Episodes

30: Corporate Culturalism — Hugh Willmott

August 2, 2017 Dmitrijs Kravcenko 0:16:54
Hugh Willmott Strength is Ignorance; Slavery is Freedom: Managing Culture in Modern Organizations was Hugh Willmott’s critique of corporate culturalism, a dominant theme in management studies in the 1980s. In 1993, when the paper appeared in the Journal of Management Studies, strengthening corporate culture was seen as a way to improve organizational performance. But instead of an academic response, Willmott used George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four to explain his objections.Read More

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

29: Carnegie Mellon Series #3 – Designing Business Schools — Herb Simon

June 6, 2017 Dmitrijs Kravcenko 0:13:00
We discuss Herbert Simon’s article “The Business School: A Problem in Organizational Design,” published in 1967. This was written at a time when the business school enterprise was facing difficulties and wrestling over its identity. The paper framed these challenges as a design problem relating to a business school's purpose, what the business school should teach to its students, and what type of faculty would be needed to fulfill the purpose.Read More

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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.Read More

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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.Read More

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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.Read More

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.Read More

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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).Read More

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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.Read More

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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.Read More

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! Read More