About the podcast
The original podcast that launched the network, Talking About Organizations (TAOP) is a monthly (two weeks on, two weeks off) conversational podcast about management and organization studies. Delivered in a format best described as somewhere between a reading group and a panel discussion, the podcast tackles one book/journal article/idea per episode. It is free, not-for-profit and publicly available for all to enjoy!
TAOP was founded on a simple premise — that too few people within management and organization studies read the classic and foundational work upon which the ideas that we study, assume, debate and apply are based. Why do we manage the way we do? Who decided on what is and what is not important? What even are the classics of management and organizational theory?
Some highlights:
Over 19,000 regular listeners;
First podcast to be cited as a source in two peer-reviewed articles (Bridgman, Cummings, and Ballard, 2018; du Gay and Vikkelso, 2018) and referenced in two very cool books (Grey, 2016; Bridgman and Cummings, 2020);
First podcast to hold an annual standing Professional Development Workshop at the largest management and organization studies conference in the world – the Academy of Management;
First podcast to design and host a full academic conference around itself (OLKC 2019 in Brighton, UK);
Collaboration with a premier academic journal – the Journal of Management Studies – to record a series of episodes on their most influential articles, featuring distinguished authors;
Collaboration with Management Learning Journal and the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS).
Answers to these and many other similar questions can be found in the works of the ‘founding fathers’ of management. Unfortunately, most these works are no longer widely read, many are forgotten, and some are straight up misrepresented.
This is where Talking About Organizations came in – delivered in a format best described as somewhere between an informal reading group and a panel discussion, the show tackles one book/journal article/idea per episode. These primarily focus on the classical texts in management (eg. Taylor, Follett, Maslow, Spaulding, Weber, etc.) but also include more contemporary works featuring some of the most prominent international scholars in the field.
Talking About Organizations is the first and by far the most popular podcast of its kind within the academic management community. When it was launched back in 2015, podcasts in management and organizational studies academia were virtually non-existent. Since then, TAOP has become something of a nascent institution. It has inspired a number of colleagues to start their own podcasts or to include podcasts into their teaching curricula – almost 40 Universities across the world integrated TAOP into their teaching, any many more students, scholars and practitioners use the podcast to learn about management on their own. Talking About Organizations contributed, and continues to contribute, to driving a renaissance of interest in the history of management ideas, theories, and practices.
The current team are: Dr. Tom Galvin (US Army War College), Dr. Pedro Monteiro (Copenhagen Business School), Ms. Miranda Lewis (Warwick Business School), Dr. Ralph Soule (George Washington University), Dr. Gretta Corporaal (University of Oxford), Dr. Jarryd Daymond (University of Sydney), Ms. Catherine Molloy (Compton Fundraising Consultants), Dr. Maikel Waardenburg (Utrecht University), Dr. Leonardo Melo Lins (Brazilian Network Center), and Mr. Frithjof Wegener (TU Delft)