Talking About Organizations Podcast

We conclude our discussion of the War of the Currents using an article from Cole and Chandler on competitive impression management as it applied during the famous War of the Currents between Edison and Westinghouse. The article's aim was to uncover the strategies used between the competitors and build a framework that extended the literature on impression management to better account for situations involving direct competition between two (or more) actors.

We continue or discussion of the War of the Currents using an article from Tushman and Anderson on the impacts of technological breakthroughs and how they increase uncertainty and complexity in organizational environments. through the study of three industries – minicomputer, cement, and airlines. We then contrast their findings to the uniquely circumstances behind the unfolding of the War of the Currents between Edison and Westinghouse.

This is Part 1 of our latest "movie" episode. The film we watched is from 2017 The Current War, directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, and distribution by 101 Studios. It dramatized the so-named War of the Currents that was a real competition between two important industrial figures – Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse – over which type of power would become the dominant standard for distributing electricity across the United States.

Coming soon! We will explore the famous War of the Currents as part of our occasional "movie" episode, this time the 2017 film "The Current War" that dramatized the dispute between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse over which form of electrical current -- AC or DC -- would become the de facto standard across the USA and subsequently the world.

In Part 2, we further contrast the relational work perspective of Zelizer and Bandelj with the dominant embeddedness perspective promoted by Granovetter and other early economic sociologists a few decades ago. The embeddedness perspective remains “embedded” in the field despite the relational work perspective providing more robust and interesting scholarly research. Are we seeing the emergence of a new paradigm shift as described in our episode on Thomas Kuhn’s scientific revolutions?