Talking About Organizations Podcast

In Part 2 of our episode on Kanter’s Commitment and Community, we examine in depth her conclusions about the distinction between “retreat” and “service” communities and why the former tends to fail while the latter shows greater chances of long-term success. However, we also debate on the meaning of “success” as being more nuanced that merely duration of the commune over time. We then discuss the implications for this study for the...

This month we return to the works of Rosabeth Moss Kanter, whose works on tokenism we explored way back in Episode 17. This time, we will discuss one of her better known books Commitment and Community: Commune and Utopias in Sociological Perspective that examines the origins and life cycle of numerous communes that sprang up in the US from the mid-19th century to the 1960s. Written based on her dissertation study at a time when hip...

Coming soon! In our next episode, we will discuss Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s famous book Commitment and Community that examines the origins and life cycle of numerous communes that sprang up in the US from the mid-19th century to the 1960s. What drove people to start or join these communes? And then, what factors allowed some to survive for decades or longer while others broke up within months? The answers have added greatly to our und...

In Part 2 of the episode on Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, we bring the concepts to the present day. His essay uses examples mostly from the natural sciences, so we ponder over how well his concepts apply to the social sciences. Also, in Kuhn’s time, science was generally seen to be a good thing and scientific progress translated into benefits for society writ large. Sixty-plus years later, science and scientists are n...

For our 10th anniversary episode, we selected a modern classic that greatly informs science and research across many disciplines, including organization studies. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a book often assigned to rising graduate students as a primer for entering the sciences. A culmination of Kuhn’s earlier works on the philosophy and history of science, Scientific Revolutions challenges the notion th...

10 years ago today, on October 13th, 2015, four rising scholars – Dmitrijs, Pedro, Miranda, and Ralph – launched the Talking About Organization Podcast with an episode on Frederic Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management. In this special, current-day cast members reflect on what we have done and what we would like to continue doing in the program. To learn more about this program and its mission, please go to our website at...

Private SNAFU was a series of black-and-white animated shorts of three to five minutes in length recounting various misadventures of the title character as he goes to war. The purpose of the training videos was to socialize and reinforce the importance of adherence existing US Army policies and procedures and helping to introduce soldiers to potential hazards and challenges that they would face in combat. Produced by Warner Bros. u...

For this year’s movie episode, we elected to take on a video series used during World War II to help socialize US Army rules and procedures among forces either deployed or getting ready to deploy. Private SNAFU was a series of black-and-white animated shorts of three to five minutesin length recounting various misadventures of the title character as he goes to war. We will examine these videos from an organizational studies perspec...

In Part 2, we continue exploring the case study of NASA in the 1960s. Having discussed the strategies used by President Kennedy to inspire NASA’s members to the ultimate goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade, it was then up to the members to connect their work activities (many of which had nothing directly to do with spaceflight) to that ultimate goal. To what extent could this be replicated, we asked ourselves...

In this month’s episode, we examine a historical case study about how meaningfulness of work can be shaped by leaders’ actions. One frequently cited example of the solidarity felt among members of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) during the decade-long runup to the Apollo XI moon landing is the often-repeated—but apocryphal—story of a NASA janitor who, when asked by President John F. Kennedy what he was doin...

In Part 2 of the episode on Mark Granovetter's 1985 paper, "Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness," we consider the meaning of embeddedness in contemporary practical situations and the significant body of research that followed forty years later. His framework provides a more nuanced and realistic explanation of economic life, accounting for both the guiding influence of social contexts and...

In this month’s episode, we discuss Mark Granovetter's 1985 paper, Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness. Granovetter's work provided a middle ground between two overly simplistic perspectives presented respectively by economists and sociologists-- the undersocialized view that treated individuals as isolated, purely rational agents and the oversocialized perspective that viewed individuals as enmeshed i...

In Part 2 of the episode on Harry Braverman’s book Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the 20th Century, we consider the half-century since its publication and how things turned out rather differently from Braverman’s predictions at the end of the book. Algorithmic management, deunionization, globalization, and advances in technology have furthered conditions that Braverman argued against. Why is that, and what d...

In this month’s episode, we discuss Harry Braverman’s book Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the 20th Century. Along with his criticism of how work had been systematically deskilled over time, he was also highly critical of many of the seminal authors and schools of thought that he felt enabled this shift. Among his targets were scientific management under Frederic Taylor, but also the human relations school, t...