Talking About Organizations Podcast

Please join us for the fifth episode in our Carnegie-Mellon School series as we discuss Barbara Levitt and James G. March’s brilliant literature review of “Organizational Learning,” published in the Annual Review of Sociology in 1988. This work surveyed the literature across various streams in organizational learning up through the 1980s. Topics include learning from experience, organizational memory, ecologies of learning, and organizational intelligence. Of particular interest is how organizational learning was defined as not an outcome but a process of translating the cumulative experiences of individuals and codifying them as routines within the organization. But an important question remains three decades later – do organizations really learn? Tune in as we wrestle with this question, and with many others!

Near the end of Episode 41, we discussed the themes of member commitment to the organization and an organization’s commitment to its individual members. This arose in the context of our continuing discussions of the gig economy and its impact on our understandings of organization. The ‘gig economy’ was the subject of several previous episodes (such as Episode 18 on algorithmic management and Episode 36 on human capital) and was the primary focus of our first symposium, presented in three parts as Episode 40 including a keynote address and panels on defining and researching the gig economy and related phenomena. Without revisiting those discussions, suffice to say that our dialogue raised lots of questions and concerns about the gig economy.

Our discussion of Gareth Morgan's classic 'Images of Organization' concludes as we discuss the modern-day implications of these metaphors. How can we use metaphor to better understand the interactions of organizations in the environment, and of organization and member commitment to each other? We also discuss possible areas of future research.

Our discussion of Gareth Morgan's Images of Organization continues as we explore the individual metaphors and compare them. What makes some metaphors better understood than others? How do they describe the positive and negative aspects of organizing?

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.