Talking About Organizations Podcast

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.

We continue our discussion of Jane Addams’ "A Modern Lear" and asked ourselves the same questions she asked. How can one approach a difficult, complex, or dynamic situation and avoid the conflagrations that engulfed the Pullman situation? To what extent can pragmatism contribute to a suitable approach for contemporary labor relations challenges?

We discuss a famous speech by Jane Addams, titled "A Modern Lear," her reflections on the events leading to and during the infamous Pullman Railway Strike of 1894. Using ideas drawn from the emergence of classic pragmatism and Shakespeare’s King Lear as an analogy, Addams took both the ownership and workers to task for the violence and provides a way to avoid a recurrence of such a tragedy. In Part 1, we discuss the reasons for the strike and how Addams’ reactions to it contributed to the speech’s content.

We continue our discussion of a classic 1954 book by Alvin Gouldner titled, 'Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy.' We asked ourselves to what extent do the patterns that Gouldner and his research team uncovered still apply today, and how much do certain patterns seem to emerge more readily than others.