Miranda Lewis

69: Our 5th Anniversary Special!

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!

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

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.

52: Management in Practice – Rosemary Stewart

What do managers do in practice? How do they spend their time (or put another way, how does their time spend them)? Are there differences in the demands of managers in different positions, or withiin different organizations? These were the questions that famed management theorist Rosemary Stewart set out to uncover in her research back in the 1960s, resulting in the first edition of this episode's subject--her book Managers and Their Jobs: A Study of the Similarities and Differences in the Ways Managers Spend Their Time.

50: Celebrating 50 Episodes! What Have We Learned?

Talking about organizations has reached 50 episodes!

 To mark this occasion, we gathered all seven of us hosts to discuss what we like (and perhaps not) about the podcast and podcasting, what our favorite or most remembered episodes were, and what we have learned along the way. 

Turns out, one of the key things we learned was how much such a small number of dedicated scholars and practitioners can do with a lot of motivation and energy. As we discuss, there were many in the beginning who scoffed at the idea of podcasting on classic and emerging organization theories and concepts of management science. But with over 12,000 active listeners worldwide, Talking About Organizations has proven to be useful and entertaining all at once.

We hope you enjoy this brief retrospective. Also, click on the below graphic to view all the places where we have podcasted from in our many travels — sometimes having to find unique and interesting places to record to avoid noise and other problems!

Some photos from our first recordings and meetings!

Did you know THAT…

  • the podcast grew out of intellectually fertile soil of the Innovation, Knowledge and Organisational Networks Research Centre at the Warwick Business School. Thank you Jacky Swan, Davide Nicolini, Dawn Coton and many others for your early support and feedback!
  • while TAOP is no longer the sole academic podcast of its kind in management and organization studies, it is by far the largest one? Enjoyed by over 12000 regular listeners, Talking About Organizations is a reminder to all of us of the value of conversations to intellectual development and of the interest that our community has in foundational texts.
  • by the 50th episode we have had the pleasure of welcoming 25 guests on the show 27 times? And this is excluding guests and keynote speakers for our special events!
  • Speaking of special events, December 2017 marked the very first time we independently hosted an event – the Symposium on the Continuities and Disruptions of Management in the Gig Economy, featuring a whole bunch of wonderful people! Also big thanks to Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and University of Sussex for providing the resources that made it possible!
  • Katharina Dittrich (E4 and E21) and Mats Alvesson (E28 and E32) are the only two guests to make more than a single appearance on the show? Katharina also holds the honor of being our very first guest!
  • the podcast has been referenced in two peer-reviewed journals? See du Gay and Vikkelso (2018) and Bridgman, Cummings and Ballard (2018) for examples of two articles showing exceptionally good taste in their choice of sources.
  • there is a myth that rare collectable artefacts from the early days of the podcast exist scattered throughout the land… these range from the five original coffee mugs to a unique signed poster from the time of E21. Rest assured – we don’t know where most of these are either.

42: Carnegie Mellon Series #5 – Organizational Learning

We discuss Barbara Levitt and James G. March’s article “Organizational Learning,” published in the 1988 edition of the Annual Review of Sociology. Although the authors hailed from Stanford University in California, we have included this episode in our Carnegie-Mellon Series because of James March’s involvement and perspectives on organization that clearly influenced the article. This work was a literature review across various streams in organizational learning up through the 1980s. Topics include learning from experience, organizational memory, ecologies of learning, and organizational intelligence. Of particular interest is how organizational learning was defined as not an outcome but a process of translating the cumulative experiences of individuals and codifying them as routines within the organization. From this, the authors applied the brain metaphor – such as memory and intelligence – to explain the phenomenon.

39: Carnegie Mellon Series #4 – Organizational Choice

The podcasters discuss a fascinating article, “A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice,” published in Administrative Science Quarterly back in 1972 by Michael Cohen, James March, and Johan Olsen. This is another episode from the Carnegie-Mellon University tradition, alongside Episode 4 on Organizational Routines and Episode 19 on Organizational Learning. This installment addresses organizational decision making and choice and, like the others in this series, it changed the way people think about organizations and organizational behavior.

38: Socialization and Occupational Communities – Van Maanen

In this episode, we examine John Van Maanen's classic ethnographic study of police recruits from an urban police department in the U.S. "Police socialization: A longitudinal examination of job attitudes in an urban police department," published in Administrative Science Quarterly in 1975, presents Van Maanen's study on the socialization process of new police officers from their training and indoctrination at the police academy to their early months on the beat.

34: Sociotechnical Systems – Trist and Bamforth

We discuss important article by Eric Trist and Ken Bamforth, “Some Social and Psychological Consequences of the Longwall Method of Coal-Getting,” published in the journal Human Relations in 1951. Eric Trist was a British social scientist best known for his contributions to the field of organization development and one of the founders of the Tavistock Institute. Ken Bamforth was a miner and industrial fellow of the Tavistock Institute. The article’s subtitle is an examination of the psychological situation and defences of a work group in relation to the social structure and technological content of the work system, and explores how a technological change in the coal-mining industry tore apart the social structure of the workers who were supposed to have benefitted from the change. The technological change in question was the mechanization of the process of mining and extracting coal along a very long face, as opposed to the previous ‘hand-got’ methods where small teams would dig out coal from smaller faces.

33: Foreman – Master and Victim of Doubletalk

This episode covered Fritz J. Roethlisberger’s classic 1945 article from Harvard Business Review (HBR), “The FOREMAN: Master and Victim of Double Talk.” The article resulted from a study concerning the dissatisfaction of foremen in mass production industries at the time. Foremen suffered under low pay and poor wartime working conditions. Meanwhile, management addressed the foremen’s concerns through short-sighted “symptom-by-symptom” corrective actions to little effect. As a result, foremen were leaning toward unionization, while management found itself unable to keep pace with the social implications of rapidly advancing technologies on the supervisory structure.

24: Learning by Knowledge-Intensive Firms — Bill Starbuck

We discuss another of the classics from the Journal of Management Studies, a paper from 1992 by William Starbuck, entitled “Learning by knowledge-intensive firms”. This time, we are very happy to be joined by the author of the work, Professor William Starbuck, one of the leading experts in Organization Theory, whose research covers an incredible number of areas of expertise, as shown in his biography. This paper is the first to discuss knowledge intensive firms, concept based on the economists’ notions of capital and labour intensive firms, and which are defined as those firms where “knowledge has more importance than other inputs” (p.715).