Dmitrijs Kravcenko, Pedro Monteiro, Author at Talking About Organizations Podcast

40: Symposium on the Gig Economy LIVE

February 24, 2018 Pedro Monteiro

The TAOP Symposium on the Gig Economy was a unique, one-day interdisciplinary symposium on the forms and effects of management in the contemporary sharing (a.k.a. gig) economy that took place on 15 December 2017 at the University of Sussex. Blending individual and panel presentations from leading scholars and commentators with group conversations, we wanted to examine the continuities – as well as disruptions - in the ways that work is organised through, and in light of, online platforms.

39: Carnegie Mellon Series #4 – Organizational Choice

February 8, 2018 Pedro Monteiro

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

February 4, 2018 Pedro Monteiro

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.

35: The Managed Heart – Arlie Hochschild

October 24, 2017 Pedro Monteiro 0:39:33

The Managed Heart, originally published in 1983 by Dr. Arlie Hochschild, introduced the concept of emotional labour as a counterpart to the physical and mental labour performed in the scope of one’s duties. The importance of emotional labour is made clear in Dr. Hochschild’s descrption of flight attendants, who regardless of the dispositions of airline passengers, turbulence in the flight, or personal stress is required to act and behave in ways that minimize passenger anxiety and encourage them to fly with that airline again. Thus, the book explores the challenges of stress, protecting one’s personal identity and private life, differentiated (and often unfair) gender roles, miscommunication between supervisors and workers or workers and clients, and others.

34: Sociotechnical Systems – Trist and Bamforth

October 4, 2017 Pedro Monteiro 0:15:41

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

September 13, 2017 Pedro Monteiro 0:13:14

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.

27: Context and Action in the Transformation of the Firm — Andrew Pettigrew

April 25, 2017 Pedro Monteiro 0:12:00

We discuss Andrew Pettigrew's classic JMS article, "Context and Action in the Transformation of the Firm,” that introduced Pettigrew's triangle of context, content, and process into the discourse on change management though his study of change in an UK chemical firm.

26: Enacted Sensemaking in Crisis Situations — Karl Weick

March 28, 2017 Pedro Monteiro

We discuss another JMS classic, Karl Weick's "Enacted Sensemaking in Crisis Situations," that examines how that the central mechanisms behind failure and incidents is given by the interaction between humans and technology (and not by technology in itself). Weick's study examined the the Bophal Disaster, a gas leak incident that took place in 1984 in India and shows how individuals enacted rather than encountered the events.

25: Competitive Groups as Cognitive Communities — Joseph Porac

March 15, 2017 Pedro Monteiro 0:16:41

We discuss another JMS classic, “Competitive Groups as Cognitive Communities the case of Scottish Knitwear Manufacturers” by Porac, Thomas, and Baden-Fuller from 1989. Employing an approach based on the ‘interpretive’ side of organizations, the Authors propose that a key mechanism in competition and strategy is given by the “mental models used by key decision-makers to interpret the task environment of their organization”. These, in turn, emerge out of material and cognitive exchanges among customers, suppliers, and producers.

Pedro Monteiro