Talking About Organizations Podcast

We conclude our conversation about the Aston School with one of its founding members, Bob Hinings. In this release, we focus on the legacy and impacts of the Aston School on contemporary organization studies and its relationships with other major literature streams such as contingency theory.

The Aston Group from Birmingham, United Kingdom played a major role in the early development of organization theory and management science. Throughout the 1960s, the Aston Group performed numerous studies (the "Aston Studies") of industrial Birmingham and contributed landmark works on organizational structure, organizational analysis, and institution theory. We are honored to welcome one of its members, Bob Hinings, to our studio as a special guest to talk about the Aston School, its contributions, and some of the stories behind them.

In part 2, we explore an article from Edward Powley on activating organizational resilience — “Reclaiming resilience and safety: Resilience activation in the critical period of crisis,” published in Human Relations in 2009. The article describes three different social mechanisms that are put into action according to Powley — liminal suspension, compassionate witnessing, and relational redundancy. Respectively, these mechanisms cause the organization to temporarily restructure itself to respond to the crisis, leverage interpersonal relationships within the organization more intensely, and leverage social connections across boundaries to reach out and help others outside the organization.

Crises and disasters are regular occurrences in organizational life, putting leaders into the spotlight and organizations under tremendous pressure to respond appropriately - whether it is to preserve life or salvage reputations. With the COVID-19 pandemic ongoing, we wanted to discuss some classic texts on organizational crises and their management. In this episode, we include Karl Weick's famous paper on the Tenerife Air Disaster when two Boeing 747s collided and an article from Edward Powley on activating organizational resilience in crisis.

This is part 2 of our case study on the Hudson's Bay Company and remote work where we focus on responses to pandemics by distributed organizations. We explore an article by Paul Hackett, titled “Averting disaster: The Hudson’s Bay Company and smallpox in Western Canada during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,” published in 2004 in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine. Smallpox was a feared and well-known killer in North America during the 18th and 19th centuries. But as vaccination became possible, HBC officials in Canada made some surprising decisions about employing it. Are there insights we can glean and apply to present-day crises?

We discuss two works exploring a firm that exercised remote operations as a matter of course and faced multiple pandemics during its early existence. The Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) was chartered in 1670 by King Charles II at a time when the French monopolized fur trading with Native Americans in modern-day Canada. From then, the English would establish its own robust fur trading industry, establishing hundreds of posts from the western shores of Hudson Bay all across modern western Canada. The case is exceptional in demonstrating the historical challenges of remote operations, leading from a distance, trust, and control -- where communications were limited to letters sent annually with the fur shipments across the Atlantic. How could London possibly maintain oversight and exercise control under such conditions?

We are proud to support the OMT Division at the Academy of Management in producing their own podcast - The OMT Podcast! The show, hosted by Tanja Ohlson from Oxford University, will focus on interviewing members of the OMT division about their life and research. Available now on all major podcast directories as well as on http://omtweb.org/omtpodcast . Check it out!

Our discussion of WALL-E concludes with a look at dystopian fiction and how it presents class differences that suggest ways in which some will feel the burden of societal unrest more than others. This is exemplified in the movie by the way that presumably some segments of society were able to leave the wasted Earth while others might not have. How can we use organization theory, management science, and studies of leadership to understand similar phenomena going on all around us?

Movies can be effective tools for discussing concepts, ideas, and experiences about organizations and management. In this episode, we cover the 'instant' classic film WALL-E by Pixar Animation Studios and directed by Andrew Stanton. WALL-E is the story of a robot who at one time was part of a massive clean-up effort on Earth while all the humans left to live on cruise ships in space. We talk about the setting and the story for clues about organizational behavior and management. Along with the movie obvious commentary on consumerism, we talk about leadership, meaning of work, and many other topics. Join Tom, Pedro, Maikel and Ralph for a fun conversation!

We conclude on episode on Dan Brass' article, "Being in the Right Place: A Structural Analysis of Individual Influence in an Organization" from Administrative Science Quarterly. In this part of the discussion, we explore Dan's mixed-methods approach that included criticality, transaction alternatives, and centrality (access and control) in the social networks of the organization. The results showed that connections in workflow, communication, and friendship networks resulted in greater perceptions of influence by others. But as we discuss, some of Dan's findings were found a bit surprising. Which ones? Listen and find out! We are once again joined by Sarah Otner.