Why do we ask for your support?
Because we are entirely supported by our listeners! We have had productive sponsorship arrangements with various schools and journals in the past, but everyone’s belt has tightened and sponsorships dried up a few years ago. We have elected to continue because the support we receive through our donation page has been enough to keep us going. But it means we must pass the hat around continuously.
We need your help to continue talking about organizations! Please consider donating using the donation button in the sidebar at right.
The podcast and its purpose
Talking About Organizations (TAOP) is a conversational podcast about management and organization studies, founded in October 2015 by four then-PhD students based in the US and UK. TAOP was founded on a simple premise — that few people within management and organization studies read the classic, or foundational work upon which the ideas that we study, debate and apply are based. Why do we manage the way we do? Who decided on what is and is not important? Answers to many questions like this are found in the works of the ‘founding fathers’ of management that all too many people are unfamiliar with. In order to remedy this, the four of us set out to read these classic books and articles and then convene to present and discuss them. Idea was that if our listeners did not have the time or the motivation to read the actual source materials, perhaps they would find it convenient to listen to us discuss them in podcast format.
Ten years, 120+ episodes and over 19000 listeners later we remain just as committed to offering critical, thorough and easy-to-consume reflections on the most critical ideas in management and organization studies to anyone willing to listen as we were back then. Always free of charge. Always in control of our content and agenda. Always authentically emergent and never, ever scripted.
We wholeheartedly believe in the intellectual and moral value of honest, long-form conversations, and think that by opening up the academic discipline of management and organization studies, on the one hand, to the broader population and, on the other hand, to more diverse, inclusive and rigorous perspectives is exceptionally important.
What we do
The format of Talking About Organizations can be best described as a cross between a formal reading group and an informal conversation among friends. We read foundational works in management and organization studies, as designated by the cannon (e.g., F.W. Taylor) or as considered as such by us (e.g., Xenophon), and then convene to discuss key ideas, contemporary context and our reflections. This latter part is recorded and becomes the podcast that we distribute online to anyone willing to listen. We are all volunteers and do this for your professional use and because it is fun!
Each episode aims to tackle a particular book or a journal article, or, in some cases, an idea, film or even a conference keynote. We sometimes invite special guests to join us for certain episodes, most of whom are top internationally leading academics (such as Henry Mintzberg, Andrew Pettigrew, Sarah Kaplan, and many, many others). We release an episode split into two parts every month. The podcast is entirely free, not-for-profit and publicly available for everyone to enjoy on iTunes, Spotify, our website and from other sources.
So, what is our ‘Unique Selling Point’?
As a matter of fact, Talking About Organizations is unique in more than a few ways. Perhaps most significantly, TAOP is the first and by far the most popular podcast of its kind within the academic management community. When we started, most of our colleagues would express what could be best described as cautious optimism with respect to the feasibility of the podcast format for professional academics. Since then, TAOP has become something of a nascent institution, proudly being responsible for the following selected milestones:
- Over 19,000 people listening to every new episode, which exceeds the total combined membership of two of the largest professional groups in management and organization studies (EGOS and AoM OMT group) by more than double;
- Being the first podcast to be cited as a source in two peer-reviewed articles (Bridgman, Cummings, and Ballard, 2018; du Gay and Vikkelso, 2018) and referenced in two very cool books (Grey, 2016; Bridgman and Cummings, 2020);
- First podcast to hold an annual standing Professional Development Workshop at the largest management and organization studies conference in the world – the Academy of Management;
- First podcast to design and host a full academic conference around itself (OLKC 2019 in Brighton, UK);
- Collaboration with a premier academic journal – the Journal of Management Studies – to record a series of episodes on their most influential articles, featuring distinguished authors;
But these milestones aside, the most important and lasting contribution of the podcast is to have re-invigorated a growing interest in foundational ideas among management scholars and a steady engagement with a broader audience both within academia and outside of it – while about ⅔ of our listeners come from various parts of academia, the other ⅓ is a diverse mix of practitioners, policy makers, educators, entertainers, athletes, etc. We regularly receive feedback from this latter group on how listening to the podcast enabled them to make sense of things they have read for work or class, or were attempting to research but could not quite grasp or put in context.
So, we thank you for all your support last year and invite you to join us in thinking about the future of TAOP, and what that future will look like!