Episodes

38: Socialization and Occupational Communities – Van Maanen

February 4, 2018 Pedro Monteiro
In this episode, we examine John Van Maanen's classic ethnographic study of police recruits from an urban police department in the U.S. "Police socialization: A longitudinal examination of job attitudes in an urban police department," published in Administrative Science Quarterly in 1975, presents Van Maanen's study on the socialization process of new police officers from their training and indoctrination at the police academy to their early months on the beat.

37: Socrates on Management – Oeconomicus by Xenophon

December 5, 2017 Dmitrijs Kravcenko
This episode takes us to ancient Greece and one of the great practical philosophers, Xenophon (pronounced ZEN-uh-phun), whose Oeconomicus may have been one of his "minor" works in the world of philosophy, but it is a fascinating work for those interested in management and organizational studies. The book is written as a dialogue, with Socrates playing a sort of narrator who engages with men and encourages them to become more virtuous, with varying success.

36: The Human Capital Hoax – Employment in the Gig Economy

November 14, 2017 Ralph Soule 0:52:31
We step back from the classics and examine a contemporary work covering a timely topic – the negative effects of ‘Uberization’ and the gig economy on the economic and social fabric. The article is Peter Fleming's "The human capital hoax: Work, debt, and insecurity in the era of uberization," published in 2017 in the journal Organization Studies. In it, Fleming takes a classic approach towards economics and traces its ‘dark’ influence on contemporary dynamics.

35: The Managed Heart – Arlie Hochschild

October 24, 2017 Ralph Soule 0:39:33
The Managed Heart, originally published in 1983 by Dr. Arlie Hochschild, introduced the concept of emotional labour as a counterpart to the physical and mental labour performed in the scope of one’s duties. The importance of emotional labour is made clear in Dr. Hochschild’s descrption of flight attendants, who regardless of the dispositions of airline passengers, turbulence in the flight, or personal stress is required to act and behave in ways that minimize passenger anxiety and encourage them to fly with that airline again. Thus, the book explores the challenges of stress, protecting one’s personal identity and private life, differentiated (and often unfair) gender roles, miscommunication between supervisors and workers or workers and clients, and others.

34: Sociotechnical Systems – Trist and Bamforth

October 4, 2017 Tom Galvin 0:15:41
We discuss important article by Eric Trist and Ken Bamforth, “Some Social and Psychological Consequences of the Longwall Method of Coal-Getting,” published in the journal Human Relations in 1951. Eric Trist was a British social scientist best known for his contributions to the field of organization development and one of the founders of the Tavistock Institute. Ken Bamforth was a miner and industrial fellow of the Tavistock Institute. The article’s subtitle is an examination of the psychological situation and defences of a work group in relation to the social structure and technological content of the work system, and explores how a technological change in the coal-mining industry tore apart the social structure of the workers who were supposed to have benefitted from the change. The technological change in question was the mechanization of the process of mining and extracting coal along a very long face, as opposed to the previous ‘hand-got’ methods where small teams would dig out coal from smaller faces.

33: Foreman – Master and Victim of Doubletalk

September 13, 2017 Ralph Soule 0:13:14
This episode covered Fritz J. Roethlisberger’s classic 1945 article from Harvard Business Review (HBR), “The FOREMAN: Master and Victim of Double Talk.” The article resulted from a study concerning the dissatisfaction of foremen in mass production industries at the time. Foremen suffered under low pay and poor wartime working conditions. Meanwhile, management addressed the foremen’s concerns through short-sighted “symptom-by-symptom” corrective actions to little effect. As a result, foremen were leaning toward unionization, while management found itself unable to keep pace with the social implications of rapidly advancing technologies on the supervisory structure.

32: Organizational Stupidity with Mats Alvesson and Bjorn Erik Mork LIVE

August 23, 2017 Ralph Soule
"Functional stupidity" is the term used by Alvesson and Spicer to describe a strange phenomenon they observed in practice: smart people in organizations that do seemingly not smart things because people are discouraged to think and reflect. Mats Alvesson and Bjørn Erik Mørk sit down with Ralph to talk about functional stupidity and real world implications for nearly an hour after Mats' keynote speech at the conference.

31: Process Studies, PROS and Institutional Theory LIVE

August 15, 2017 Dmitrijs Kravcenko
Please join us for the first of two fascinating special episodes recorded from the International Process Symposium 2017. The aim of the Symposium is to consolidate, integrate, and further develop ongoing efforts to advance a sophisticated process perspective in organization and management studies. PROS is an annual event, organized in conjunction with the annual series Perspectives on Process Organization Studies published by Oxford University Press, and it takes place in a Greek island, in June every year.

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.

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.