Talking About Organizations Podcast

We are examining organizational secrecy using the Manhattan Project during World War II as a case study. The Manhattan Project came about following the discovery of nuclear fission in 1938 and the understanding that Nazi Germany was trying to develop a powerful weapon that could change the course of the war. Naturally, the American effort had to be kept secret to hide both the existence of the project and, failing that, any information about progress and potential employment. How did they do it and what challenges did they face? What could we learn about maintaining secrets in contemporary organizations?

We will examine organizational secrecy using the Manhattan Project during World War II as a case study. The Manhattan Project was an effort to devise, develop, and test the world’s first nuclear weapons, an effort whose public disclosure could have been devastating. From the case, we will examine what organizations decide needs to be kept from outside observation, why, how they accomplish it, and to what extent they succeed.

We conclude our discussion of Follett’s Dynamic Administration with a look at contemporary issues. The COVID-19 pandemic arguably made pragmatists of many of us as we navigated the challenges and shifted to different modes of working! But as the pandemic recedes to an uncertain new normal, now what? Can we sustain and grow ‘power-with’ and avoid falling back to old forms of competition and ‘power-over’?

We return to the works of Mary Parker Follett and expand upon “The Law of the Situation” that we covered in Chapter 5. In this episode, we revisit Dynamic Administration with a look at the first five chapters as a whole – focusing on Chapter 1 (“Constuctive Conflict”), Chapter 3 (“Business as an Integrative Unity”), Chapter 4 (“Power”), and Chapter 5 (“How Must Business Management Develop in order to Possess the Essentials of a Profession”) that introduced Follett’s conception of professionalizing business.

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.