Samantha Ortiz

119: Management & the Worker — Roethlisberger & Dickson

November 12, 2024 Samantha Ortiz 0:04:36
We return for another look at the Hawthorne Studies through Fritz Roethlisberger and William Dickson’s 1939 book Management and the Worker. The work chronicles five years of experiments that initially sought the optimal conditions for increased worker performance but evolved into an examination of the social controls that worker exercise over themselves for self-preservation against managerial decisions. It also includes an introspective look into the researchers themselves as they had to design new experiments to make sense of the surprising and contradictory findings. The book is incredibly detailed and laid the foundation for the development of the Human Relations tradition in organization studies.Read More

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111: Visible & Invisible Work – Susan Leigh Star

March 12, 2024 Samantha Ortiz 0:03:05
In this episode, we focus on the emerging discourse from the 1990s on how automated systems would potentially change the very meaning of work. The discussion is on a seminal work of Susan Leigh Star and co-author Anselm Strauss, “Layers of Silence, Arenas of Voice: The Ecology of Visible and Invisible Work,” published in CSCW’s flagship journal, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, in 1999. The article focuses on the challenges and risks of automating work processes without due consideration of all the invisible work done in an organization that systems designers might overlook.Read More

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108: Presentation of Self in Everyday Life – Goffman

December 12, 2023 Samantha Ortiz 0:03:58
Erving Goffman’s 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life was an important attempt at explaining both apparent and hidden human behaviors across social and organizational settings. Through a comprehensive framework employing theater as a metaphor, he describes the roles of people as performers and members of an audience who try to shape the unfolding situation in ways suitable to their aims. Meanwhile, there is a backstage where people return to being themselves and proceed to set conditions for the next performance, and rules and protocols seek to protect such backstage behaviors from unwanted observation or disclosure. The aim for each person is to be seen in the best or most purposeful light.Read More

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106: The Study of Organizations Across Disciplines

October 10, 2023 Samantha Ortiz
We sit down with Woody Powell and Bob Gibbons who, since 2016, have been organizing the summer institute on organizational effectiveness at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) in Stanford, California. We ask them to reflect on the history of CASBS and the summer institute, the value of fostering interdisciplinary conversations on the study of organizations, and the way in which they design and conduct the summer institute to allow young scholars across economics, sociology, management, public policy, political science, information and communication studies, and other fields, to learn from one another.Read More

105: Manifest & Latent Roles — Alvin Gouldner

September 12, 2023 Samantha Ortiz 0:03:47
Alvin Gouldner wrote the article, “Cosmopolitans and locals: Toward an analysis of latent social roles” in 1957 to propose that through the 1950s latent roles had been seriously overlooked by scholars. Manifest roles, described as those roles and role identities that are directly related to one’s defined position in the organizational structure, had been the sole focus. Latent roles comprised the complementary roles that members made salient but were not officially recognized. Instead, managers might dismiss such roles as “irrelevant, inappropriate, or illegitimate” to recognize formally despite them being essential in the organization’s social fabricRead More

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103: Bringing Work Back In — Barley & Kunda

July 11, 2023 Samantha Ortiz 0:03:54
In their 2001 Organization Science article “Bringing Work Back In,” Steven Barley and Gideon Kunda lamented how the study of work, its organization, and its performance shifted after the 1950s. Work was the center of attention among the classic era of organization studies beginning with Frederic Taylor, but afterward, the focus shifted to post-bureaucratic concepts such as boundaryless organizations and networks. Barley and Kunda argues that these new ideas are not grounded in rigorous studies of how people perform work in such new organizations. Read More

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99: Gendering in Organizations — Joan Acker

March 14, 2023 Samantha Ortiz 0:04:14
Joan Acker’s 1990 article “Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations” was a significant work in feminist theories of organizations. She charged that prior feminist research had wrongly assumed that organizational structures were gender neutral. Instead, everything about organizations from structures to symbols are inherently gendered, and until that was acknowledged and studied, organizations would continue to reinforce long-standing gender inequalities. The article is significant for its synthesis of a growing body of research that questioned the claims of gender neutrality in organizational practices that creates and sustains barriers to women’s equality in the workplace.Read More

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96: Informating at Work – Shoshana Zuboff

December 6, 2022 Samantha Ortiz 0:04:58
We discuss Shoshana Zuboff’s "In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power" that examines several cases of organizations introducing information technologies in the workplace hoping to improve organizational performance, transparency, and collaboration but instead dehumanized the workplace and ushered in new ways of managerial surveillance. In Part 1, we discuss the major themes of the book, her telling of the histories of both blue- and white-collar work, and her incredible case studies.Read More

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89: Administrative Behavior in Public Sector — Herbert Kaufman

May 17, 2022 Samantha Ortiz 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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88: Social Defenses Against Anxiety — Isabel Menzies

April 12, 2022 Samantha Ortiz 0:04:53
This month’s episode examines one of the classic studies from the Tavistock Institute, Isabel Menzies’ “A Case-Study in the Functioning of Social Systems as a Defence Against Anxiety.” This famous study of how a teaching hospital developed odd and somewhat dysfunctional methods for protecting its nurses from anxiety and stress by effectively isolating nurses from the patients to prevent emotional attachment. Nursing students witnessing these methods in practice found them in violation of their expectations regarding care and their professional calling, and were quitting. What were these methods and why did they come about?Read More

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