Talking About Organizations Podcast

In Part 2 of our episode on Prasad, we shift our attention to his 2003 book chapter titled “The gaze of the other: Postcolonial theory and organizational analysis” that synthesizes the foundational works of postcolonial theory and tie it to cross-cultural challenges faced by contemporary organizations. We also discuss the implications of the theory in the two decades that followed given the significant global changes that have occu...

Anshuman Prasad (1954-2023) was a leading scholar and development of postcolonial theory and bringing it to the domain of management and organization studies. The theory strove to explain the significance influences and impacts that Western colonialism had on non-Western cultures and its implications for organizations located in non-Western settings. We are reading two of his many works, one about the specific use of science as a t...

This is Part 2 on our discussion of Fligstein’s 1996 article, “Markets as politics: A political-cultural approach to market institutions." Here we work our way through the 16 propositions” (or provocations as we would refer to them)and test them out from a contemporary view. Do they make sense in retrospect? Do they continue to lend themselves toward a useful research agenda? What alternative or additional propositions might w...

Fligstein’s 1996 article, “Markets as politics: A political-cultural approach to market institutions,” was an important contribution to the field of economic sociology, countering the dominant neoclassical view of economics that failed to explain market behaviors in practice. He argued for an alternative paradigm – a “political-cultural” model that suggested that the formation of markets was part of “state building” and subjected t...

The Talking About Organizations Podcast website is more than just a host for great conversations. It is also a resource for rising scholars of organization theory and management science. And so, to launch our 10th year of podcasting and with 120+ episodes covering so many great classics of organization studies, we decided the website and the program needed a boost. Part 1 is a conversation about professional knowledge in which we ...

In Part 2 on Zbaracki’s “The rhetoric and reality of Total Quality Management,” we look at contemporary examples of rhetoric-reality gaps. Not being confined to “business fads,” there are many other cases where threatened legitimacy of an organization can lead it to acting defensively and avoid public acknowledgement of significant problems. What can or should managers do to avoid getting caught in a “lie” (or a really robust “fish...

This month we explore a renowned multiple-case study commonly assigned as foundational readings in organization studies programs. Mark Zbaracki’s “The rhetoric and reality of Total Quality Management” chronicled the development and introduction of Total Quality Management (TQM) into the corporate environment, only to find that in many cases its implementation did not align with the promises made by leaders about process improvement...

Coming soon! You might not have heard of Total Quality Management (TQM) but you no doubt have encountered pre-packaged performance improvement programs like it. What happens when the promises and rhetoric surrounding such a program exceed the realities of its implementation? Such is the subject of Mark Zbaracki’s “The rhetoric and reality of Total Quality Management” that explored its implementation in several different sites, find...

In this episode, we discuss “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizations,” a ground breaking article by sociologists Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell in 1983. The authors argued that the traditional views of why organizations tended to assimilate one another was not explained by the pursuit of rationality or efficiency. Rather, they did so in response to many other stimuli such as r...

Coming soon! We will tackle “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizations,” a ground breaking article by sociologists Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell in 1983. They argued that the traditional views of why organizations tended to assimilate one another was not explained by the pursuit of rationality or efficiency. Rather, they did so in response to many other stimuli such as regulato...

The episode on Roethlisberger and Dickson concludes with a discussion of the contemporary meanings and importance of the Hawthorne studies. The authors concluded the book with the idea that executives should establish dedicated positions of leadership for mastering the human dimension of work in their firms and become experts in solving human problems so to maintain morale and optimize productivity. But was this heeded? Is it time ...

We return for another look at the Hawthorne Studies through Fritz Roethlisberger and William Dickson’s 1939 book Management and the Worker. The work chronicles five years of experiments that initially sought the optimal conditions for increased worker performance but evolved into an examination of the social controls that worker exercise over themselves for self-preservation against managerial decisions. It also includes an introsp...

We return for another look at the Hawthorne Studies through Fritz Roethlisberger and William Dickson’s 1939 book Management and the Worker. The work chronicles five years of experiments that initially sought the optimal conditions for increased worker performance but evolved into an examination of the social controls that worker exercise over themselves for self-preservation against managerial decisions. It also includes an introsp...