Episodes

68: Globalization and Culture Clashes — “American Factory” (Documentary)

September 8, 2020 Tom Galvin
For this episode, we cover a documentary that presents a compelling picture about culture clashes in the workplace. American Factory is an important and powerful documentary, telling the story of cultural clashes and labor-management relations as a Chinese firm re-opened and re-purposed a close automotive plant in Ohio.

67: Professions & Professionalism — Andrew Abbott

August 11, 2020 Tom Galvin
The text for this episode is Andrew Abbott's 1989 book The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor. This book is a watershed in our understanding of professions and their work. While previous literature had a focus on distinctive occupational groups and their professionalization projects, Abbott invited us to think more systemically about the interdependencies and how professions compete with each other over "jurisdictions," claims of ownership and responsibility over expert knowledge and its applications.

66: Workplace Isolation – Forester

July 16, 2020 Ella Hafermalz
In this episode (which took place in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic), we explore the social and emotional impacts to the worker on having to work from home. For some workers, the concept of telework is hardly new. But many other vocations place great value on regular social contact with clients and customers. These include teachers, doctors, lawyers, public servants, and many others. The sudden thrust to teleworking for an unknown period of time has raised questions as to how these workers are coping with the new normal.

65: Organizational Structure — The Aston School

June 9, 2020 Pedro Monteiro
The Aston Group was based in the United Kingdom and played a major role in the early development of organization theory and management science. Starting in the 1960s, they carried out a program of research that departed from the comparative study of work organizations in the Birmingham area in the UK and contributed landmark works on organizational structure and the development of contingency approach.

64: Disasters and Crisis Management – Powley and Weick

May 12, 2020 Ralph Soule
Crises and disasters are regular occurrences in organizational life, putting leaders into the spotlight and organizations under tremendous pressure to respond appropriately -- whether it is to preserve life or salvage reputations. With the COVID-19 pandemic ongoing, we wanted to discuss some important texts on organizational crises and their management, and in this episode we present two -- from Karl Weick studying the Tenerife air disaster and Edward Powley on activating organizational resilience.

63: Remote Operations — The Hudson’s Bay Company

April 14, 2020 Tom Galvin
For this episode we discuss the history of a classic firm which exercised remote operations as a matter of course and faced multiple pandemics during its early existence. The Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) was chartered in 1670 by King Charles II at a time when the French monopolized fur trading with Native Americans in modern-day Canada. From then, the English would establish its own robust fur trading industry, establishing hundreds of posts from the western shores of Hudson Bay all across modern western Canada. The case is exceptional in demonstrating the historical challenges of remote operations where communications were limited to letters sent annually with the fur shipments across the Atlantic. How could London possibly maintain oversight and exercise control under such conditions?

62: Consumerism & Meaning at Work — WALL-E

March 17, 2020 Tom Galvin
This is another episode where we look at organizations through the medium of film. WALL-E, a 2008 animated film from Pixar, is the story of a robot who at one time was part of a massive clean-up effort on Earth while all the humans left to live on cruise ships in space. In this episode, we talk about the setting and the story for clues about organizational behavior and management.

61: Power & Influence in Organizations — Dan Brass

February 11, 2020 Pedro Monteiro
What is power and influence? Although power appears as a multilevel concept, the early organizational literature tended to view it as wielded by people--measured as skills, traits, or competencies. This would change in the 1980s, in large part to a classic empirical study providing evidence that one's position within an organizational structure was more likely to translate into one's source of power. Dan Brass' article, "Being in the Right Place: A Structural Analysis of Individual Influence in an Organization" from Administrative Science Quarterly is the subject of this episode.

60: Contingency Theory — Joan Woodward

January 14, 2020 Tom Galvin
Joan Woodward was a pioneer in organization theory, and in this episode we explore her seminal work Industrial Organization: Theory and Practice, originally published in 1965. The book presents the results of an extensive longitudinal study of the technologies, processes, and systems used by over one hundred industrial firms concentrated in southeast England over a ten year period.

59: Theory X and Y – Douglas McGregor

December 2, 2019 Tom Galvin
In this episode, we examine Douglas McGregor's most famous work, The Human Side of Enterprise, that proposed two "theories" encapsulating management assumptions about human behavior. His Theory X described the dominant thinking of the 1950s, where managers held a dim view of employees, who were assumed to be disinclined to work and had to be coerced into doing so. McGregor felt that Theory X led to adversarial relationships between managers and workers, resulting in poorer performance and an unhealthy environment. His Theory Y saw employees as wishing to be challenged and fulfilled if properly empowered and engaged.