Social Science Bites ... on organization studies

Just a short post today, to draw attention to my podcast on Social Science Bites. Social Science Bites features interviews with leading social scientists and covers a wide array of topics and disciplines, but this is the first time that anyone from organization studies, or for that matter any management studies area, has been interviewed. The previous nearest to the field was the interview with the sociologist Michael Burawoy, talking about sociology and the workplace (it is well worth a listen). Burawoy, of course, has been very influential in organization studies, especially within the labour process tradition.

The interview with me is edited from a longer interview conducted by David Edmonds, which was great fun to do. It was quite broad in focus, trying to tackle the entirety of organization studies as a discipline, although with forays into some of the specific research projects I have done. Of course, I wouldn’t claim to be a spokesperson for organization studies in toto, but I hope I managed to convey something of its scope as well as indicating some of the more critical approaches to which my book is dedicated. I particularly like the inclusion in the final version of comments about the falsity of thinking that critical approaches to organization studies are political whereas mainstream approaches are apolitical.

Whilst I am blowing my own trumpet, I’ll also mention a book just out by Helen Sword, entitled Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Harvard University Press, 2017) which features me as one example (although of course there is much more of interest in the book than that). Writing is a ubiquitous but in some ways mysterious part of academic life in that its consequences are overt and public but its processes hidden and private. Sword's book is fascinating in bringing those processes to light.

On the topic of writing, regular readers of this blog – and I know there are some – may have noticed that I am posting less frequently than in the past. This is because I am putting a lot of effort into my other blog, on the consequences of Brexit, and rapidly unfolding events make that a big task. I hope some readers of the blog find some interest in the other one and see, as I do, some connection between the underlying themes of both blogs.