Organizational Behavior

28: Organizations as Rhetoric — Mats Alvesson

May 16, 2017 Dmitrijs Kravcenko 0:16:06
Our next episode in the JMS classics series covers Mats Alvesson's ", Organizations as Rhetoric: Knowledge-Intensive Firms and the Struggle with Ambiguity" from 1993 that concluded with the idea that organizations are best understood as 'systems of persuasion' where actors use their agency to engage in discourse on behalf of the organization.

26: Enacted Sensemaking in Crisis Situations — Karl Weick

March 28, 2017 Dmitrijs Kravcenko
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 Dmitrijs Kravcenko 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.

24: Learning by Knowledge-Intensive Firms — Bill Starbuck

February 21, 2017 Ralph Soule 0:10:48
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).

20: High Reliability in Practice – USN Rear Admiral Tom Mercer

December 17, 2016 Ralph Soule 0:15:54
Based around a classic work by Weick and Roberts (1993) on Collective Mind in Organizations - where the authors observed and analyzed the way people on the deck of an aircraft carrier function in a collective manner - this episode brings you a discussion of how concepts of High Reliability (see also Episode 11) flesh out in real life!

14: Simply Managing, by Henry Mintzberg

August 2, 2016 Dmitrijs Kravcenko 0:11:18
The book we analyzed in this episode, Simply Managing (2013), is an updated study of managers conducted by Henry Mintzberg based on observing 29 managers at all levels of organizations across a range of industries and organizational structures: business, government, healthcare, and pluralistic organizations such as museums and non-governmental organizations.

13: Banana Time – Donald Roy

July 5, 2016 Dmitrijs Kravcenko 0:09:57
One of the most famous ethnographic works, Banana Time: Job Satisfaction and Informal Interaction describes Donald F. Roy's experience of working as a drill press operator (as in the picture on this page) for two months. Set against the backdrop of Taylor-inspired Scientific Management, the paper provides a thick description of the setting, the tools of work and, most importantly, behaviour and dynamics of the group of workers whom Roy was assigned to work with.