Talking About Organizations Podcast

We will examine, through an organizational lens, one of the great sports comedies of the late 20th century, A League of Their Own, directed by Penny Marshall. The movie tells the story of how the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League formed through a fictionalized account of the lived experiences of the players. The movie helped inspire the growth of women’s professional team sports that began in the 1990s and continues to this day.

Talking About Organizations has always been a free resource, available to students and scholars of organizations and management for almost 10 years now! Unfortunately, it is not free to produce, so we are turning to you, our listeners, to please help us keep the show on air, ad free, and without any paywalls!If you value the work that we do, please help us cover operating costs with the price of a coffee (or multiple coffees): https://www.buymeacoffee.com/taopThank you so much!NB. If you'd like to support us in some other way, please don't hesitate to get in touch via our social media accounts!

We conclude our look at Lawrence Peter’s The Peter Principle by discussing why the Principle is timeless is its quality. Our contemporary experiences with hierarchies may have changed due to greater mobility of workers, but the Principle itself provokes our thinking about management. We also discuss how Peter used satire to present his points and why it seems to be so effective in this particular instance. Is satire a reasonable method to launch and disseminate ideas, and if so, how and when it is most suitable?

Ever wonder why some people flop after getting promoted? The discussion dives into the humorous yet thought-provoking Peter Principle, which suggests folks rise until they hit their incompetence. With anecdotes showcasing the pitfalls of upward mobility, the hosts explore how societal pressures can lead to mismatched skills and poor performance in new roles. They also highlight the psychological effects of navigating hierarchies and the varying types of incompetence, encouraging a reevaluation of what true success means in the workplace.

We will provide our take on The Peter Principle, the book that provided the old adage, “In a hierarchy, everyone rises to their level of incompetence.” While the book was written as satire, it touched a nerve of many people frustrated about organizational life. A fun episode!

We conclude the episode by looking to the present day and how the negotiations over work visibility has evolved since the turn of the 21st century. Have the emergence of social media, emergence of general computing platforms over the proprietary systems from the 1990s, and increased competitive pressures driving quests for efficiency challenged or reinforced the arguments that Star and Strauss made in the article? Reviews and reactions are decidedly mixed.

Delve into the fascinating world of visible and invisible work, as explored through Susan Leigh Star's groundbreaking ideas from the 1990s. Discover the implications of automation on overlooked labor and the unintended consequences it brings. The discussion highlights how societal perceptions shape our understanding of work, with intriguing examples from domestic labor and the challenges of collaborative environments. Uncover the significance of context in interpreting work dynamics while sharing stories that bridge the mundane with the profound.

We will discuss Susan Leigh Star’s “Layers of Silence, Arenas of Voice: The Ecology of Visible and Invisible Work,” published in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work in 1999. The article deals with the challenges and risks of automating work processes without due consideration of all the invisible work done in an organization that systems designers might overlook.

Since Edelman’s two articles were published, a lot of research has followed into the ever-evolving environment engulfing organizations and the legal systems they operate under. It is more important to comply with the letter of the law or its intent? Why do organizations expend so much energy trying to avoid legal liability rather than pursue the intentions of the legislators to improve employer-employee relationships, such as in the case of civil rights law that tries to eliminate discrimination from the workplace?

In this episode, we explore two articles from Lauren Edelman, “Legal Ambiguity and Symbolic Structures: Organizational Mediation of Civil Rights Law” from 1992 and “The Endogeneity of Legal Regulation: Grievance Procedures as Rational Myth” from 1999. These studies showed a wide variety of organizational responses to the enactment of civil rights legislation, but that certain responses were legitimated due to their success in symbolically showing effort in addressing discrimination and thus institutionalized across other organizations.