted at a gypsum processing plant that included both a mine and a production line for construction materials. Gouldner and his team uncovered three distinct patterns of bureaucratic rules based on the acceptance and compliance of bureaucratic rules by workers and management – patterns still relevant today.
  • 77: Job Design – Hackman & Oldham
    We discuss a 1975 article by J. Richard Hackman and Greg R. Oldham in the Journal of Applied Psychology titled, “Development of the Job Diagnostic Survey.” The purpose of the instrument was to help managers increase the motivational potential of jobs. They developed the JDS through the studies of existing jobs to determine what makes a job motivating and also how to improve the motivating potential of jobs from how they are defined and described. It remains a seminal reading in job design today. With Special Guest Lisa Cohen from McGill University.
  • 76: Comparative Analysis of Organizations – Charles Perrow
    We discuss a 1967 article from Charles Perrow, “A Framework for the Comparative Analysis of Organizations.” Perrow proposed a framework for comparing organizations, largely around “technology” which in contemporary times would be taken to mean the work to be performed. The framework allows analysis of the character of the work being done, nature of the raw material (e.g., tangible objects or intangible symbols), and associated task and social structures.
  • 75: Institutionalization – Philip Selznick
    Philip Selznick seeded the origins of institutional theory in organization studies. He brought attention to the symbolic aspects of administration, such as when organizational tools and processes assume an importance beyond their concrete technical value—what he labelled institutionalization. In this episode, we discuss one of his classic works from 1949, TVA and the Grass Roots: A Study in the Sociology of Formal Organization that contributed to his theory of organization through an examination of the Tennessee Valley Authority — was formed to foster recovery from the Great Depression.
  • 74: Emergence of Middle Management — Alfred Chandler
    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,
  • 73: Organizing Innovation — Michael Tushman
    Discusses an important work from Michael Tushman about how innovation benefits from individuals who communicate across boundaries. With special guest Hila Lifshitz-Assaf who has collaborated with Tushman and did her own dissertation on boundary spanning in the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
  • 72: Organizational Diagnosis — Marvin Weisbord
    Business literature is now loaded with models and frameworks designed to help organizations identify, analyze, and fix their problems. But it wasn’t always this way, and in fact a half century ago there were few general-purpose models available that were well-suited for the task. Enter Marvin Weisbord who in the 1970s developed and promoted a simple framework and associated suite of tools designed for anyone to investigate what was going wrong. In this episode, we discuss one of his articles — “Organizational Diagnosis: Six Places to Look for Trouble With or Without a Theory,” published in 1976 in the journal Group and Organization Management — that introduced his Six-Box Model of organizational diagnosis.
  • 71: Managerial Behavior — Melville Dalton
    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.
  • 70: Epistemic Coloniality in Latin America – Eduardo Ibarra-Colado
    With Special Guest Samantha Ortiz In Episode 56, we opened a window to the world of African-American studies in management studies when we discussed the work of Charles Clinton Spaulding. We now continue the effort to expand the canon of organization theory and management science, this time focusing on Latin America. Worldwide, much of the…
  • 69: Our 5th Anniversary Special!
    Celebrate five years of the Talking About Organizations Podcast with us!!! On October 13, 2015 — The Talking About Organizations Podcast descended upon the unsuspecting world of academia with the release of Episode 1: Scientific Management – F.W. Taylor’s One Best Way, covering the much misunderstood and severely misrepresented work of Frederick Winslow Taylor. Our original…
  • 68: Globalization and Culture Clashes — “American Factory” (Documentary)
    American Factory is an important and powerful documentary, telling the story of cultural clashes and labor-management relations as a Chinese firm re-opened and re-purposed a close automotive plant in Ohio. Six years earlier, in 2008, General Motors (GM) shuttered its Moraine, Ohio automotive plant, rendering thousands of workers unemployed. Then in 2014, China’s Fuyao Glass…
  • Announcement! Updates to “Reflections on Management with Tom Galvin”
    With the growing success of the Reflections on Management podcast, part of the Talking About Organizations Network, we invited host Tom Galvin to provide an update on big changes coming to the program and website for the fall 2020 season! Reflections now has over 40 episodes of content related to or inspired by the classics…
  • 67: Professions & Professionalism — Andrew Abbott
    The work of certain groups of specialists in society is a crucial theme for those interested in organizations. And it became particularly relevant in light of the COVID-19 pandemic as debates emerge on whether “experts” got things wrong or how decision-makers have decided (or not) to listen to the professionals. But who exactly are the…
  • 66: Workplace Isolation – Forester
    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.
  • 65: Organizational Structure — The Aston School
    With Special Guest Bob Hinings 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…
  • 64: Disasters and Crisis Management – Powley and Weick
    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…
  • The Do’s and Don’ts of Academic-ing at a Distance
    With so much teaching never designed to be delivered via distance learning being delivered via distance learning, we wanted to chip in and offer some of our experience amassed during 64 episodes of (distance) recording the podcast. Granted, while these are more applicable to asynchronous teaching than synchronous Zoom-lecturing, we nonetheless hope that there might…
  • 63: Remote Operations — The Hudson’s Bay Company
    For this episode we discuss the history of a classic firm which exercised remote operations as a matter of course and faced multiple pandemics during its early existence. The Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) was chartered in 1670 by King Charles II at a time when the French monopolized fur trading with Native Americans in modern-day Canada. From then, the English would establish its own robust fur trading industry, establishing hundreds of posts from the western shores of Hudson Bay all across modern western Canada. The case is exceptional in demonstrating the historical challenges of remote operations where communications were limited to letters sent annually with the fur shipments across the Atlantic. How could London possibly maintain oversight and exercise control under such conditions?
  • 62: Consumerism & Meaning at Work — WALL-E
    As we demonstrated in previous episodes about “Twelve Angry Men” and “Modern Times,” movies can be effective tools for discussing concepts, ideas, and experiences about organizations and management. Add to this the ‘instant’ classic film WALL-E, released in 2008 by Pixar Animation Studios and directed by Andrew Stanton. WALL-E is the story of a robot…
  • 61: Power & Influence in Organizations — Dan Brass
    With Special Guest Sarah Otner 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…
  • 60: Contingency Theory — Joan Woodward
    Joan Woodward was a pioneer in organization theory, and in this episode we explore her seminal work Industrial Organization: Theory and Practice, originally published in 1965. The book presents the results of an extensive longitudinal study of the technologies, processes, and systems used by over one hundred industrial firms concentrated in southeast England over a…
  • 59: Theory X and Y – Douglas McGregor
    In this episode, we examine Douglas McGregor’s most famous work, The Human Side of Enterprise, that proposed two “theories” encapsulating management assumptions about human behavior. His Theory X described the dominant thinking of the 1950s, where managers held a dim view of employees, who were assumed to be disinclined to work and had to be…
  • 58: Contingency Approach – AOM 2019 Workshop LIVE
    With Speakers Sarah Kaplan, Signe Vikkelsø, and Gino Cattani This PDW represents the second edition of what we hope to be a standing series showcasing the enduring relevance of earlier organizational research and raise interest for it. We believe that paying attention to the classics of our field may complement the strong emphasis (at AOM…
  • 57: Reward Systems – Steven Kerr
    Why do organizations espouse one thing but do another? This is essentially what Steven Kerr asks in his popular 1975 article in the Academy of Management Journal, “On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B,” on reward systems. Using examples ranging from politics and war to business and public sector settings, Kerr found…
  • 56: Cooperative Advantage – Charles Clinton Spaulding
    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.
  • 55: Group Dynamics and Foundations of Organizational Change – Kurt Lewin
    We discuss Kurt Lewin’s article, “Frontiers in Group Dynamics,” that makes a strong case for treating the social sciences on the same level with the natural sciences–previously, social science was considered neither rigorous nor valid. Using metaphors from physics, Lewin explains social phenomena in tangible, physical terms and explains how individuals within a social space interact in ways that could be measured similarly to physical or chemical phenomenon.
  • 54: Measuring Organizational Cultures – Hofstede
    Fresh off a study that identified key factors for comparing national cultures, organizational psychologist Geert Hofstede and his team set off to determine whether similar constructs could be deduced for organizational cultures. The success of this research is detailed in Hofstede’s classic 1990 paper, “Measuring Organizational Cultures: A Qualitative and Quantitative Study Across Twenty Cases,”…
  • 53: Taylorism in Motion — Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times
    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.
  • 52: Management in Practice – Rosemary Stewart
    With Special Guest Maja Korica from the Warwick Business School, UK! So 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…
  • 51: The Tyranny of Light — Hari Tsoukas
       Haridimos Tsoukas‘ 1997 article “The Tyranny of Light” was a bold article that challenged conventional wisdom about the oncoming information society. The Internet, personal computers, and the dot-com boom were still new and exciting. With information technologies advancing at an incredible pace, the sky (and the capacity of silicon) was the limit. Internet start-ups…
  • 50: Celebrating 50 Episodes! What Have We Learned?
    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…
  • 49: Engineered Culture and Normative Control – Gideon Kunda
    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 from a modest…
  • 48: Stratified Systems Theory — Elliott Jaques
    As bureaucracies became more prevalent as a feature of organizations post-WWII, questions surfaced as to how they could be improved. Was there an optimal way to design them? What was the best role of individual members within a bureaucracy? Could individuals be developed to handle higher level roles? Among those asking such questions was Elliott…
  • 47: Organizational Identity — Albert & Whetten
    “Who are we?” The pursuit of an answer to this tantalizingly simple question began with a book chapter written in 1985 by organization theorists Stuart Albert and David Whetten. “Organizational Identity” established the construct of identity at the organizational level and described it as the sum of three types of claims — claims of an…
  • 46: Classics of Management and Organization Theory – AoM 2018 Workshop LIVE
    With Speakers Paul Adler, Silvia Dorado, Siobhan O’Mahony, and Marc Ventresca A special recording from a workshop on management classics held at the 2018 Academy of Management Conference in Chicago. Hosted by Pedro, this PDW intended to raise interest towards classic authors/ideas in the field of organization and management theory. It offered scholars from all…
  • 45: Fate of Whistleblowers – C. Fred Alford
    We discuss Fred Alford’s book Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Power in 2001 to understand and make sense of horrible treatment often suffered by those who witness and report illegal or immoral acts and have the courage and persistence to speak up and stand for what is right. In workplace environments, we have a name for such heroic men and women – whistleblowers. But historically, the experiences of many other whistleblowers are discouraging – being ostracized, ignored, harassed, marginalized, physically attacked, socially isolated and ultimately defeated while the wrongdoers continue with their organizations. Alford’s study brings these experiences to light in hopes of changing attitudes toward those who would speak up for what is right.
  • 44: Transaction Costs and Boundaries of the Firm – Williamson and Malone
    Following on a theme from the previous episode, we explore an important reading that bridges organization theory with economics. This was the explicit aim of Oliver E. Williamson’s famous article, “The Economics of Organization: The Transaction Cost Approach,” published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1981. The article begins with a statement that the assumption of…
  • Reflections on the “Human Capital Hoax”
    Inspired by Episode 36. THE HUMAN CAPITAL HOAX – EMPLOYMENT IN THE GIG ECONOMY By Benoit Gautier Thanks to Talking About Organizations Podcast, I have been Reading P. Fleming’s ‘The Human Capital Hoax’ (Episode 36). The basic claim of the paper is that human capital theory has opened the gates for the ‘uberization’ of the workforce….
  • Centralization and the Inefficient Quest for Efficiency
    Inspired by Episode 43. THE CENTRALIZATION/DECENTRALIZATION DEBATE – THE FEDERALIST PAPERS By Tom Galvin Listen to Tom’s sidecast here:   Greetings, and I hope you enjoyed listening to us debate the merits of centralization and decentralization in organizations on Episode 43, where we framed the debate using as lenses Federalist Papers #9 and #10, authored…
  • 43: Centralization/Decentralization Debate – The Federalist Papers
    The Federalist Papers was a series of writings from American history leading up to its current Constitution, completed in 1787. Formed as thirteen separate colonies, this newly independent nation tried to form a central government that granted maximum autonomy to the States to prevent the emergence of an American monarchy. We explore two in this episode and use them to host the first-ever TAOP debate where two of us argued for federalism and two argued for anti-federalism!
  • 42: Carnegie Mellon Series #5 – Organizational Learning
    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.
  • Milton Hershey and an Organization’s Commitment to its Members
    Inspired by Episode 41. IMAGES OF ORGANIZATION – GARETH MORGAN By Tom Galvin Listen to Tom’s sidecast here: Near the end of Episode 41, we discussed the themes of member commitment to the organization and an organization’s commitment to its individual members. This arose in the context of our continuing discussions of the gig economy…
  • 41: Images of Organization – Gareth Morgan
    We conclude Season 4 with one of our most ambitious efforts, tackling Gareth Morgan’s classic book Images of Organization, originally published in 1986. This lengthy and detailed volume synthesizes an incredible range of organization theories and concepts over the previous century and presents them under the umbrella of eight distinct metaphors. Each metaphor represents a different…
  • 40: Symposium on the Gig Economy LIVE
    A SPECIAL EPISODE FROM OUR VERY FIRST EVENT! The TAOP Symposium on the Gig Economy was a unique, one-day interdisciplinary symposium on the forms and effects of management in the contemporary sharing (a.k.a. gig) economy that took place on 15 December 2017 at the University of Sussex. Blending individual and panel presentations from leading scholars…
  • The Value of Simple Exploratory Models for Explaining Complex Behaviors
    Inspired by Episode 39. CARNEGIE-MELLON SERIES No. 4 — ORGANIZATIONAL CHOICE By Tom Galvin Listen to Tom’s sidecast here:   In past seasons, we discussed the extent to which publication practices valuing journal articles above books limit our understanding of organizational phenomena. We also debated how the peer-review process and its current emphasis on ‘theoretical…
  • 39: Carnegie Mellon Series #4 – Organizational Choice
    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…
  • 38: Socialization and Occupational Communities – 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…
  • 37: Socrates on Management – Oeconomicus by Xenophon
    This episode takes us to ancient Greece and one of the great practical philosophers, Xenophon (pronounced ZEN-uh-phun), whose Oeconomicus may have been one of his “minor” works in the world of philosophy, but it is a fascinating work for those interested in management and organizational studies. The book is written as a dialogue, with Socrates playing a sort of narrator who engages with men and encourages them to become more virtuous, with varying success.
  • 36: The Human Capital Hoax – Employment in the Gig Economy
    Episode 36 represents a momentary break from older seminal readings to a very recent essay covering a timely topic – the negative effects of ‘Uberization’ and the gig economy on the economic and social fabric. While the text and the phenomena are quite recent, the author analyzes these matters by re-reading a classic approach in…
  • 35: The Managed Heart – Arlie Hochschild
    The Managed Heart, originally published in 1983 by Dr. Arlie Hochschild, introduced the concept of emotional labour as a counterpart to the physical and mental labour performed in the scope of one’s duties. The importance of emotional labour is made clear in Dr. Hochschild’s descrption of flight attendants, who regardless of the dispositions of airline passengers, turbulence in the flight, or personal stress is required to act and behave in ways that minimize passenger anxiety and encourage them to fly with that airline again. Thus, the book explores the challenges of stress, protecting one’s personal identity and private life, differentiated (and often unfair) gender roles, miscommunication between supervisors and workers or workers and clients, and others.
  • 34: Sociotechnical Systems – Trist and Bamforth
    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.
  • Reflections on Wieliczka
    Inspired by Episode 34. ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE – TRIST AND BAMFORTH By Tom Galvin In my preparations for Episode 34 (Trist & Bamforth, 1951), I was reminded of a bus tour I took back in the summer of 2001 from Heidelberg, Germany to Krakow, Poland. Part of the tour included a guided visit to the Wieliczka Salt…
  • 33: Foreman – Master and Victim of Doubletalk
    To open Season 4, this episode covered Fritz J. Roethlisberger’s classic 1945 article from Harvard Business Review (HBR), â€œThe 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…
  • 32: Organizational Stupidity with Mats Alvesson and Bjorn Erik Mork LIVE
    With Special Guests Mats Alvesson and Bjørn Erik Mørk Ralph attended the 2017 Organizational Learning, Knowledge and Capabilities conference in Valladolid, Spain and had the opportunity to discuss The Stupidity Paradox: The Power and Pitfalls of Functional Stupidity at Work (Profile Books), co-authored by Mats Alvesson and AndrĂŠ Spicer, with Mats Alvesson (keynote speaker) and Bjørn Erik Mørk…
  • 31: Process Studies, PROS and Institutional Theory LIVE
    With Special Guests Trish Reay, Tammar Zilber, Hari Tsoukas, and Ann Langley Please join us for the first of two fascinating special episodes recorded from the International Process Symposium 2017. The aim of the Symposium is to consolidate, integrate, and further develop ongoing efforts to advance a sophisticated process perspective in organization and management studies….
  • 30: Corporate Culturalism
    Hugh Willmott Strength is Ignorance; Slavery is Freedom: Managing Culture in Modern Organizations was Hugh Willmott’s critique of corporate culturalism, a dominant theme in management studies in the 1980s. In 1993, when the paper appeared in the Journal of Management Studies, strengthening corporate culture was seen as a way to improve organizational performance. But instead of an academic response, Willmott used George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four to explain his objections.
  • 29: Carnegie Mellon Series #3 – Designing Business Schools, by Herb Simon
    We discuss Herbert Simon’s article “The Business School: A Problem in Organizational Design,” published in 1967. This was written at a time when the business school enterprise was facing difficulties and wrestling over its identity. The paper framed these challenges as a design problem relating to a business school’s purpose, what the business school should teach to its students, and what type of faculty would be needed to fulfill the purpose.
  • 28: Organizations as Rhetoric
    Our next episode in the JMS classics series covers Mats Alvesson’s “, Organizations as Rhetoric: Knowledge-Intensive Firms and the Struggle with Ambiguity” from 1993 that concluded with the idea that organizations are best understood as ‘systems of persuasion’ where actors use their agency to engage in discourse on behalf of the organization.
  • 27: Context and Action in the Transformation of the Firm
    We discuss Andrew Pettigrew’s classic JMS article, “Context and Action in the Transformation of the Firm,” that introduced Pettigrew’s triangle of context, content, and process into the discourse on change management though his study of change in an UK chemical firm.
  • 26: Enacted Sensemaking in Crisis Situations
    We discuss another JMS classic, Karl Weick’s “Enacted Sensemaking in Crisis Situations,” that examines how that the central mechanisms behind failure and incidents is given by the interaction between humans and technology (and not by technology in itself). Weick’s study examined the the Bophal Disaster, a gas leak incident that took place in 1984 in India and shows how individuals enacted rather than encountered the events.
  • 25: Competitive Groups as Cognitive Communities
    We discuss another JMS classic, “Competitive Groups as Cognitive Communities the case of Scottish Knitwear Manufacturers” by Porac, Thomas, and Baden-Fuller from 1989. Employing an approach based on the ‘interpretive’ side of organizations, the Authors propose that a key mechanism in competition and strategy is given by the “mental models used by key decision-makers to interpret the task environment of their organization”. These, in turn, emerge out of material and cognitive exchanges among customers, suppliers, and producers.
  • 24: Learning by Knowledge-Intensive Firms
    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).
  • Reflections on the “Process and Practice Perspectives” Workshop at the University of Queensland Business School
    Inspired by Episode 21. “SMALL RESEARCH, BIG ISSUES” By Ella Hafermalz “Process and practice perspectives” are piquing the interest of a range of organisational scholars. The group that gathered at the University of Queensland Business School workshop last week represented the diversity of scholars interested in these approaches. Faculties of Management, Information Systems, Advertising and…
  • 23: Influence of Institutions and Factor Markets
    This is an episode in our special series of Classics in the Journal of Management Studies. Mike Wright co-authored “Emerging multinationals from mid-range economies: the influence of institutions and factor markets” in 2013 that looked at the variety in the development of emerging economies and, through institution theory, increased understanding of competition between multinational economies and the respective national ones.
  • 22: Human-Machine Reconfigurations – Lucy Suchman
    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.
  • 21: Small Research, Big Issues with Brian Pentland and Katharina Dittrich LIVE
    From the ‘Connections in Action’ workshop held by the IKON Research Unit at the University of Warwick, 5-6 December 2016 What a treat! Joining us for this Special Episode from the fascinating ‘Connections in Action’ workshop at the University of Warwick are Katharina Dittrich and Brian Pentland (aka Doctor Decade)! To our great delight, Doctor Decade…