Talking About Organizations Podcast

Join Tom, Ella, Maikel and Frithjof as they examine criticisms of the article, particularly Richard Boettger and Charles Greer’s rejoinder “On the Wisdom of Rewarding A While Hoping for B,” published in Organization Science in 1994.

Why do organizations espouse one thing but do another? This is essentially what Steven Kerr asks in his popular 1975 article in the Academy of Management Journal, “On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B,” on reward systems. Using examples ranging from politics and war to business and public sector settings, Kerr found a common pattern: that the organization’s goals are too often not supported by the things they actually reward and encourage. The context and relationships among actors may differ, but the result is too commonplace to ignore.In Part 1 of this episode, we break down Kerr’s examples (which in some cases were peculiar to 1975) and consider how generalizable they really are. We also address key differences in the 1995 update, published in the Academy of Management Executive.

Conclusion of conversation about C.C. Spauilding. His ideas are also distinctive as they reflect some form of ‘African management’ principles, the most salient being the emphasis on cooperation, echoing the African idea on cooperation (Ubuntu) and doing business also for the good of communities. The latter was important as African-Americans were/are a particularly vulnerable and discriminated minority. Spaulding also evoked a religious or spiritual dimension in his work, and some of his practices mirrored those exercised in African-American churches. Thus, one can attribute to him the practice of workplace spirituality before this concept was adopted in contemporary works. Spaulding’s work also displayed social entrepreneurship, which echoes the work of contemporary researchers like Dr. Nevena Radoynovska on how entrepreneurship can play a vital role in vulnerable populations.Joining us for this episode are two scholars of African-American Management History — Leon Prieto of Clayton State University and Simone Phipps of Middle Georgia State University.

In this episode, we acknowledge the extraordinary contributions of Charles Clinton Spaulding, an important management thought leader who, like many African-Americans prior to the U.S. civil rights movement, has been sadly overlooked in the management canon. From 1923 until 1952, Spaulding served as the President of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, the largest company in the U.S. owned exclusively by African-Americans, with over $40 million in assets at the time of his death.Joining us for this episode are two scholars of African-American Management History — Leon Prieto of Clayton State University and Simone Phipps of Middle Georgia State University. Together, they authored a 2016 paper that the Academy of Management called groundbreaking, “Rediscovering Charles Clinton Spaulding’s ‘The Administration of Big Business’: Insight into early 20th Century African-American Management Thought,” and have authored several other papers bringing important attention to Spaulding and other African-American management leaders whose works deserve much wider attention!

Renowned guest Kurt Lewin discusses the three phases of organizational change: unfreezing, moving, and freezing in this podcast. The discussion also explores the pitfalls of blindly applying Lewin's change model, the power of group dynamics, advancements in measuring organizational dynamics, and the importance of involving groups in organizational change.

In this episode, Prof. Stephen Cummings discusses Kurt Lewin's influential work in social psychology and organizational development. They explore Lewin's use of force fields and how he applied physics metaphors to the social sciences. The podcast also discusses the connection between the physical and social sciences, and the application of force fields in various settings.

In Part 2 of the episode we look at how much has changed in organizations from 1980s to the present day. To what extent do Hofstede’s six factors still hold up? How salient is his model of socializing cultures between societies (“nations”) and organizations? To what extent is the construct of organizational culture being misused, such as suggested in our Episode 49 where we explored Gideon Kunda’s study of “tech culture?” Are there dangers to conflating organizational culture with climate?

Fresh off a study that identified key factors for comparing national cultures, organizational psychologist Geert Hofstede and his team set off to determine whether similar constructs could be deduced for organizational cultures. The success of this research is detailed in Hofstede's classic 1990 paper, "Measuring Organizational Cultures: A Qualitative and Quantitative Study Across Twenty Cases," published in Administrative Science Quarterly. Through surveys and interviews among members of twenty units within ten large organizations, Hofstede's team proposed six distinct determinants of organizational culture that could be compared and contrasted across all organizations.Please also join us in welcoming 2 new podcast hosts - Jarryd and Frithjof!

Tune in for Part 2 of our discussion of Charlie Chaplin's classic film - Modern Times. What does the film have to say about such contemporary topics as gig economy, gender in the workplace and emotional labour? Join us to find out!

Routinely ranked as one of the greatest movies of all time, Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film “Modern Times” balances great physical comedy with powerful social commentary. Playing his famed “Tramp” role for the final time, Chaplin portrayed a hapless Worker on an assembly line who is tormented both by supervisors and the work itself. After being subjected to a humiliating experiment intended to improve the line’s efficiency, the Worker runs through a series of rotating jobs, stints in jail, and other misadventures as he tries to find his purpose in life.He eventually finds his purpose through a growing relationship with the Gamine (Paulette Goddard), a tragic young woman orphaned after a worker’s strike turns violent and kills her father. She escapes becoming a ward of the state but resorts to stealing to survive until caught by the police. After the Worker sacrifices himself to save them, the two would become inseparable. Seeing a happy couple in a well-to-do, they imagine themselves being happy and carefree living together in a rundown falling-apart shack. But in the end, she cannot hide from her past as an escaped orphan. Destitute and alone, the two find themselves on a barren road — she appears to have given up on life, but the Worker convinces her to continue on and try again. They leave, walking down the road to who knows where?As we viewed the film, our initial thoughts were about how Taylorism is portrayed and critiqued through the scenes at the factory and the social turmoil going on outside. But the film actually touches on many of the themes of this podcast. Referenced throughout the episode were Taylor (Episode 1), Maslow (Episode 3), Max Weber’s Bureaucracy (Episode 6), The Hawthorne Studies (Episode 9), Banana Time (Episode 13), Suchman’s Human-Computer Interactions (Episode 22), the Gig Economy (Episodes 36 & 40), Socialization a la Van Maanen (Episode 38), the Garbage Can Model of Decisionmaking (Episode 39), and Kunda’s Study of Tech Culture (Episode 49).Listen as we discuss this fantastic and powerful film whose insights on work and society are still relevant today!