Talking About Organizations Podcast

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...

In Part 2 of our episode on Barley, we conclude the discussion on the relationship that he drew among the institutionalized patterns of behavior in the hospitals, the actions that the radiologists and technologists undertook, and the subsequent changes to those patterns. How can we use these ideas to better understand work and technological change today? Are there other newer lenses with which we can make sense of on-going structur...

This month we discuss a foundational work by Steven Barley on the introduction of new technologies into established organizations. His study of the fielding of CT scanners in two hospitals showed how established organization structures and patterns of behavior influenced actions undertaken by radiologists and the new CT technologists, which in turn changed the structures in the hospital. This study contributed to a greater understa...

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 ...