Talking About Organizations Podcast

In this final release of our 5th year celebration, we welcome the perspectives of several past guests, hosts, and observers of past recordings -- with additional commentary from cast members Pedro, Miranda, Catherine, Leonardo, and Tom. Our guests discussed the experiences (and fun) of participating in the podcast, the podcast's current role and potential future directions, and the state of scholarship in organization studies. We thank our guests -- Deborah Brewis, Leon Prieto, Simone Phipps, Maja Korica, Marc Ventresca, Fabricio Neves, Polyana Silva, and Ella Hafermalz.

About a month before the anniversary, we solicited questions from our listeners about things they wanted to know or suggestions for the podcast. Out of the large number of excellent questions received; Dmitrijs, Miranda, Maikel, Jarryd, and Tom broke it down to five that we tackled and discussed in our own Talking About Organizations way. The questions covered academic publication, desires for different topics to be included in the show, on the state of organization studies today, addressing contemporary issues, and attacking wicked problems.

On October 13, 2020, we celebrate our fifth anniversary with a series of releases over next two weeks. In these release, we offer listeners an insider perspective on the making of our episodes. Dmitrijs, Pedro, Ralph, and Tom discuss how we choose an episode topic, schedule it, record it and conduct post-production, and release it through the web and RSS feeds. We also talk about the broader Talking About Organizations Network and what we enjoy most about doing the podcast.

We conclude our review of this important 2019 documentary by considering additional management theories to explain what happened. Among them are Herzberg's two-factor theory covering hygiene and motivation forms of incentives and Maurice Halbwachs' concept of collective memory and 'spaces' -- such as how the American workers recalled the facility's layout for automotive manufacturing and therefore struggled with the changes being imposed by the Chinese managers. What implications do these theories have for future multinational ventures?

American Factory is an important and powerful documentary, telling the story of cultural clashes and labor-management relations as a Chinese firm re-opened and re-purposed a closed automotive plant in Ohio. In this episode, we analyze this story through the lenses of several important organization theories and management science classics.

Andrew Abbott invited us to think more systemically about the interdependencies and how professions compete with each other over "jurisdictions," claims of ownership and responsibility over expert knowledge and its applications. So we conclude this episode with a review of one of Abbott's case studies -- that of the information professions (e.g., librarian, statistician, computer programmer) -- and consider implications for professions today.

With the growing success of the Reflections podcast, part of the Talking About Organizations Network, we invited host Tom Galvin to provide an update on big changes coming to the program and website for the fall 2020 season!

In this episode, we look at the first half and first case study of Andrew Abbott's book "The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor." In this episode, the focus is on how Abbott defines the major constructs of his framework -- professionalization, professional work (diagnosis, inference, treatment), and claims of jurisdiction. For Part 1, we concentrate on the application of Abbott's framework onn individual professions and subdivisions therein.

Join us and Dr. Ella Hafermalz for the conclusion of Episode 66 on workplace isolation. In the second part of the episode, we discuss the role of the office, how sudden mass-exposure to remote work may be exacerbating a host of underlying societal issues, as well as the extent to which technology can help organizations keep running as (or as close as) before.

We continue our series of episodes related to the social change being spurred by the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic that has brought about rapid and immediate social change. In this episode, we explore the social and emotional impacts to the worker on having to work from home. For some workers, the concept of telework is hardly new. But many other vocations place great value on regular social contact with clients and customers. These include teachers, doctors, lawyers, public servants, and many others. The sudden thrust to teleworking for an unknown period of time has raised questions as to how these workers are coping with the new normal.This time we are joined by our former podcaster - Ella Hafermalz - to discuss Tom Forester’s “The Myth of the Electronic Cottage,” an article from Futures in 1988, republished in Computers & Society in 1989.