Talking About Organizations Podcast

We discussed how 1977, the publication date for "The Visible Hand" marked a watershed moment for middle management as it began to decline soon thereafter. Chastised as bureaucratic and a target for downsizing, middle management has been under continuous scrutiny and pressure to the present day. What might Chandler have said about this?

Alfred Chandler’s award-winning book, "The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business" provides an excellent summary of the history of American commerce from the pre-industrial era to the mid-20th century, and how new technologies and a changing society led to the creation of the modern industrial enterprise. The "visible hand" refers to the transparency and prominence of this new class of manager who coordinated and controlled these growing enterprises,

Hila Lifshitz-Assaf, a former student of Michael Tushman and a researcher in open innovation, joins the discussion to delve into Tushman's seminal work on innovation processes. They highlight how his 1977 ideas on boundary roles apply to current challenges like remote collaboration. Topics include the impact of open innovation on professional identities at NASA, the importance of boundary spanning for effective communication in R&D, and the balance between formal structures and informal interactions, especially in a post-pandemic world.

Hila Lifshitz-Assaf, an Associate Professor at NYU Stern and former NASA boundary spanning researcher, joins the discussion about Michael Tushman's impactful work on innovation. They explore how boundary roles like gatekeepers enhance communication and drive organizational innovation. The conversation dives into the dynamics of R&D teams and how various knowledge frameworks shape project outcomes. Lifshitz-Assaf highlights the changing coordination challenges teams face in today's fast-paced environments, revealing the vital role of informal networks.

In Part 2, we discuss the implications of Weisbord's model for consultancy, particularly internal to the organization. As diagnostic models have gotten more complex, should one rely on external consultants and their expense or internal consultants who have greater knowledge of the organization but are more subject to politics? Also, how can the six-box model be used as an educational tool that teaches members how to detect and resolve problems in the organization?

Business literature is now loaded with models and frameworks designed to help organizations identify, analyze, and fix their problems. But it wasn't always this way. In the 1970s, Marvin Weisbord developed and promoted a simple framework and associated suite of tools designed for anyone to investigate what was going wrong. In this episode, we discuss one of his articles -- "Organizational Diagnosis: Six Places to Look for Trouble With or Without a Theory," published in 1976 in the journal Group and Organization Management -- that introduced his Six-Box Model of organizational diagnosis.

Part 2 of our episode on Melville Dalton's "Men Who Manage" is now released -- but this time we add a feminist perspective on managers and management. Gretta, Miranda, and Catherine welcome Judy Wajcman into the conversation to discuss her 1998 book, "Managing like a man: Women and men in corporate management," which provides an interesting contrast to the experiences expressed by the subjects of Dalton's study and whose evidence debunks many of the myths around possible gender differences in how men and women manage.

2020 ushered in a full year of major change and renewed a lot of conversations about how we work, live, and cooperate in organizations and societies. In that spirit, we discuss Melville Dalton's classic 1959 book "Men Who Manage: Fusions of Feeling and Theory in Administration." The study provided an intimate look at how men (as these were all men at the time) entered into the managerial culture of a firm, how the separations between managers are workers were structured and maintained, and how managers felt about their standing -- which ranged from secure to tenuous. In Part 1, we focus on the study itself, which is still very relevant not only for understanding what happens within the circle of managers but also how the boundaries can exclude others, particularly along gender lines.

We continue our conversation on Ibarra-Colado's critique by discussing his proposed research agenda and recommendations for imbuing organization studies in Latin America with a regional identity. How should scholars conduct rigorous research in the region free from the constraints of tranditional measure of 'relevance' imposed by the global community of scholarship?

We discuss an important critique of the state of Latin American organization studies leveled by Eduardo Ibarra-Colado in a famous 2006 work "Organization studies and epistemic coloniality in Latin America: thinking otherness from the margins." This manifesto and call to action considers how the current scholarship paradigm controlled by an "Anglo-Euro Centre" severely disadvantages scholarship in the region. With guest Samantha Ortiz, a PhD candidate from the Emlyon Business School.