The Talking About Organizations Podcast website is more than just a host for great conversations. It is also a resource for rising scholars of organization theory and management science. And so, to launch our 10th year of podcasting and with 120+ episodes covering so many great classics of organization studies, we decided the website and the program needed a boost. So unlike most episodes where Parts 1 and 2 are two halves of a longer conversation, we did something a little different, but just this once.
Part 1. Dialogue on Cultivation and Curation of Knowledge — released 11 February 2025
Part 1 is a conversation about professional knowledge in which we explain some of the challenges that organizations face in maintain their corporate base of knowledge and expertise. There’s the common problem of “brain drain” whereby many of the senior members are retiring or departing the workplace and there never seems to be enough time to pass their expertise on to new members. There is the challenge of encoding data for storage and re-use, a time-consuming and often fruitless affair that results in massive amounts of “stuff” being captured on DVDs, hard drives, or cloud storage occupying space but otherwise never again seeing the light of day. And then there is recency bias that we find a problem in our own program. It is easier to find the latest posts but more difficult to find older ones and see how different parts of the organizational studies canon relate to each other.
Why is this important? What is the risk of not paying attention to these challenges? Listen to the conversation and find out!
Part 2. Launch of the TAOP Resource Center — released 18 February 2025
The Resource Center is a repository for entry-level scholars to learn more about “what’s out there.” What are the major fields of scholarship, tools of the trade, and phenomena of interest to researchers and practitioners alike. The below topics are sorted in multiple ways to reflect the complexity and multitude of perspectives on organizations and the many scholarly communities studying them. Each perspective is organized into aisles like in a Library, and each aisle is further divided into racks and shelves. Some will be stubs that we are working on to fill, others will be robust — your help is greatly appreciated!
The center is organized sort of like a Library — into “Aisles” and “Racks.” We divided the resources into four (4) Aisles — one focused on research and research methods, one on theory, one on current topics (mostly oriented toward contemporary practice), and one on the professional community of organization scholars and associated education.
Within each Aisle is a number of “Racks” divided topically. Each Rack contains a brief essay on a topic, why it is important, a quick introduction to the foundational works in that topic (consider it like an initial “must-read” list), a discussion about key literature streams or subfields within the topic, relevant episodes from the Talking About Organizations Podcast, and a reference list. Because of the natural overlap in perspectives, you will find some of the same resources in multiple locations across the Resource Center (for you WordPress geeks, these are identified by category) — this is because there is no absolute consensus on how organization studies is divided by subtopic or field. In other words, there is no “one best way” to design this Center, so we allowed for a lot of flexibility.
You may also download the audio files here: Part 1 | Part 2
Read with us:
Rousseau, D. M., Manning, J., & Denyer, D. (2008). Evidence in management and organizational science: assembling the field’s full weight of scientific knowledge through syntheses. Academy of Management Annals, 2(1), 475-515.