Greetje Corporaal

71: Managerial Behavior — Melville Dalton

December 15, 2020 Greetje Corporaal
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.Read More

69: Our 5th Anniversary Special!

October 13, 2020 Greetje Corporaal
On October 13, 2015 -- The Talking About Organizations Podcast descended upon the unsuspecting world of academia with the release of Episode 1: Scientific Management - F.W. Taylor's One Best Way, covering the much misunderstood and severely misrepresented work of Frederick Winslow Taylor. Five years later and we are still here! Come celebrate our first five years with retrospective looks at how we plan and put on the show, talks with some of our past guests, and responses to questions sent in by our listeners!Read More

67: Professions & Professionalism — Andrew Abbott

August 11, 2020 Greetje Corporaal
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.Read More

66: Workplace Isolation – Forester

July 16, 2020 Greetje Corporaal
In this episode (which took place in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic), 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 clients and customers. These include teachers, doctors, lawyers, public servants, and many others. The sudden thrust to teleworking for an unknown period of time has raised questions as to how these workers are coping with the new normal.Read More

65: Organizational Structure — The Aston School

June 9, 2020 Greetje Corporaal
The Aston Group was based in the United Kingdom and played a major role in the early development of organization theory and management science. Starting in the 1960s, they carried out a program of research that departed from the comparative study of work organizations in the Birmingham area in the UK and contributed landmark works on organizational structure and the development of contingency approach.Read More

64: Disasters and Crisis Management – Powley and Weick

May 12, 2020 Greetje Corporaal
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 important texts on organizational crises and their management, and in this episode we present two -- from Karl Weick studying the Tenerife air disaster and Edward Powley on activating organizational resilience.Read More

63: Remote Operations — The Hudson’s Bay Company

April 14, 2020 Greetje Corporaal
For this episode we discuss the history of a classic firm which 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, establishing hundreds of posts from the western shores of Hudson Bay all across modern western Canada. The case is exceptional in demonstrating the historical challenges of remote operations where communications were limited to letters sent annually with the fur shipments across the Atlantic. How could London possibly maintain oversight and exercise control under such conditions?Read More

60: Contingency Theory — Joan Woodward

January 14, 2020 Greetje Corporaal
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. Read More

58: Contingency Approach – AOM 2019 Workshop LIVE

November 20, 2019 Greetje Corporaal
This professional development workshop focuses on the contingency approach as exemplary of classic scholarship in organization and management theory. We focus on the historical context of the contingency approach, the main ideas of authors and traditions associated with it, and their connections with contemporary research.Read More

53: Taylorism in Motion — Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times

March 14, 2019 Greetje Corporaal
We discuss Charlie Chaplin's 1936 film "Modern Times" balances great physical comedy with powerful social commentary. Chaplin portrayed a hapless Worker on an assembly line who is tormented both by supervisors and the work itself. After being subjected to a humiliating experiment intended to improve the line's efficiency, the Worker runs through a series of rotating jobs, stints in jail, and other misadventures as he tries to find his purpose in life.Read More