Talking About Organizations Podcast

Coming soon! We will tackle “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizations,” a ground breaking article by sociologists Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell in 1983. They argued that the traditional views of why organizations tended to assimilate one another was not explained by the pursuit of rationality or efficiency. Rather, they did so in response to many other stimuli such as regulatory pressures, professional norms, and the need to reduce uncertainty.

The episode on Roethlisberger and Dickson concludes with a discussion of the contemporary meanings and importance of the Hawthorne studies. The authors concluded the book with the idea that executives should establish dedicated positions of leadership for mastering the human dimension of work in their firms and become experts in solving human problems so to maintain morale and optimize productivity. But was this heeded? Is it time to revisit this finding?

We return for another look at the Hawthorne Studies through Fritz Roethlisberger and William Dickson’s 1939 book Management and the Worker. The work chronicles five years of experiments that initially sought the optimal conditions for increased worker performance but evolved into an examination of the social controls that worker exercise over themselves for self-preservation against managerial decisions. It also includes an introspective look into the researchers themselves as they had to design new experiments to make sense of the surprising and contradictory findings. The book is incredibly detailed and laid the foundation for the development of the Human Relations tradition in organization studies.

We return for another look at the Hawthorne Studies through Fritz Roethlisberger and William Dickson’s 1939 book Management and the Worker. The work chronicles five years of experiments that initially sought the optimal conditions for increased worker performance but evolved into an examination of the social controls that worker exercise over themselves for self-preservation against managerial decisions. It also includes an introspective look into the researchers themselves as they had to design new experiments to make sense of the surprising and contradictory findings. The book is incredibly detailed and laid the foundation for the development of the Human Relations tradition in organization studies.

This is the second half of our presentation of a symposium titled “Design Choices: Examining the Interplay of Organizational Structure and Digital Technologies” from the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management. Here we will present an edited version of the question and answer session.

This month we present a recording of a symposium titled “Design Choices: Examining the Interplay of Organizational Structure and Digital Technologies” from the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management. Digital technologies now underpin the very fabric of the workplace; how tasks are assigned, bundled, and monitored partially hinges on the design of such technologies. Four panelists discuss various perspectives on the matter including design thinking, disparities of structures and norms that the same technologies generate among different nations, and the need to formally differentiate design research from design practice.

Discover the intriguing relationship between organizational structures and digital technologies as experts discuss how these elements shape workplace dynamics. The conversation delves into the impact of design thinking and the disparities that arise in different countries. Panelists emphasize the critical need to separate design research from actual design practices, shedding light on the complexities of today's management landscape. Join the dialogue that explores the evolving hierarchies influenced by our digital tools.

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.