Talking About Organizations Podcast

This month, we are presenting recordings of two events from the Academy of Management Annual Meeting 2025. The first event was Multimodal Impact: Translating Academic Knowledge via Contextual, Collaborative, and Collectivist Modes. This symposium brings together five presenters to explore diverse modes of translating academic expertise into practice. As management researchers increasingly strive t...

In Part 2 of our episode on Kanter’s Commitment and Community , we examine in depth her conclusions about the distinction between “retreat” and “service” communities and why the former tends to fail while the latter shows greater chances of long-term success. However, we also debate on the meaning of “success” as being more nuanced that merely duration of the commune over time. We then discuss the...

This month we return to the works of Rosabeth Moss Kanter, whose works on tokenism we explored way back in Episode 17. This time, we will discuss one of her better known books Commitment and Community: Commune and Utopias in Sociological Perspective that examines the origins and life cycle of numerous communes that sprang up in the US from the mid-19th century to the 1960s. Written based on her di...

Coming soon! In our next episode, we will discuss Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s famous book Commitment and Community that examines the origins and life cycle of numerous communes that sprang up in the US from the mid-19th century to the 1960s. What drove people to start or join these communes? And then, what factors allowed some to survive for decades or longer while others broke up within months? The an...

In Part 2 of the episode on Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, we bring the concepts to the present day. His essay uses examples mostly from the natural sciences, so we ponder over how well his concepts apply to the social sciences. Also, in Kuhn’s time, science was generally seen to be a good thing and scientific progress translated into benefits for society writ large. Sixty-plus years...

For our 10th anniversary episode, we selected a modern classic that greatly informs science and research across many disciplines, including organization studies. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a book often assigned to rising graduate students as a primer for entering the sciences. A culmination of Kuhn’s earlier works on the philosophy and history of science, Scientific R...

Coming soon! For our 10th anniversary episode, we selected a modern classic that greatly informs science and research across many disciplines, including organization studies. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a book often assigned to rising graduate students as a primer for entering the sciences.

10 years ago today, on October 13th, 2015, four rising scholars – Dmitrijs, Pedro, Miranda, and Ralph – launched the Talking About Organization Podcast with an episode on Frederic Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management . In this special, current-day cast members reflect on what we have done and what we would like to continue doing in the program. To learn more about this program and its...

In Part 2 of the episode on the Private SNAFU video series, we recount the various trials and tribulations of developing training modules for organizational use. What kinds of media and approaches would be most effective and most efficient, given the increasing breadth and complexity of workplace rules and policies that need to be socialized among the workforce?

Private SNAFU was a series of black-and-white animated shorts of three to five minutes in length recounting various misadventures of the title character as he goes to war. The purpose of the training videos was to socialize and reinforce the importance of adherence existing US Army policies and procedures and helping to introduce soldiers to potential hazards and challenges that they would face in...

For this year’s movie episode, we elected to take on a video series used during World War II to help socialize US Army rules and procedures among forces either deployed or getting ready to deploy. Private SNAFU was a series of black-and-white animated shorts of three to five minutesin length recounting various misadventures of the title character as he goes to war. We will examine these videos fro...

In Part 2, we continue exploring the case study of NASA in the 1960s. Having discussed the strategies used by President Kennedy to inspire NASA’s members to the ultimate goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade, it was then up to the members to connect their work activities (many of which had nothing directly to do with spaceflight) to that ultimate goal. To what extent could thi...

In this month’s episode, we examine a historical case study about how meaningfulness of work can be shaped by leaders’ actions. One frequently cited example of the solidarity felt among members of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) during the decade-long runup to the Apollo XI moon landing is the often-repeated—but apocryphal—story of a NASA janitor who, when asked by Preside...

Coming soon! We will discuss Drew Carton’s 2018 article “’I’m not mopping the floors, I’m putting a man on the moon’: How NASA leaders enhanced the meaningfulness of work by changing the meaning of work” from Administrative Science Quarterly that delves into the reality behind the myth of the highly motivated NASA janitor during the 1960s.

In Part 2 of the episode on Mark Granovetter's 1985 paper, "Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness," we consider the meaning of embeddedness in contemporary practical situations and the significant body of research that followed forty years later. His framework provides a more nuanced and realistic explanation of economic life, accounting for both the guidi...

In this month’s episode, we discuss Mark Granovetter's 1985 paper, Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness. Granovetter's work provided a middle ground between two overly simplistic perspectives presented respectively by economists and sociologists-- the undersocialized view that treated individuals as isolated, purely rational agents and the oversocialized perspective th...

Coming soon! We will discuss Mark Granovetter's 1985 paper, "Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness." He argued that economic behavior is not the product of isolated rational calculations, nor is it fully determined by social norms. Instead, individuals are embedded in a complex network of relationships that simultaneously provides structure and allows for personal discr...

In Part 2 of the episode on Harry Braverman’s book Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the 20th Century, we consider the half-century since its publication and how things turned out rather differently from Braverman’s predictions at the end of the book. Algorithmic management, deunionization, globalization, and advances in technology have furthered conditions that Braverman argu...

In this month’s episode, we discuss Harry Braverman’s book Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the 20th Century. Along with his criticism of how work had been systematically deskilled over time, he was also highly critical of many of the seminal authors and schools of thought that he felt enabled this shift. Among his targets were scientific management under Frederic Taylor, but...

Coming soon! We will examine Harry Braverman’s 1974 book Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the 20th Century. It is considered a foundational text on labor relations and the systematic ways that work has been deskilled over time and why. How well have his arguments stood the test of time to the present day?

In Part 2 of our episode on Barley, we conclude the discussion on the relationship that he drew among the institutionalized patterns of behavior in the hospitals, the actions that the radiologists and technologists undertook, and the subsequent changes to those patterns. How can we use these ideas to better understand work and technological change today? Are there other newer lenses with which we...

This month we discuss a foundational work by Steven Barley on the introduction of new technologies into established organizations. His study of the fielding of CT scanners in two hospitals showed how established organization structures and patterns of behavior influenced actions undertaken by radiologists and the new CT technologists, which in turn changed the structures in the hospital. This stud...

Steven Barley’s career has produced considerable scholarship on meaningful work and change in organizations. This month’s episode will cover one of his earliest works on the introduction of CT scanners in two hospitals that greatly altered the structures of their respective radiology departments. Of interest was the story of how that restructuring took place. Stay tuned!

In Part 2 of our episode on Prasad, we shift our attention to his 2003 book chapter titled “The gaze of the other: Postcolonial theory and organizational analysis” that synthesizes the foundational works of postcolonial theory and tie it to cross-cultural challenges faced by contemporary organizations. We also discuss the implications of the theory in the two decades that followed given the signif...

Anshuman Prasad (1954-2023) was a leading scholar and development of postcolonial theory and bringing it to the domain of management and organization studies. The theory strove to explain the significance influences and impacts that Western colonialism had on non-Western cultures and its implications for organizations located in non-Western settings. We are reading two of his many works, one about...