Talking About Organizations Podcast

We conclude our episode on economic sociology and valuation by looking at the impact work has had on contemporary research. Societies continue to wrestle with how to properly assign value to intangible things such as non-fungible tokens and other cryptocurrencies, “climate change,” and “social media.” There are also questions of the value and utility of expertise in legal proceedings – is it better to have the best expert as a witness or an expert who is a more effective communicator?

Economic sociology bridges economics and sociology, exploring questions such as how social environments explain and influence economic activities. Of interest for this episode is the subfield of economic valuation, in which researchers have been studying how the monetary worth of something is formed or constructed. One influential work is Marion Fourcade’s “Cents and Sensibility: Economic Valuation and the Nature of ‘Nature’,” published in the American Journal of Sociology in 2011. The article explores the economic valuation of peculiar goods, things that are intangible or otherwise cannot be exchanged in a market yet have a social value, and uses a case study of the legal proceedings following oil spills in the US and France to explain why the monetary awards were calculated so differently from each other.

Coming soon! We enter the field of economic sociology and valuation through a comparative study by Marion Fourcade on the different legal outcomes of oil spills in the US and France. “Cents and Sensibility: Economic Valuation and the Nature of ‘Nature’,” published in the American Journal of Sociology in 2011, presents a case study of the legal proceedings following oil spills in the US (the Exxon Valdez) and France (the Amoco Caldez) where the two lawsuits resulted in surprisingly different monetary awards to the plaintiffs. Why? The answers lie in how the nations constructed the very meaning of nature and its ostensible value.

We conclude our episode on Resource Dependence Theory (RDT) by discussing its continued influence over organization studies and management science to present day. Does RDT help us better understand how organizations try to cope with contemporary challenges like social media technologies or the impacts of the COVID pandemic and its aftermath? What would Pfeffer and Salancik have to say about the roles of managers today?

Resource Dependence Theory (RDT) represented a significant departure from extant literature on management and organization studies in the 1970s. Prior to the publication of Jeffrey Pfeffer and Gerald’s The External Control of Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective in 1978, the social context and environment surrounding organizations were little studied. In the book, Pfeffer & Salancik argued that the behaviors or organizations and their managers were driven by the context, because of the need for resources in order to survive. Thus, managerial decisions were based far more on how to manage interdependencies with external social actors than what would presumably lead to objectively better outcomes. They believe RDT explains more accurately the kinds of managerial behaviors observed and how organizations chose (and fired) their executives than other theories of the time.

Coming soon! We will Jeffrey Pfeffer and Gerald’s The External Control of Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective that introduced Resource Dependence Theory on how organizations were dependent on the environment for resources and survival, that the environment often included social actors who sought control over organizations, and that managerial decisions sought in turn to mitigate or respond to that control.

We conclude our episode on Robert K. Merton by examining contemporary challenges of conducting field work and the implications for the continued pursuit of rigorous science. How has field work changed or what new barriers have emerged? How must the academic community adapt to the present challenges of being able to conduct quality research?

Robert K. Merton was a sociologist who founded the study of the sociology of science, how acts of research influence and are influenced by the contexts being studied. Two of his early essays exemplify this body of work whereby he and his research teams reflect on the challenges and difficulties of performing field work. In this episode, we examine two speeches delivered in 1947 – “The Machine, the Worker, and the Engineer” and “Selected Problems of Field Work in the Planned Community” – that exemplifies the effort to better understand how to study social change in organizations due to technology change.

We will explore two of the early works of renowned sociologist Robert K. Merton whose interests included studying the processes of field work in order to improve the quality and rigor of field studies. What are the challenges and difficulties of doing research in environments rife with conflict and tension?

In Episode 114, we re-examine one of our earlier episodes that covered Trist & Bamforth’s study on the longwall method of coal-getting (Episode 34) is the most referenced of any episode we have released. In this introductory segment, Pedro & Tom take a retrospective look at the episode, why it was included in the program back in 2017, and why it continued to come up in conversation over and over again in the seven years since.