Talking About Organizations Podcast

In this part of the conversation with the wonderful Denise Rousseau we plunge into the deep end of what business schools are for, what are the moral foundations for management education, the role and value of authority, and the dichotomy between individual vs environmental interpretation of a person. We also discuss the relationship of business schools with actual businesses and talk about coaching and development. All in all, a fascinating episode full of reflections about management as a profession!

Please join us for this very interesting conversation with the fascinating Denise Rousseau about Herbert Simon's JMS Classic - The Business School: A Problem in Organizational Design (1967). In this episode we touch upon the now pervasive issues of managerial education, the value of teaching administration, as well as the origins of how management became an institutionalized profession.Also, get to know Herbert Simon from anecdotes recounted by Denise, and hear what she has to say on these, and many other topics!

Join us for a brief summary of Episode 28, where we were joined by Mats Alvesson to discuss his JMS Classic "Organizations as Rhetoric". This is a synopsis of the conversation, covering a number of aspects related to epistemology, types and purpose of rhetoric, and adjacent concepts such as organizational memory and functional (as well as generic) stupidity.

In this concluding part of Episode 28 we further delve into the relationship between rhetoric and knowledge, touching upon such aspects of it as collective memory, the roles people play, fads and fashions, as well as functional stupidity.

For our sixth Journal of Management Studies Classic episode we discussed a set of articles by Professor Mats Alvesson on Organizations as Rhetoric. Focusing on the original work published in 1993, we were very pleased to welcome Mats himself as a guest on this episode!In this paper, Mats made a series of critical claims to highlight ‘the politics and rhetoric of professions’, as opposed to an ‘essentialist’ view of organizations (Alvesson, 1993: 999). Central to his observations is a notion that although organizational knowledge is seen as key to to organizational performance, there is little grounding or relationship to external reality of such knowledge. So, if you're interested in critical management, epistemology or anything to do with identity construction, we highly recommend that you listen to what Mats has to say on these topics!

Please join Tom as he summarizes our conversation with Andrew Pettigrew and introduces the key concepts from the reading! What a great way to refresh memory about one of the critical process-based studies in management or to introduce new scholars to the works of Andrew Pettigrew!

Join us for the second part of the conversation about Journal of Management Studies Classic article - 'Context and Action in the Transformation of the Firm' - with Andrew Pettigrew. In this part we go into more depth in discussing management, transformational leadership and the role and nature of context. Andrew is a wonderful guest with much to say so make sure to listen to this one!

Join us for this episode as we sit down (literally, this time!) with Professor Andrew Pettigrew to discuss his discipline-shaping work on context and action in organizations. There is so much in this work! Not only is the article we are discussing a product of a very long-term study conducted in ethnographic tradition, but it is also one of the key sparks that ignited the engine of organizational studies that is the process-based view!

Conclusion of our conversation with Dr Thomas Roulet about Karl Weick's Journal of Management Studies Classic article - Enacted Sensemaking in Crisis Situations. A really fun and interesting episode where we touch upon a number of key concepts in management and organization studies!

Karl Weick's enacted sensemaking is a key concept in management theory, as well as a fundamental idea behind high reliability organizing. Join us as we welcome Dr Thomas Roulet of King's College London to discuss our fourth Journal of Management Studies classic paper - Enacted Sensemaking in Crisis Situations (1988)!