Talking About Organizations Podcast

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...

We continue our discussion of the 1975 article by J. Richard Hackman and Greg R. Oldham in the Journal of Applied Psychology titled, “Development of the Job Diagnostic Survey.” We asked ourselves to what extent does the JDS apply today, by looking at a range of contexts and industries that present tough challenges for today’s job designers.

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 potentia...

We continue our discussion of the 1967 article from Charles Perrow, “A Framework for the Comparative Analysis of Organizations.” We ask ourselves to what extent does the framework apply to any organization, and can it allow us to analyze organizations within the same industry that are otherwise incomparable – such as mass production firms or small-scale craft shops producing similar widgets.

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 intan...

In Part 2 of our episode on Selznick’s TVA and the Grass Roots, we discuss its implications on contemporary organizational studies. In many ways, the story of TVA mirrors those of many other grass-roots style operations that have taken place since. The “cooptative mechanism” Selznick identified, whereby power or the burdens of power are shared and co-evolve, showed the relevance of political relat...

Philip Selznick's classic 1949 book, TVA and the Grass Roots: A Study in the Sociology of Formal Organization contributed to his theory of organization. The TVA -- the Tennessee Valley Authority -- was formed to foster recovery from the Great Depression. But its very existence was controversial as it sat uncomfortably between public and private sectors, and between the federal and state levels of...

We discussed how 1977, the publication date for "The Visible Hand" marked a watershed moment for middle management as it began to decline soon thereafter. Chastised as bureaucratic and a target for downsizing, middle management has been under continuous scrutiny and pressure to the present day. What might Chandler have said about this?

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 ne...

In Part 2 of this episode, we take Michael Tushman's (1977) work, "Special boundary roles in the innovation process," and apply the ideas of boundary spanning and roles of individuals in the innovation process to contemporary times. This includes research projects pursued by castmembers Pedro and Gretta, along with our special guest Hila Lifshitz-Assaf that shed light on how to better embed innova...

Discusses an important work from Michael Tushman, "Special boundary roles in the innovation process," published in Administrative Science Quarterly (1977) 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 Spa...

In Part 2, we discuss the implications of Weisbord's model for consultancy, particularly internal to the organization. As diagnostic models have gotten more complex, should one rely on external consultants and their expense or internal consultants who have greater knowledge of the organization but are more subject to politics? Also, how can the six-box model be used as an educational tool that tea...

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. In the 1970s, Marvin Weisbord 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 Diagnosi...

Part 2 of our episode on Melville Dalton's "Men Who Manage" is now released -- but this time we add a feminist perspective on managers and management. Gretta, Miranda, and Catherine welcome Judy Wajcman into the conversation to discuss her 1998 book, "Managing like a man: Women and men in corporate management," which provides an interesting contrast to the experiences expressed by the subjects of...

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 o...

We continue our conversation on Ibarra-Colado's critique by discussing his proposed research agenda and recommendations for imbuing organization studies in Latin America with a regional identity. How should scholars conduct rigorous research in the region free from the constraints of tranditional measure of 'relevance' imposed by the global community of scholarship?

We discuss an important critique of the state of Latin American organization studies leveled by Eduardo Ibarra-Colado in a famous 2006 work "Organization studies and epistemic coloniality in Latin America: thinking otherness from the margins." This manifesto and call to action considers how the current scholarship paradigm controlled by an "Anglo-Euro Centre" severely disadvantages scholarship in...

In this final release of our 5th year celebration, we welcome the perspectives of several past guests, hosts, and observers of past recordings -- with additional commentary from cast members Pedro, Miranda, Catherine, Leonardo, and Tom. Our guests discussed the experiences (and fun) of participating in the podcast, the podcast's current role and potential future directions, and the state of schola...

About a month before the anniversary, we solicited questions from our listeners about things they wanted to know or suggestions for the podcast. Out of the large number of excellent questions received; Dmitrijs, Miranda, Maikel, Jarryd, and Tom broke it down to five that we tackled and discussed in our own Talking About Organizations way. The questions covered academic publication, desires for dif...

On October 13, 2020, we celebrate our fifth anniversary with a series of releases over next two weeks. In these release, we offer listeners an insider perspective on the making of our episodes. Dmitrijs, Pedro, Ralph, and Tom discuss how we choose an episode topic, schedule it, record it and conduct post-production, and release it through the web and RSS feeds. We also talk about the broader Talki...

We conclude our review of this important 2019 documentary by considering additional management theories to explain what happened. Among them are Herzberg's two-factor theory covering hygiene and motivation forms of incentives and Maurice Halbwachs' concept of collective memory and 'spaces' -- such as how the American workers recalled the facility's layout for automotive manufacturing and therefore...

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 closed automotive plant in Ohio. In this episode, we analyze this story through the lenses of several important organization theories and management science classics.

Andrew Abbott invited us to think more systemically about the interdependencies and how professions compete with each other over "jurisdictions," claims of ownership and responsibility over expert knowledge and its applications. So we conclude this episode with a review of one of Abbott's case studies -- that of the information professions (e.g., librarian, statistician, computer programmer) -- an...

With the growing success of the Reflections 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!

In this episode, we look at the first half and first case study of Andrew Abbott's book "The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor." In this episode, the focus is on how Abbott defines the major constructs of his framework -- professionalization, professional work (diagnosis, inference, treatment), and claims of jurisdiction. For Part 1, we concentrate on the application...