Talking About Organizations Podcast

We conclude our discussion of Louis Brandeis’ “Business – A Profession” by looking at the contemporary situation, greatly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic. We consider the effects of stakeholder capitalism, increased worker dissatisfaction and willingness to leave their jobs, and other challenges , and ask ourselves to what extent might Brandeis’ ideas apply today?

What do the terms “Taylorism” or “scientific management” bring to mind? Difficult work environments? Managers push workers to their limits? Do more with less? But these were not the original intentions. The real intentions were to help workers conserve energy and complete their tasks more safely and efficiently. In an upcoming episode we will present the works of Louis Brandeis who coined the term scientific management and who wanted to professionalize business in ways that equally benefit customers and workers.

We discuss the life and works of Louis Brandeis who originated the term ‘scientific management’ that aimed at conserving effort and making work life more predictable, reducing worker stress and increasing satisfaction. He also advocated for a more altruistic and professionalized form of business leadership that served both the needs of customers or clients and those of the workers under their supervision. A collection of his lectures entitled “Business – A Profession” expounds on these ideas, and he includes a number of case studies and illustrations to show both the human and financial potential of his professed forms of management where profit would not be the only measure of a business’ success.

We conclude our discussion of Jay Galbraith’s portfolio of books and articles focusing on organizational design with a look at contemporary challenges facing managers. We raise common misconceptions about design, including those also found in Galbraith’s own work. In the process of revisiting the meaning of design, we consider how managers can leverage it to make their organizations better.

We discuss several works by Jay Galbraith on the theory and practice of organizational design, which is about creating organizations to provide better outcomes and serve the organization’s purpose and strategy. This episode begins with a focus on one of Jay Galbraith’s earlier publications, an article titled, “Organizational Design: An Information Processing View” for designing organizations to make better decisions in times of high uncertainty, and then brings in his more recent works promoting his five-point “Star Model,” a design tool for use by managers.

Concludes the presentation of a professional development workshop hosted at the 2021 Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management on female scholars whose works are often overlooked. Includes presentations Maja Korica on Rosemary Stewart, Maria José Tonelli on Isabel Menzies Lyth, and Lisa Cohen on Rosabeth Moss Kanter.

Presents a professional development workshop we hosted at the 2021 Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management. It sheds light on the foundational texts of female scholars for the field of organization and management theory but whose work is often overlooked. Part 1 includes presentations by Emmanuelle Vaast on Jean Lave, Marta Calás on Edith Penrose, and Martha Feldman on Susan Leigh Star.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on societies and the workspace have demonstrated the importance of open conversations on matters of diversity and inclusion. The theme for the 37th Colloquium of the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS), hosted virtually in July 2021 by the Vrije Universiteit (VU) in Amsterdam, was “Organizing for an inclusive society: Meanings, motivations, and mechanisms.” In this special episode, we offer the keynote address of that colloquium by Mirjam van Praag, “The Value (Drivers) of Diversity: A Perspective from Research and Management Practice.” She provides insights from her research on the added value and imperative of sustaining diversity in the workplace.

We conclude our discussion of Sumantra Ghoshal’s article, “Bad Management Theories are Destroying Good Management Practices,” with a further exploration of the purposes of business schools and the question of what exactly is a “good” management practice? If we are to break the feedback loop that Ghoshal is critiquing, where do we begin and what is required?

Sumantra Ghoshal, business education critic, discusses the negative impact of business schools in shaping management theories. The podcast explores the preference for quantifiable models, ethics disregard, and the challenges of teaching students with different motivations. It also touches on everyday entrepreneurship, the influence of management theories, the pessimistic view of ethical responsibility in corporations, the evolution of business schools, and the importance of ethical behavior.