Organizational Behavior

116: Resource Dependence Perspective — Pfeffer & Salancik

August 27, 2024 Catherine Jackson 0:03:44
Resource Dependence Theory (RDT) represented a significant departure from extant literature on management and organization studies in the 1970s. Prior to the publication of Jeffrey Pfeffer and Gerald’s The External Control of Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective in 1978, the social context and environment surrounding organizations were little studied. In the book, Pfeffer & Salancik argued that the behaviors or organizations and their managers were driven by the context, because of the need for resources in order to survive. Thus, managerial decisions were based far more on how to manage interdependencies with external social actors than what would presumably lead to objectively better outcomes. They believe RDT explains more accurately the kinds of managerial behaviors observed and how organizations chose (and fired) their executives than other theories of the time.

115: Sociology of Science — Robert K. Merton

July 23, 2024 Miranda Lewis 0:03:54
Robert K. Merton was a sociologist who founded the study of the sociology of science, how acts of research influence and are influenced by the contexts being studied. Two of his early essays exemplify this body of work whereby he and his research teams reflect on the challenges and difficulties of performing field work. In this episode, we examine two speeches delivered in 1947 – “The Machine, the Worker, and the Engineer” and “Selected Problems of Field Work in the Planned Community” – that exemplifies the effort to better understand how to study social change in organizations due to technology change.

114: Sociotechnical Systems — Trist & Bamforth (revisited)

June 6, 2024 Tom Galvin
With over 110 episodes in our catalogue, we decided it was time to take a step back and revisit one of our earlier episodes that continues to come up time and again. Episode 34, covering Trist & Bamforth’s study on the longwall method of coal-getting, was referenced in sixteen (16) episodes since its release. That is more than any other episode! This re-release includes a new supplement further the conversation to contemporary issues and a sidecast on the use of this study as a cautionary tale for professional education.

113: Sports & Gender – “A League of Their Own”

May 14, 2024 Sarah Otner 0:03:46
The rapid growth of women’s professional team sports has a history, and many contemporary women’s athletes have honored the legacy of past pioneers as their inspiration. Included in this legacy is the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) that existed from 1943 through 1954 in the U.S. and popularized through the 1992 film “A League of Their Own,” directed by Penny Marshall and starring a large ensemble cast including Geena Davis and Tom Hanks. In addition to describing the lived experiences of the league’s first players, it captures how deeply embedded and institutionalized baseball was in the US such that fears of losing it due to World War II and the drafting of players into military service caused baseball owners to create a women’s league. The movie touches on various important organizational themes such as gendering, innovation, and identity.

112: Hierarchies & Promotion – The “Peter Principle”

April 9, 2024 Miranda Lewis 0:04:04
The diligent administrative assistant moves up to supervisor but fails. The assembly line worker is promoted to foreman but cannot do the job. A teacher earns a deputy principal position in a school but falls flat on their face. Why is that? Why does this seem to happen across organizations? In The Peter Principle, Lawrence J. Peter and Raymond Hull not only provides answers to these questions, they delve into all the possible implications. The Principle goes like this, “In a hierarchy, everyone rises to their level of incompetence.” How they derived this principle the subject of our conversation that explores one of the funniest but more insightful book on the perils of organizational life ever written.

111: Visible & Invisible Work – Susan Leigh Star

March 12, 2024 Rohin Borpujari 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.

110: Organizations and Law – Lauren Edelman

February 13, 2024 Pedro Monteiro 0:04:11
In this episode, we explore two articles from Lauren Edelman, “Legal Ambiguity and Symbolic Structures: Organizational Mediation of Civil Rights Law” from 1992 and “The Endogeneity of Legal Regulation: Grievance Procedures as Rational Myth” from 1999. These studies showed a wide variety of organizational responses to the enactment of civil rights legislation, but that certain responses were legitimated due to their success in symbolically showing effort in addressing discrimination and thus institutionalized across other organizations.

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.

107: Institutionalized Rules and Formal Structures — Meyer & Rowan

November 14, 2023 Pedro Monteiro 0:03:57
We discuss John Meyer and Brian Rowan’s famous 1977 article “Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony.” In it, they argued that “institutionalized products, services, techniques, policies, and programs function as powerful myths, and many organizations adopt them ceremonially” (p. 340), even if they result in organizations becoming less efficient or effective in their intended missions or purposes. In fact, these myths can become so powerful as to stigmatize organizations that reject them.

102: Executive Leadership — Sloan’s “My Years at General Motors”

June 13, 2023 Leonardo Melo Lins 0:04:52
Alfred Sloan was President, Chairman, and CEO of General Motors from 1923 to 1956. His memoir “My Years at General Motors” tells his story about how he took a corporation consisting of several disparate and competing companies and shaped them into division that manufactured cars tailored to different segments of society. He constantly pursued and integrated new technologies into the automobiles themselves while also shaping the buying experience through the introductions of different styles, improved relations with dealings, and financial services that rivaled banks.