Talking About Organizations Podcast

This is our second episode featuring the works of Charles Perrow, but which covers a wholly different topic from Episode 76’s “A framework for the comparative analysis of organizations.” Perrow’s 1999 book Normal accidents: Living with high-risk technologies is an instant classic that counters the common narrative that safety can be successfully engineered and risk eliminated in technological systems – including those that pose a “high risk” of catastrophe such as massive explosions, environmental cataclysms, widespread systemic failures, and so on. Perrow defines an accident as the type of event that causes damage to a system such that it cannot be used again, as opposed to an incident in which a system shutdown or other remedial action successfully preserves the system and is reversible such that routine operations can resume. Technological systems of the late 20 century such as nuclear power plants, aerospace and maritime platforms, chemical factories, hydroelectric dams, and recombinant DNA research either had major accidents or fears among experts or the public have been expressed about the risks of accidents. To alleviate concerns, company owners and government officials have called for and largely gotten safety systems installed that should help identify problems proactively to allow for pre-emptive responses or to shut a system down to mitigate catastrophic effects. The trouble is, according to Perrow, that these safety systems add as much risk as they alleviate, making the potential for catastrophe more likely rather than less. At the heart of the problem was a fundamental lack of understanding of what causes accidents in the first place. Correcting this required a monumental effort to study the detailed reports from major accidents across a number of industries, including the Three Mile Island disaster of 1979. Through this, Perrow identified two salient factors that were present to a degree in industries that seemed prone to such accidents – high systems complexity and tight coupling of system components. The coupling meant that a failure in one part of the system would contribute to the cascading of problems across other parts. Complexity meant that despite the presence of meters and indicators, it might not be possible for an operator or anyone else to properly decipher what was happening to the system, and therefore their corrective actions could inherently worsen the situation. From this, a number of other phenomena can be explained, such as tendencies for industries to dismiss accidents as the result of operator error rather than the inherent complexity of the system design itself. This is why the book is titled Normal Accidents, based on Perrow’s contention that certain industries simply cannot avoid accidents. The question becomes to what extent do the effects of the accident either extent only to those on-site (i.e., workers) when it occurs or if the effects extend outside the site, whether the nearby town or across a much wider geographic region. While an informative read, this book is probably not going to make anyone feel good about the increasingly complex technologies that have been fielded in the years since the book’s publication. Part 1. The inherent problem of accidents in high-risk systems Summary of Episode 134 Part 1Supplement Perrow, C. (1999). Normal accidents: Living with high-risk technologies, updated edition. Princeton University Press. Talking About Organizations Podcast Episode 76. Comparative Analysis of Organizations — Charles Perrow Episode 64. Disasters and Crisis Management — Powley and Weick Episode 20. High-Reliability in Practice — Tom Mercer, US Navy The post 134: Normal Accidents — Charles Perrow appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

Henry Mintzberg’s career as a consultant and management researcher spans decades and has resulted in numerous works that provide critical perspectives on dominant schools of thought in organizational design, strategies, and planning. Although we hosted him as one of our earliest guests to discuss his book Simply Managing, we hadn’t gone back and discussed his original canon of work independently. But because it was so rich and choosing one best work to cover proved difficult, we decided on a divide-and-conquer approach where each of us in the episode read different works while one was the keeper of the whole canon. The five works we explored follow: (1) “Patterns in Strategy Formation,” 1978 article in Management Science; (2) “An Emerging Strategy in ‘Direct’ Research,” 1979 article in ASQ; (3) “Of strategies, deliberate and emergent,” 1985 article in SMJ; (4) “The design school: Reconsidering the basic premises of strategic management,” 1990 article in SMJ; and (5) the book The rise and fall of strategic planning, published by Prentice Hall in 2000. With the slight exception of the Direct Research article, all the works would converge on the 2000 book in which Mintzberg summarizes his overall concerns and criticisms about the unfulfilled promises of the theories and tools presented for strategic planning up to that time. The overriding theme is that good strategies and plans were thought to be the way for organizations to move seamlessly into a more promising and prosperous future. Through clearly defined and executable planning methods, full appreciation and understanding of a firm’s past performance, and simple, effective tools for generating plans, managers could properly prioritize and distribute resources and organizational energy toward a desired outcome, one that could be easily described and explained to members and stakeholders alike. That despite the prevalence of such tools and numerous “studies” supposedly touting their benefits, the outcomes were unsatisfactory and the actual functions of plans and strategies were devolving toward merely means of managerial control. Mintzberg rightfully asks why. What he deduces through his various works and then derives in the 2000 book are that strategic development and planning suffer from three broad fallacies. The first is the fallacy of predetermination, that a strategy based on a forecast of the future can be made into an executable plan without the plan becoming inflexible and thus driving the organization forward despite disruptions and shocks in the environment. This leads to a tendency for plans to become means of managerial control rather than paths to desired futures. The second is the fallacy of detachment in that the planning function is treated as separate from the line function and detached from day-to-day operations. This leads to plans that sound great but wind up being infeasible and too often nonsensical to those who would have to implement it. Third is the fallacy of formalization, or that “innovation can be institutionalized.” The belief that creativity can be harnessed and systematized has little real support, in Mintzberg’s view. Instead, true managerial creativity became squashed by checklists because of the ease of which checklists allow for ready measurement (even if the measures were bogus to begin with). He does offer certain circumstances where this form of connecting strategies and plans does work, but these occur infrequently, and instead Mintzberg develops a set of general roles that planners and strategists should play in the course of bringing about needed organizational change toward better futures. His approach is less engineered and more iterative, which not all managers or stakeholders may like, but in his view puts the organization on firmer ground. Part 1. Mintzberg’s take on strategic planning Summary of Episode 133 Part 1Supplement Mintzberg, H. (1978). Patterns in Strategy Formation. Management Science, 24(9), 934–948....

We return to the works of Rosabeth Moss Kanter and discuss one of her better known books "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. Written based on her dissertation study at a time when hippie communes were popular, she wondered what drove people to start or join these communes and what factors enabled the communes’ survival. The post 131: Commitment and Community – Rosabeth Moss Kanter appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

A culmination of Kuhn’s earlier works on the philosophy and history of science, Scientific Revolutions challenges the notion that science progresses along a predictable or linear path where discoveries are made at readily identified and verifiable times and the academic community embraces these advancements largely as they come. The post 130: History and Philosophy of Science – Thomas Kuhn appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

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 minutes in length recounting various misadventures of the title character as he goes to war. The post 129: Socialization and Training – The Private SNAFU Video Series appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

We 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. The post 128: Meaningfulness of Work – Andrew Carton appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

We 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 discretion. The post 127: The Problem of Embeddedness – Mark Granovetter appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

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 also the human relations school, the Hawthorne Studies, Joan Woodward, and other seminal authors we have covered in this program. Hmm, what gives? Listen and find out. The post 126: Labor and Monopoly Capital — Harry Braverman appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

We discuss an important article 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 study contributed to a greater understanding of the relationships between institutions and action. The post 125: Institution and Action — Steven Barley appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

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 the specific use of science as a tool of colonialism and the other is a book chapter that summarizes the works of the early postcolonial theorists. The post 124: Postcolonial Theory — Anshuman Prasad appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

We cover the economic sociology of Neil Fligstein, who countered the dominant 1990s-era neoclassical view of economics that failed to explain well various market behaviors being observed at the time. He argued for an alternative paradigm – a “political-cultural” model that suggested that the formation of markets was part of “state building” and subjected to various social institutions that belonged to the state. The post 123: Markets as Politics — Neil Fligstein appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

This month we explore a renowned multiple-case study commonly assigned as foundational readings in organization studies programs. Mark Zbaracki’s “The rhetoric and reality of Total Quality Management” chronicled the development and introduction of Total Quality Management (TQM) into the corporate environment, only to find that in many cases its implementation did not align with the promises made by leaders about process improvements nor did firms fully exercise all the practices and activities that TQM required. The question that Zbaracki posed was more than to what extent did this rhetoric-reality unfold, but why? The post 121: Rhetoric vs. Reality — Mark Zbaracki appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

In this episode, we discuss “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizations,” a ground breaking article by sociologists Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell in 1983. The authors argued that the traditional views of why organizations tended to assimilate one another was not explained by the pursuit of rationality or efficiency. Rather, they did so in response to many other stimuli such as regulatory pressures, professional norms, and the need to reduce uncertainty. But why “the iron cage revisited”? The article was inspired by Weber’s use of the metaphor to describe how bureaucratization was destined to enslave humanity. That it did not (at least not to the extent anticipated) spurred the question of why else do organizations model themselves after others in their fields. The post 120: Institutional Isomorphism — DiMaggio & Powell appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

We return for another look at the Hawthorne Studies through Fritz Roethlisberger and William Dickson’s 1939 book Management and the Worker. The work chronicles five years of experiments that initially sought the optimal conditions for increased worker performance but evolved into an examination of the social controls that worker exercise over themselves for self-preservation against managerial decisions. It also includes an introspective look into the researchers themselves as they had to design new experiments to make sense of the surprising and contradictory findings. The book is incredibly detailed and laid the foundation for the development of the Human Relations tradition in organization studies. The post 119: Management & the Worker — Roethlisberger & Dickson appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

This month we present a recording of a symposium titled “Design Choices: Examining the Interplay of Organizational Structure and Digital Technologies” from the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management. Digital technologies now underpin the very fabric of the workplace; how tasks are assigned, bundled, and monitored partially hinges on the design of such technologies. Four panelists discuss various perspectives on the matter including design thinking, disparities of structures and norms that the same technologies generate among different nations, and the need to formally differentiate design research from design practice. The post 118: Organizational Structures & Digital Technologies – AoM 2024 Symposium appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

Economic sociology bridges economics and sociology, exploring questions such as how social environments explain and influence economic activities. Of interest for this episode is the subfield of economic valuation, in which researchers have been studying how the monetary worth of something is formed or constructed. One influential work is Marion Fourcade’s “Cents and Sensibility: Economic Valuation and the Nature of ‘Nature’,” published in the American Journal of Sociology in 2011. The article explores the economic valuation of peculiar goods, things that are intangible or otherwise cannot be exchanged in a market yet have a social value, and uses a case study of the legal proceedings following oil spills in the US and France to explain why the monetary awards were calculated so differently from each other. The post 117: Economic Sociology & Valuation – Marion Fourcade appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

Resource Dependence Theory (RDT) represented a significant departure from extant literature on management and organization studies in the 1970s. Prior to the publication of Jeffrey Pfeffer and Gerald’s The External Control of Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective in 1978, the social context and environment surrounding organizations were little studied. In the book, Pfeffer & Salancik argued that the behaviors or organizations and their managers were driven by the context, because of the need for resources in order to survive. Thus, managerial decisions were based far more on how to manage interdependencies with external social actors than what would presumably lead to objectively better outcomes. They believe RDT explains more accurately the kinds of managerial behaviors observed and how organizations chose (and fired) their executives than other theories of the time. The post 116: Resource Dependence Perspective — Pfeffer & Salancik appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

Robert K. Merton was a sociologist who founded the study of the sociology of science, how acts of research influence and are influenced by the contexts being studied. Two of his early essays exemplify this body of work whereby he and his research teams reflect on the challenges and difficulties of performing field work. In this episode, we examine two speeches delivered in 1947 – “The Machine, the Worker, and the Engineer” and “Selected Problems of Field Work in the Planned Community” – that exemplifies the effort to better understand how to study social change in organizations due to technology change. The post 115: Sociology of Science — Robert K. Merton appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

With over 110 episodes in our catalogue, we decided it was time to take a step back and revisit one of our earlier episodes that continues to come up time and again. Episode 34, covering Trist & Bamforth’s study on the longwall method of coal-getting, was referenced in sixteen (16) episodes since its release. That is more than any other episode! This re-release includes a new supplement further the conversation to contemporary issues and a sidecast on the use of this study as a cautionary tale for professional education. The post 114: Sociotechnical Systems — Trist & Bamforth (revisited) appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.

The rapid growth of women’s professional team sports has a history, and many contemporary women’s athletes have honored the legacy of past pioneers as their inspiration. Included in this legacy is the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) that existed from 1943 through 1954 in the U.S. and popularized through the 1992 film “A League of Their Own,” directed by Penny Marshall and starring a large ensemble cast including Geena Davis and Tom Hanks. In addition to describing the lived experiences of the league’s first players, it captures how deeply embedded and institutionalized baseball was in the US such that fears of losing it due to World War II and the drafting of players into military service caused baseball owners to create a women’s league. The movie touches on various important organizational themes such as gendering, innovation, and identity. The post 113: Sports & Gender – “A League of Their Own” appeared first on Talking About Organizations Podcast.