Talking About Organizations Podcast

Our discussion of Gareth Morgan's Images of Organization begins with an overview of the text and Morgan's use of metaphor to capture the essence of entire streams of literature into a simple idea. We also introduce several of the metaphors and show how together they tell the story of organization theory from the beginning.Join us for the final episode of Season 4 and ask yourself - which metaphor are you?

Final panel from our Symposium on Continuities, Disruptions and Management in the Gig Economy. This panel focused on methodological issues in researching gig and sharing economy, and featured Gretta Corporaal (Oxford), Mareike Mohlmann (WBS) and Rebecca Prentice (Sussex). Please enjoy!

Please join us for the first panel of the TAOP Symposium on Continuities, Disruptions and Management in the Gig Economy, held at the University of Sussex on 15 December 2017. In this first panel, Arianna Tassinari from Warwick Business School (also Episode 18), Sarah O'Connor from Financial Times, and Natalia Levina from NYU (and part 1 of this Special) discuss the different ways how one can understand and define the gig economy.Please enjoy!

TAOP Symposium on the Gig Economy was a unique, one-day interdisciplinary symposium on the forms and effects of management in the contemporary sharing (a.k.a. gig) economy that took place on 15 December 2017 at the University of Sussex. Blending individual and panel presentations from leading scholars and commentators with group conversations, we wanted to examine the continuities – as well as disruptions - in the ways that work is organised through, and in light of, online platforms such as uber, deliveroo, upwork.This Special Episode presents recordings of the keynote and the two panels from the event. Part 1 features a keynote by Professor Natalia Levina of NYU.

During Episode 39 we explore a famous 1972 article in Administrative Science Quarterly from Cohen, March, and Olsen on the Garbage Can Model of Decision Making, which contained (above all things) a fully-documented computer program written in FORTRAN 66! The sidecast also included details of how they designed the program what its outputs were.As we discuss during the podcast, this was far from an empirical study. They designed the model solely for exploratory purposes—to demonstrate an interesting concept that could apply to actual organizations such as colleges and universities of various sizes. It struck me because present-day articles devote so little time to the models in use, either mentioning minimal details in the text or providing a summary or introduction to them in an appendix. Certainly not something that could be replicated as is copy-pasted from the journal.

Our discussion of “The Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice” by Cohen, March, & Olsen, concludes with our reflections on the article. The model was provocative for its time, but what have we learned in the forty years since now that the garbage can model is better understood and accepted as common practice in organizations?Other posts in the Carnegie Mellon School series: Episode 4 on Organizational Routines, Episode 19 on Organizational Learning, Episode 29 on Business School Design,and our Series Introduction.

Our discussion of “The Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice” by Cohen, March, & Olsen, continues as the podcasters discuss the technical aspects of the model and its implications for modern practice. Also from the Carnegie-Mellon School series: Episode 4 on Organizational Routines, Episode 19 on Organizational Learning, Episode 29 on Business School Design,and our Series Introduction.

Please join us for the fourth episode in our series of podcasts focused on works from the Carnegie-Mellon School. For this episode, the podcasters tackle “The Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice” by Michael Cohen, James March, and Johan Olsen, published in Adninistrative Science Quarterly in 1972. The article was a radical departure from conventional thinking about choice and decision making at the time, where leaders identified problems and applied solutions rationally. Instead, the authors asserted that an organization was “a collection of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer, and decision makers looking for work.”Also see: Episode 4 on Organizational Routines, Episode 19 on Organizational Learning, Episode 29 on Business School Design, and our Series Introduction.

Our discussion of John Van Maanen's "Police Socialization" concludes with a more in-depth look at his methodology and use of 'covert' methods. As a participant-observer, Van Maanen's study included his participation in police training and joining patrols. Covert research challenges the principle of informed consent but may be necessary for conduct research on populations that are otherwise difficult to access. Through a very recent article by Thomas Roulet, et al. in Organizational Research Methods, the podcasters discuss the pros and cons of such methods and the ethical questions raised. You won't want to miss it!

Please join us as we continue talking about John Van Maanen's article, "Police Socialization: A Longitudinal Examination of Job Attitudes in an Urban Police Department." For Part 2, we look to other, more contemporary settings where similar socialization activities occur. How has our growing understanding of socialization shaped organizational life since 1975 when this article was written? How has ethnographic research evolved? Find out here!