Talking About Organizations Podcast

We return to the works of Mary Parker Follett and explore her ideas on professionalizing business. Expanding on our examination of her “law of the situation” in Episode 5, we look at constructive conflict, organizational integration, and power. Together, these ideas represent a pragmatic approach to business where collaboration is the norm and channels competition toward the good of the organization rather than any one party within it.

As we conclude our discussion of James D. Thompson’s Organizations in Action, we focus on the final chapters where Thompson proposes his theory of administration whose basic function is proposed as co-alignment. This meant that organizations had to synthesize the needs and perspectives of individual members with the many streams of institutionalized action performed by the organization. What would become of the research agenda Thompson proposed nearly 55 years ago?

We examine James D. Thompson’s Organizations in Action: Social Science Bases of Administrative Theory from 1967 that established a new direction in organization studies. Beginning with a recapitulation of the theoretical work of the time, Thompson expanded the dominant rational model of organizing with the emerging ideas about human behaviour, complexity, and the relation between organizations and their environments. The result was a proposed theory of administration that remains relevant to this day.

We will examine James D. Thompson’s Organizations in Action: Social Science Bases of Administrative Theory from 1967 that proposed a new theory of administration based on a synthesis of rational and natural models of organization and ushered management into an open-systems paradigm. A class of administrative science that still informs organizational research today!

In the conclusion of our examination of Herbert Kaufman’s “The Forest Ranger: A Study in Administrative Behavior,” published in 1960, we bring the results of the study to contemporary times and look at how public sector organizations have evolved in the past six decades. As Kaufman would explain in an afterword in the revised version of his book, even the Forest Service face difficulties as civil rights and other movements took hold in the time after the original study. What are the pressures facing public servants today? To what extent are the lessons of Kaufman still relevant?

This month’s episode examines a classic study in public administration, Herbert Kaufman’s “The Forest Ranger: A Study in Administrative Behavior,” published in 1960. The U.S. Forest Service was a widely distributed organization with its many Rangers individually assigned to manage large tracts of public land. It would have been easy for the Forest Service to lose control and fragment, but it did not. Kaufman’s study showed how and why the various techniques used by the Forest Service kept the Rangers integrated under a common vision.

This month’s release is on Herbert Kaufman’s study of forest rangers in the 1950s, looking at how the Forest Service worked to keep hundreds of Rangers scattered around the country unified under a common purpose and vision. The study is a classic of public administration and organizational behavior, showing various techniques that public sector organizations can use to hone a well-oiled bureaucracy!

In this podcast, Isabel Menzies, an expert in social defenses against anxiety in organizational life, discusses contemporary sources of anxiety and the methods used to defend against it. Topics include the evolving nature of anxiety in the field of medicine, understanding and managing anxiety in organizations, exploring the relationship dynamics between doctors and nurses, shifting anxieties within the healthcare system, perpetuation of anxiety within organizations, rethinking the welcoming process for new members, and the constant movement and adaptation in organizations.

Isabel Menzies, a researcher who conducted a classic study on social systems as a defense against anxiety, discusses the odd methods a teaching hospital developed to protect nurses from anxiety. These methods violated nursing students' expectations and caused them to quit. The podcast explores the challenges in effectively training nursing students while using them as a resource in the hospital, the role of emotional labor and coping mechanisms, and the impact of detachment and empathy in healthcare.

This month return to one of the classic studies from the Tavistock Institute, Isabel Menzies’ famous study of how a teaching hospital developed odd and somewhat dysfunctional methods for protecting its nurses from anxiety and stress. Listen here for a quick summary of the episode.