The Bank Holiday Weekend Special

Some listening suggestions for a bit of downtime

As we are heading into a long weekend in the UK, and hopefully still suitably calm and enjoyable weekends elsewhere, I thought I would compile another set of listening suggestions if you need a bit of a break from screens and reading.

Talking ‘bout Organizations

I don’t think I have previously suggested any of the podcasts from the Talking About Organizations series, which curates interesting discussions about organizational scholarship — both the classic and more recent contributions.

Titled “Meaningfulness at work”, this podcast is a discussion with Andrew Carton about his article about NASA planning the first mission to the moon under John F Kennedy:

As today’s article and its author (our very special guest) Drew Carton show, while the story of the janitor may not be true, it represents a time and place where everyone in the organization indeed felt something special about their work. Through an extensive review of thousands of archival documents, Carton was not only able to supply ample evidence of such unity of purpose and effort, he successfully laid out a framework that explains how the actions of President Kennedy and NASA leaders accomplished this. The award-winning 2018 article, “’I’m not mopping the floors: I’m putting a man on the moon’: How NASA leaders enhanced the meaningful of work by changing the meaning of work,” showed not only how difficult this was in practice, it also raises questions about how challenging it may be to replicate this success, contrary to the promises made in some popular business literature.

It’s a double episode which you can find here or at the podcast service of your choice: https://www.talkingaboutorganizations.com/128-meaningfulness-of-work-andrew-carton/

History and Theory

I enjoyed the discussion, especially for the interesting transition of the author from previously quantitative work to a qualitative approach. He name-checks Colin Fisher, whose LinkedIn post of one of Carton’s more recent pieces on the six dimensions of strong theory caught my eye. I found that piece really insightful, doing organisational history (and used it for my AOM talk about History & Theory), but had not realised that Carton had actually ventured into a historical study prior to this.

So now it is a lot less mysterious to me why the six dimensions so clearly relate to the many challenges of doing historical research in management. But what is interesting is how little the discussion of the NASA piece on the podcast actually flags that this is historical research — even though one of the discussants is Rohin Borpujari, who organises the History & Theory AOM PDWs.