Catherine Jackson, Pedro Monteiro, Greetje Corporaal, Tom Galvin, Author at Talking About Organizations Podcast

116: Resource Dependence Perspective — Pfeffer & Salancik

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.

103: Bringing Work Back In — Barley & Kunda

July 11, 2023 Catherine Jackson 0:03:54

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.

101: The Motivation to Work — Frederick Herzberg

May 9, 2023 Catherine Jackson 00:04:47

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.

96: Informating at Work – Shoshana Zuboff

December 6, 2022 Catherine Jackson 0:04:58

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.

88: Social Defenses Against Anxiety — Isabel Menzies

April 12, 2022 Catherine Jackson 0:04:53

This month’s episode examines one of the classic studies from the Tavistock Institute, Isabel Menzies’ “A Case-Study in the Functioning of Social Systems as a Defence Against Anxiety.” This famous study of how a teaching hospital developed odd and somewhat dysfunctional methods for protecting its nurses from anxiety and stress by effectively isolating nurses from the patients to prevent emotional attachment. Nursing students witnessing these methods in practice found them in violation of their expectations regarding care and their professional calling, and were quitting. What were these methods and why did they come about?

85: Carnegie-Mellon Series #6 — Organizations

January 11, 2022 Catherine Jackson 0:07:21

In this episode, we discuss the second edition of James March and Herbert Simon’s classic text 'Organizations.' In addition to the well-known concepts such as bounded rationality and satisficing, the book introduces an important critique of the mechanistic view that “classic” organization theory to that point approached organizations and its members. How do decisions get made? What causes individuals or join, stay in, or leave organizations? What about the causes and effects of conflict? We explore all this and more.

78: Patterns of Bureaucracy — Alvin Gouldner

July 13, 2021 Catherine Jackson

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 by workers and management – patterns still relevant today.

71: Managerial Behavior — Melville Dalton

December 15, 2020 Catherine Jackson

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 of a firm, how the separations between managers are workers were structured and maintained, and how managers felt about their standing -- which ranged from secure to tenuous. In Part 1, we focus on the study itself, which is still very relevant not only for understanding what happens within the circle of managers but also how the boundaries can exclude others, particularly along gender lines.

67: Professions & Professionalism — Andrew Abbott

August 11, 2020 Catherine Jackson

The text for this episode is Andrew Abbott's 1989 book The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor. This book is a watershed in our understanding of professions and their work. While previous literature had a focus on distinctive occupational groups and their professionalization projects, 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.

Catherine Jackson