Pedro Monteiro

73: Organizing Innovation — Michael Tushman

February 16, 2021 Pedro Monteiro
Discusses an important work from Michael Tushman about how innovation benefits from individuals who communicate across boundaries. With special guest Hila Lifshitz-Assaf who has collaborated with Tushman and did her own dissertation on boundary spanning in the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).Read More

70: Epistemic Coloniality in Latin America – Eduardo Ibarra-Colado

November 10, 2020 Pedro Monteiro
We now continue the effort to expand the canon of organization theory and management science, this time focusing on Latin America. Worldwide, much of the theorizing and publishing of research has been greatly influenced by a dominant mode of thought originating in western Europe, the U.S., and Canada. Eduardo Ibarra-Colado, whose famous 2006 work "Organization studies and epistemic coloniality in Latin America: thinking otherness from the margins" represents a manifesto and call to action by all scholars to consider how the current paradigm severely disadvantages scholarship in Latin America.Read More

69: Our 5th Anniversary Special!

October 13, 2020 Pedro Monteiro
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 Pedro Monteiro
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

65: Organizational Structure — The Aston School

June 9, 2020 Pedro Monteiro
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 Pedro Monteiro
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 Pedro Monteiro
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

61: Power & Influence in Organizations — Dan Brass

February 11, 2020 Pedro Monteiro
What is power and influence? Although power appears as a multilevel concept, the early organizational literature tended to view it as wielded by people--measured as skills, traits, or competencies. This would change in the 1980s, in large part to a classic empirical study providing evidence that one's position within an organizational structure was more likely to translate into one's source of power. Dan Brass' article, "Being in the Right Place: A Structural Analysis of Individual Influence in an Organization" from Administrative Science Quarterly is the subject of this episode.Read More

58: Contingency Approach – AOM 2019 Workshop LIVE

November 20, 2019 Pedro Monteiro
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

56: Cooperative Advantage – Charles Clinton Spaulding

July 16, 2019 Pedro Monteiro
In this episode, we acknowledge the extraordinary contributions of Charles Clinton Spaulding, an important management thought leader who, like many African-Americans prior to the U.S. civil rights movement, has been sadly overlooked in the management canon. In 1927, with the U.S. in recession, Spaulding wrote a reflection of his experiences as a business leader in the Pittsburgh Courier, a widely-read newspaper, hoping to help fellow African-American business leaders overcome the economic downturn.Read More