Talking About Organizations Podcast

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.

In the conclusion of our examination of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, we look more closely at how the text and its central ideas have been adopted in popular literature covering everything from business competition to personal relationships! But how does one judge whether or not an adaptation is suitable or if it is merely leveraged an ancient name to validate some pre-conceived notions?

This month’s episode examines war and how principles derived from it are presently applied to other organizational and management contexts. Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is an ancient text that emerged from the Warring States period that lasted from the 5th through 3rd centuries B.C. and engulfed most of modern mainland China. It embraced the complexity of the environment of war, which therefore has allowed it to be adapted for navigating other forms of complexity such as business competition. We examine the text in its original context to understand its purpose and utility.

Now released! In our History & Culture series, we will examine Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. War is often used as a metaphor for other forms of competition, such as business and there are plenty of books in popular literature that appropriate Sun Tzu’s ideas for other purposes. But what does the text itself say and what insights in the nature and competition can we glean?