Talking About Organizations Podcast

The 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman became a seminal text for several emergent subfields such as impression management and symbolic interactionism, while also greatly influences studies of organizational behavior. But it was also a product of its time, with its many examples and explanations rooted in societal norms or behaviors that have long since changed or dissipated. How well does the original text truly stand up to today’s post-pandemic environment?

Erving Goffman’s 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life was an important attempt at explaining both apparent and hidden human behaviors across social and organizational settings. Through a comprehensive framework employing theater as a metaphor, he describes the roles of people as performers and members of an audience who try to shape the unfolding situation in ways suitable to their aims. Meanwhile, there is a backstage where people return to being themselves and proceed to set conditions for the next performance, and rules and protocols seek to protect such backstage behaviors from unwanted observation or disclosure. The aim for each person is to be seen in the best or most purposeful light.

Our next episode features Erving Goffman’s 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life that presents a comprehensive framework for understanding human interactions and impression management. Through numerous examples, he explains how humans in social settings try to read and shape the environment so they can act accordingly within it and generate the desired reactions of others present. This is accomplished through the metaphor of theater and dramaturgical analysis.

In the conclusion of this episode on Meyer and Rowan’s “Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony,” we review some of the studies that followed and how well the author’s arguments have stood the test of time. We explore contemporary examples that show how conformity to institutionalized rules is necessary for organizations to survive, yet, because they can detract from the organization’s purpose, organizations enact rituals to show that it is adhering to the “rules”, yet in practice they try to shield their core work processes from interruption or intervention.

Exploring institutionalized rules and formal structures, the podcast delves into Meyer & Rowan's article on organizational myths. Topics include the institutionalization of the work week, institutional theory in organizational behavior, interplay of values and structures, different perspectives on survival, and balancing agency with institutional expectations.

We explore John Meyer and Brian Rowan’s famous 1977 article “Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony.” Coming at a time when rational theories of organizing faced multiple challengers, Meyer and Rowan proposed that institutionalization of socially accepted (or demanded) norms played a significant role in driving formal structures. The article has led to significant and relevant research in institution theory that continues to this day.

We sit down with Woody Powell and Bob Gibbons who, since 2016, have been organizing the summer institute on Organizations and Their Effectiveness at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) in Stanford, California. We ask them to reflect on the history of CASBS and the summer institute, the value of fostering interdisciplinary conversations on the study of organizations, and the way in which they design and conduct the summer institute to allow young scholars across economics, sociology, management, public policy, political science, information and communication studies, and other fields, to learn from one another.

We conclude our discussion of Alvin Gouldner two-part article, “Cosmopolitans and locals: Toward an analysis of latent social roles.” In the second part of the article, Gouldner presented an initial proposal for a taxonomy of four types of locals and two types of cosmopolitans as a way kickstart the broader research agenda. However, this groundbreaking study had some significant limitations, most notably that the separation between manifest and latent roles was problematic. After addressing the contemporary implications of this article, we cover some of the different directions followed by recent scholars to bring more clarity to the latent role construct.

Sociologist Alvin Gouldner discusses manifest and latent roles in organizational structures, highlighting the importance of understanding hidden role identities. The podcast explores the intersection of sociology and management studies, the dynamics of social identities within organizations, and the unique context of academic studies compared to practical settings. Gouldner's research at Moll University and the differentiation between cosmopolitan and local roles are also discussed, shedding light on the impact of manifest roles on latent roles in organizations.

We will discuss a two-part article by Alvin Gouldner titled “Cosmopolitans and Locals: Toward an Analysis of Latent Social Roles.” Before 1957, studies on work roles focused solely on manifest roles that emerged directly from the positions held. The hidden or unstated work roles had not been studies. Gouldner’s article argued that this was a major research gap and proposed six latent roles exhibited among workers in a university to kickstart the research agenda.