Talking About Organizations Podcast

Join us and Dr. Ella Hafermalz for the conclusion of Episode 66 on workplace isolation. In the second part of the episode, we discuss the role of the office, how sudden mass-exposure to remote work may be exacerbating a host of underlying societal issues, as well as the extent to which technology can help organizations keep running as (or as close as) before.

We continue our series of episodes related to the social change being spurred by the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic that has brought about rapid and immediate social change. In this episode, 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...

We conclude our conversation about the Aston School with one of its founding members, Bob Hinings. In this release, we focus on the legacy and impacts of the Aston School on contemporary organization studies and its relationships with other major literature streams such as contingency theory.

The Aston Group from Birmingham, United Kingdom played a major role in the early development of organization theory and management science. Throughout the 1960s, the Aston Group performed numerous studies (the "Aston Studies") of industrial Birmingham and contributed landmark works on organizational structure, organizational analysis, and institution theory. We are honored to welcome one of its me...

In part 2, we explore an article from Edward Powley on activating organizational resilience — “Reclaiming resilience and safety: Resilience activation in the critical period of crisis,” published in Human Relations in 2009. The article describes three different social mechanisms that are put into action according to Powley — liminal suspension, compassionate witnessing, and relational redundancy....

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 classic texts on organizational crises and their management. In this episode, we include Karl Weick's famous...

This is part 2 of our case study on the Hudson's Bay Company and remote work where we focus on responses to pandemics by distributed organizations. We explore an article by Paul Hackett, titled “Averting disaster: The Hudson’s Bay Company and smallpox in Western Canada during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,” published in 2004 in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine. Smallpox...

We discuss two works exploring a firm that 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, establis...

We are proud to support the OMT Division at the Academy of Management in producing their own podcast - The OMT Podcast! The show, hosted by Tanja Ohlson from Oxford University, will focus on interviewing members of the OMT division about their life and research. Available now on all major podcast directories as well as on http://omtweb.org/omtpodcast . Check it out!

Our discussion of WALL-E concludes with a look at dystopian fiction and how it presents class differences that suggest ways in which some will feel the burden of societal unrest more than others. This is exemplified in the movie by the way that presumably some segments of society were able to leave the wasted Earth while others might not have. How can we use organization theory, management science...

Movies can be effective tools for discussing concepts, ideas, and experiences about organizations and management. In this episode, we cover the 'instant' classic film WALL-E by Pixar Animation Studios and directed by Andrew Stanton. WALL-E is the story of a robot who at one time was part of a massive clean-up effort on Earth while all the humans left to live on cruise ships in space. We talk about...

We conclude on episode on Dan Brass' article, "Being in the Right Place: A Structural Analysis of Individual Influence in an Organization" from Administrative Science Quarterly. In this part of the discussion, we explore Dan's mixed-methods approach that included criticality, transaction alternatives, and centrality (access and control) in the social networks of the organization. The results showe...

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 organizational structure was more likely to translate into one's source of pow...

Part 2 of our discussion of Joan Woodward's classic work on contingency theory, technology, and organization.

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 ten year period. The studies pro...

Join us as we conclude talking about one of the most known theories in management and organisational behaviour! Are you theory X or theory Y? Or is there even meaning to such a distinction? What are the normative and political assumptions behind this typology? Tune in to find out more!

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 coerced into doing so. McGregor felt that Theory X led t...

In the 2019 workshop at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management, we paid particular attention to the European(/UK) tradition as this is usually overlooked in our area (especially the work of the Tavistock Institute). We selected authors and groups representing different aspects of this approach with presentations by Sarah Kaplan (on Joan Woodward), Signe Vikkelsø (on the Tavistock Institut...

Join Tom, Ella, Maikel and Frithjof as they examine criticisms of the article, particularly Richard Boettger and Charles Greer’s rejoinder “On the Wisdom of Rewarding A While Hoping for B,” published in Organization Science in 1994.

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 a common pattern: that the organization’s goals are too often not suppo...

Conclusion of conversation about C.C. Spauilding. His ideas are also distinctive as they reflect some form of ‘African management’ principles, the most salient being the emphasis on cooperation, echoing the African idea on cooperation (Ubuntu) and doing business also for the good of communities. The latter was important as African-Americans were/are a particularly vulnerable and discriminated mino...

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. From 1923 until 1952, Spaulding served as the President of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, the largest company in the U.S. o...

Join us, and Prof. Stephen Cummings, for Part 2 of this discussion on Lewin's classic article. Many working in the change management arena–scholars and practitioners alike–have likely heard of Kurt Lewin’s three main phases of organizational change: (1) unfreezing, (2) moving, and (3) freezing (also commonly referred to as re-freezing). And indeed, Kurt Lewin presented those phases in his 1947 art...

In this episode, we are joined by Prof. Stephen Cummings (New History of Management) to address one of the foundational works in social psychology and organizational development - “Frontiers in group dynamics: Concept, method and reality in social science; social equilibria and social change”. This was the first of two articles that Kurt Lewin published in the newly established journal Human Relat...

In Part 2 of the episode we look at how much has changed in organizations from 1980s to the present day. To what extent do Hofstede’s six factors still hold up? How salient is his model of socializing cultures between societies (“nations”) and organizations? To what extent is the construct of organizational culture being misused, such as suggested in our Episode 49 where we explored Gideon Kunda’s...