Episodes

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.

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

April 25, 2017 Dmitrijs Kravcenko 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 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).

23: Influence of Institutions and Factor Markets — Mike Wright

February 7, 2017 Ralph Soule 0:10:02
This is an episode in our special series of Classics in the Journal of Management Studies. Mike Wright co-authored "Emerging multinationals from mid-range economies: the influence of institutions and factor markets" in 2013 that looked at the variety in the development of emerging economies and, through institution theory, increased understanding of competition between multinational economies and the respective national ones.

22: Human-Machine Reconfigurations – Lucy Suchman

January 17, 2017 Dmitrijs Kravcenko
We discuss Lucy Suchman’s book “Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Action” that studied the interaction of humans with a state-of-art photocopier designed to be more user friendly and more helpful in solving user problems. Yet videos showed that people found it complicated and difficult. Suchman shows that these interaction problems are greatly due to the underpinning assumptions about users’ behavior, more specifically, due to the idea that humans’ actions are based on the following of plans, which she refutes.

21: Small Research, Big Issues with Brian Pentland and Katharina Dittrich LIVE

December 17, 2016 Dmitrijs Kravcenko
What a treat! Joining us for this Special Episode from the fascinating 'Connections in Action' workshop at the University of Warwick are Katharina Dittrich and Brian Pentland (aka Doctor Decade)! To our great delight, Doctor Decade provided the live intro music for this episode and even performed one of his songs! 

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!

19: Carnegie Mellon Series #2 – Exploration and Exploitation of Knowledge

November 8, 2016 Dmitrijs Kravcenko 0:11:35
In this episode, we read James March's widely cited article, “Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning,” published in 1991 in the journal Organization Science. In the paper, March considered the relationships between exploration of new ways of doing things and the exploitation of accepted, standard practices for organizational learning.