Center for Organizational Research (COR)

A talk of interest to COR community…

“Bandage, Sort, and Hustle: Ambulance Crews on the Front Lines of Urban Suffering”

Josh Seim, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Southern California

Date:    Friday, January 17th
Time: 12:00-1:15pm
Location: The Jennifer Buher-Kane Conference Room (SSPB 4250)

ABSTRACT: What is the role of the 911 ambulance in the American city? The prevailing narrative provides a rather simple answer: saving and transporting the critically ill and injured. This is not an incorrect description, but it is incomplete. Drawing on field observations, medical records, and his own experience as a novice emergency medical technician, Josh Seim reimagines paramedicine as a frontline institution for governing urban suffering. Bandage, Sort, and Hustle (2020, University of California Press) argues the ambulance is part of a fragmented regime that is focused more on neutralizing hardships disproportionately carried by poor people and people of color than on eradicating the root causes of agony. Whether by compressing lifeless chests on the streets or by transporting the publicly intoxicated into the hospital, ambulance crews tend to handle suffering bodies near bottom of the polarized metropolis. Seim illustrates how this work puts crews in recurrent, and sometimes tense, contact with the emergency department nurses and police officers who share their subjects. These street-level relations, however, cannot be understood without considering the bureaucratic and capitalistic forces that control and coordinate ambulance labor from above. Beyond the ambulance, this book motivates a labor-centric model for understanding the frontline governance of down-and-out populations.

BIO: Josh Seim is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Southern California. He is broadly interested in the governance of poverty and suffering, and this has led him into the sociologies of medicine, punishment, and more. Professor Seim’s research has appeared in American Sociological Review, Punishment and Society, and other journals. His book, Bandage, Sort, and Hustle: Ambulance Crews on the Front Lines of Urban Suffering, was recently published by the University of California Press. Research for this book was recognized by the American Sociological Association this past August. Dr. Seim received honorable mention for both the 2019 ASA Dissertation Award and the 2019 Roberta G. Simmons Outstanding Dissertation in Medical Sociology Award.

A talk of interest to COR community…

ORGANIZATION AND MANAGEMENT COLLOQUIUM

Host: Assistant Professor Maritza Salazar

Wednesday, January 8, 2020

PAINTING A CLEAR PICTURE WHILE SEEING THE BIG PICTURE: HOW LEADERS RECONCILE THE TRADEOFF BETWEEN CONCRETENESS AND SCALE

SPEAKER:                Andrew Carton
Associate Professor of Management

UNIVERSITY:             University of Pennsylvania
Wharton School of Business

TIME:           1:00 pm – 2:30 pm

WHERE:          SB1 5100
Corporate Partners Executive Boardroom

Abstract: One of the most effective ways leaders can promote change is by communicating visions with image-based rhetoric (“make children smile”). By conveying visual snapshots of the future, leaders paint a portrait of what their organizations can one day achieve. It would thus stand to reason that leaders who naturally think and communicate in terms of picture-like detail (a concrete orientation) would promote more change than those who are inclined to think and communicate abstractly (an abstract orientation). Yet research has established that people with a concrete orientation focus on short-term, narrow details rather than long-term, organization-wide strategy (e.g., a leader who focuses on one small feature of a single product rather than long-term strategy requiring the coordinated effort of all employees). We integrate theory on construal, roles, and motivation to predict that if a team’s highest-ranking leader has a concrete orientation, he/she will focus on large-scale change if there is a “second-in-command” whose role is to oversee the implementation of operational details (an operations specialist). We predict that the presence of an operations specialist will have no effect on abstract thinkers. We find general support for these predictions in two archival studies and two experiments).

A talk of interest to COR community…

“Learning from Senior Colleagues’ Failures but not from Junior
Colleagues’ Failures? Evidence from Microdata on Heart Surgeons”

Professor Sunkee Lee
Carnegie Mellon Tepper Business School

Day: Friday, November 22
Time: 11:30-1pm
Location: Merage SB1, Room 5100

Abstract
Organizational learning research has shown that individuals learn from other individuals’ failures. However, do individuals learn from all others’ failures in organizations? We propose that in organizations with seniority hierarchies created based on organizational members’ professional tenure, individuals will learn more from their senior colleagues’ failures than from their junior colleagues’ failures. We test this main hypothesis using data on 288 cardiothoracic surgeons who performed coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgeries in 127 Californian hospitals from 2003 to 2016. We find evidence that, in fact, individuals learn from their senior colleagues’ failures but do not learn from their junior colleagues’ failures. We examine three plausible mechanisms for this finding which we offer evidence of through statistical analyses and semi-structured interviews with currently practicing cardiothoracic surgeons. Our paper contributes to the literature on learning from failures, organizational learning, organization design, and microfoundations of organizational performance.

https://www.cmu.edu/tepper/faculty-and-research/faculty-by-area/profiles/lee-sunkee.html