Maikel Waardenburg

97: Social Change and Organization – Invictus (2009 movie)

January 24, 2023 Maikel Waardenburg 0:04:15
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.Read More

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90: Organizations in Action – James Thompson

June 14, 2022 Maikel Waardenburg 0:05:01
We will examine James D. Thompson’s "Organizations in Action: Social Science Bases of Administrative Theory" from 1967 that established a new direction in organization studies. Beginning with a recapitulation of the theoretical work of the time, Thompson expanded the dominant rational model of organizing with the emerging ideas about human behaviour, complexity, and the relation between organizations and their environments. The result was a proposed theory of administration that remains relevant to this day.Read More

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89: Administrative Behavior in Public Sector — Herbert Kaufman

May 17, 2022 Maikel Waardenburg 0:05:29
This month’s episode examines a classic study in public administration, Herbert Kaufman’s “The Forest Ranger: A Study in Administrative Behavior,” published in 1960. The U.S. Forest Service was a widely distributed organization with its many Rangers individually assigned to manage large tracts of public land. It would have been easy for the Forest Service to lose control and fragment, but it did not. Kaufman’s study showed how and why the various techniques used by the Forest Service kept the Rangers integrated under a common vision.Read More

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84: Professionalizing Business — Louis Brandeis

December 7, 2021 Maikel Waardenburg 0:10:02
We discuss the life and works of Louis Brandeis who originated the term ‘scientific management’ that aimed at conserving effort and making work life more predictable, reducing worker stress and increasing satisfaction. He also advocated for a more altruistic and professionalized form of business leadership that served both the needs of customers or clients and those of the workers under their supervision. A collection of his lectures entitled Business – A Profession expounds on these ideas, and he includes a number of case studies and illustrations to show both the human and financial potential of his professed forms of management where profit would not be the only measure of a business’ success. Read More

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75: Institutionalization – Philip Selznick

April 13, 2021 Maikel Waardenburg
Philip Selznick seeded the origins of institutional theory in organization studies. He brought attention to the symbolic aspects of administration, such as when organizational tools and processes assume an importance beyond their concrete technical value—what he labelled institutionalization. In this episode, we discuss one of his classic works from 1949, TVA and the Grass Roots: A Study in the Sociology of Formal Organization that contributed to his theory of organization through an examination of the Tennessee Valley Authority -- was formed to foster recovery from the Great Depression.Read More

72: Organizational Diagnosis — Marvin Weisbord

January 12, 2021 Maikel Waardenburg
Business literature is now loaded with models and frameworks designed to help organizations identify, analyze, and fix their problems. But it wasn't always this way, and in fact a half century ago there were few general-purpose models available that were well-suited for the task. Enter Marvin Weisbord who in the 1970s developed and promoted a simple framework and associated suite of tools designed for anyone to investigate what was going wrong. In this episode, we discuss one of his articles -- "Organizational Diagnosis: Six Places to Look for Trouble With or Without a Theory," published in 1976 in the journal Group and Organization Management -- that introduced his Six-Box Model of organizational diagnosis.Read More

69: Our 5th Anniversary Special!

October 13, 2020 Maikel Waardenburg
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

64: Disasters and Crisis Management – Powley and Weick

May 12, 2020 Maikel Waardenburg
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

62: Consumerism & Meaning at Work — WALL-E

March 17, 2020 Maikel Waardenburg
This is another episode where we look at organizations through the medium of film. WALL-E, a 2008 animated film from Pixar, is the story of a robot who at one time was part of a massive clean-up effort on Earth while all the humans left to live on cruise ships in space. In this episode, we talk about the setting and the story for clues about organizational behavior and management. Read More

57: Reward Systems – Steven Kerr

October 21, 2019 Maikel Waardenburg
Why do organizations espouse one thing but do another? This is essentially what Steven Kerr asks in his popular 1975 article in the Academy of Management Journal, "On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B," on reward systems. Using examples ranging from politics and war to business and public sector settings, Kerr found a common pattern: that the organization's goals are too often not supported by the things they actually reward and encourage.Read More