Talking About Organizations Podcast

The diligent administrative assistant moves up to supervisor but fails. The assembly line worker is promoted to foreman but cannot do the job. A teacher earns a deputy principal position in a school but falls flat on their face. Why is that? Why does this seem to happen across organizations? In The Peter Principle, Lawrence J. Peter and Raymond Hull not only provides answers to these questions, they delve into all the possible implications. The Principle goes like this, “In a hierarchy, everyone rises to their level of incompetence.” How they derived this principle the subject of our conversation that explores one of the funniest but more insightful book on the perils of organizational life ever written. The post 112: Hierarchies & Promotion – The “Peter Principle” appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

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. The post 111: Visible & Invisible Work – Susan Leigh Star appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

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. The post 110: Organizations and Law – Lauren Edelman appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

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. The post 109: Emergence of Mental Health Professions – Abbott appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

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. The post 108: Presentation of Self in Everyday Life – Goffman appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

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. The post 107: Institutionalized Rules and Formal Structures — Meyer & Rowan appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

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 The post 105: Manifest & Latent Roles — Alvin Gouldner appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

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. The post 104: Social Structure & Organizations — Stinchcombe appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

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. The post 103: Bringing Work Back In — Barley & Kunda appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

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. The post 102: Executive Leadership — Sloan’s “My Years at General Motors” appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

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. The post 101: The Motivation to Work — Frederick Herzberg appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

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. The post 99: Gendering in Organizations — Joan Acker appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

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. The post 98: Managing Innovation — Burns & Stalker appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

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. The post 97: Social Change and Organization – Invictus (2009 movie) appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

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. The post 96: Informating at Work – Shoshana Zuboff appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

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. The post 95: Labor-Management Relations – Tom Lupton appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

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. The post 94: Situated Learning – Lave & Wenger appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

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. The post 93: Approaches to the Study of Work — Classics AoM PDW LIVE appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

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? The post 92: Organizational Secrecy — Case of the Manhattan Project appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

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. The post 91: Constructive Conflict – Mary Parker Follett appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.