Talking About Organizations Podcast

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," p...

Tune in for Part 2 of our discussion of Charlie Chaplin's classic film - Modern Times. What does the film have to say about such contemporary topics as gig economy, gender in the workplace and emotional labour? Join us to find out!

Routinely ranked as one of the greatest movies of all time, Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film “Modern Times” balances great physical comedy with powerful social commentary. Playing his famed “Tramp” role for the final time, 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...

Please join us as we conclude discussing Rosemary Stewart's classic work on management in practice. What is the significance of this book? How does it relate to what managers do? Why are we talking about magic wands? Tune in to find out!

Continuing with our discussion of Rosemary Stewart's classic work on management in practice with the wonderful Dr. Maja Korica of Warwick Business School

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 within 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...

What are the implications of The Tyranny of Light and what can it teach us about management in an increasingly digitised workplace? Join us as we conclude Episode 51 and reflect on the lasting impact of this work.

The podcast is back for 2019 with Part 2 of Episode 51 on The Tyranny of Light by Hari Tsoukas! If you haven't listened to Part 1 yet, please go and do so before playing this episode as this is a direct continuation of that discussion.

"The Tyranny of Light" was a bold 1997 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 were sprouting up everywhere as young entrepreneurs strove...

Do you remember the Principles of Scientific Management? The one from 50 episodes ago? As we continue to celebrate this milestone of the podcast, please join us for a trip down memory lane to Episode 1, originally aired on 13 October 2015! But that's not it - to complement the podcast, we have produced and released the audiobook version of Taylor's classic text! So if you (or anyone you know) ever...

To mark our 50th episode, 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 discu...

Conclusion of our discussion of Gideon Kunda’s ethnography of culture engineering in high-tech corporation. What are the practical and research implications of this work?

Innovation, burn-out and power dynamics. Join us for Part 2 as we discuss these and other aspects of Gideon Kunda's ethnography of normative control in high-tech organizations!

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 couple hundred to tens of thousands of employees and multiple site...

Having gone through the mechanics behind SST in Parts 1 and 2, we now ask ourselves if there is a more suitable way to measure individual time-span of discretion? Join us as we conclude Episode 48 on the Stratified Systems Theory!

How viable is SST and what are the 'real world' implications of using this theory to structure organizations? Is it really a good idea to use time-span to differentiate between the strata or is there something else? In part 2 of the episode we delve deeper into the Stratified Systems Theory to examine the fundamental mechanics of this approach through both theoretical and practical lenses.

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 Jaques, co-founder of the Tavistock Institute and la...

Conclusion of our discussion of Albert and Whetten's paper on Organizational Identity. Learn what did happen at the US Africa Command after all and what are the practical and scholarly implications of this work. What can we learn from it and is it still relevant? For this, and more, tune in to Part 3 of the episode!

Part 2 of our discussion of Albert and Whetten's paper on Organizational Identity. Is it identity of organizations or identity in organizations? What about external perceptions of the organization? How do people fill in the blanks in their perception of organizational identity? For this, and more, tune in to part two of our conversation!

"Who are we?" - The pursuit of an answer to this tantalizingly simple question began with a book chapter written in 1985 by organization theories Stuart Albert and David Whetten. "Organizational Identity" established the construct of identity at the orgnizational level and described it as the sum of three types of claims -- claims of an organization's central character, claims of its distinctivene...

What a treat! An exclusive LIVE episode featuring Paul Adler, Silvia Dorado and Marc Ventresca talking about management classics. This was recorded from a PDW hosted by Pedro at the 2018 AoM Annual Meeting in Chicago, the purpose of which was to raise interest towards classic authors/ideas in the field of organization and management theory. It offered scholars from all levels the opportunity to re...

Conclusion of our conversation with Prof Marianna Fotaki on the Fate of Whistleblowers in organizations. In this last part we offer some practical reflection and Ralph shares a personal story of how he was faced with a choice to either blow a whistle or not. Fred Alford wrote the book Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Power in 2001 to understand and make sense of these experiences. R...

In Part 2 of the episode we delve deeper into the issues of ethics, psychoanalysis, functional and dysfunctional narcissism, romantic heroism, mandated vs 'pure' whistleblowing, and the various consequences of whistleblowing that people who engage in this activity are forced to endure.

Please join us as we begin discussing C. Fred Alford’s extraordinary book Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Power. The book presents the troubling experiences of whistleblowers whose efforts to stand up for what was right, only to have the organizations turn on them – taking away both their professional and social lives. In this opener, our guest Prof Marianna Fotaki tells the story...

We wrap up our discussion of Oliver E. Williamson's famous 1981 article, "The Economics of Organization: The Transaction Cost Approach" with an exploration of related works and on-going research. Included is a review of Tom Malone et al.'s predictive look at "Electronic Markets and Electronic Hierarchies," written in 1987 when the promises of information technology were becoming reality. How well...