Talking About Organizations Podcast

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.

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?