Mary Jo Hatch Interview Part 2

In San Antonio, Mary Jo Hatch was named the 2011 Distinguished Educator. In Part 1 of this two-part series, we talked with Mary Jo about some of her contributions to teaching OMT, tips on writing for scholarly, managerial and student audiences. In Part 2, we ask about some of her scholarly contributions, what has her worried these days, and where her work is headed in the future.

One of your latest books is entitled “Organizations: A Very Short Introduction.” I am normally wary of books that call themselves short, assuming that they will not be, but this book is indeed true to its title. In fact, it is more like a pocket guide to organizing. Tell us about the inspiration for this book and the audience you had in mind when you were writing it. What kind of reception has it been getting?

It’s too soon to tell about reception, as the book only appeared in March 2011. So far what I have noticed is that people who pick up the book get big smiles on their faces and they seem to like to stroke the cover. Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introduction (VSI) series, of which the book is a part, does a fabulous job of making this series remarkably beautiful.

As to how it came about, when my longtime publisher OUP, decided to take their VSI series into organization and management, they contacted me to see if I was interested. I had long harbored a secret ambition to write for this wonderful series, so the invitation was a dream come true. The reason the book is so short is that OUP is strict about VSI length!

The book is intended for a general audience and is being marketed through mainstream bookstores that carry the entire VSI series. But I hope the book will also work its way into introductory courses on business management and other fields that deal in organizations and organizing, like engineering and medicine. Of course, writing for a general audience demanded another transition in my writing style, but it was surprising how easy and pleasurable this change was for me, probably because it meant writing in a more personal way.

There has been a surprising benefit to this last transition in my writing. Through reflecting on what organization is in the broadest terms, the pleasures of integrative, big picture thinking that were so inspirational during my student days returned. What is more, speaking to a general audience encouraged me to use examples with wider appeal than those from business that we use most often in our teaching, which was fun for me. For example, I used the organization of primitive society by our distant ancestors as well as the organization of wolf packs to illustrate points about structure, technology, gender and power. All this new thinking re-energized my love of OMT and its wide-ranging ideas.

Most business schools have stand-alone courses on strategic management and organizational behavior, but not organization theory. How have you managed to make a career in the field of organization theory? What are the keys to bringing OT into the classroom?

When I started teaching nearly 30 years ago, organization theory was a required course in MBA and undergraduate programs. It was never a popular course; the majority of students and teachers found it difficult. I had not really liked OT when I was studying either, but through teaching the subject I discovered theorizing as a really powerful way to think. I tried to teach this to my students. Putting students in the driver’s seat like this seemed to have considerable appeal. They also got engaged in helping me write the textbook – reading draft chapters and commenting on what they did and did not like was part of every class. I learned a lot about how people learn OT from that experience and from my many years of writing and rewriting in response to student input. The fact that I got reasonable teaching evaluations in a course that is not generally popular helped legitimize me and kept me employed as an organization theorist.

Making a career in OT was probably easier for me than most find it today, but it has never been and will probably never be easy. Being theoretical in an applied world like business makes life difficult. On top of that, sticking to the hard road of learning to theorize puts lots of people off. That means you don’t have many colleagues traveling with you and it can get pretty lonely. Being an introvert like me helps. Then there is the challenge of adhering to a discipline that is no longer officially part of the core curriculum in most schools. Stubbornness has proven to be a useful trait for confronting the disappearing act OMT seems to be performing. And finally, the changing expectations of journal editors and reviewers means the phenomena we study keep being narrowed to such an extent that it undermines our ability to see the bigger picture. The threat of boredom (or worse, meaninglessness) is something I worry about on behalf of OMT. Textbook writing and consulting turned out to cure me of that malaise, but it is not insignificant, I suppose, that I retired before my newfound ability to think big thoughts about organization and organizing evolved.

You’ve published important papers in several different areas – your work on identity, culture, and improvisation all come to mind. Tell us a little bit about your career and some of your latest projects. What has captured your attention recently? What, if anything, has you worried?

The great ambition of my early years as an academic was opening up OMT to phenomena that can only be fully known through the interpretation of subjective experience. Along the way, I somehow got the idea that focusing on processes was the best means of turning description into theory, hence the dynamic models of culture (Hatch, 1993) and identity (Hatch & Schultz, 2002) that consumed my early theory building efforts. If you extend the idea of theory beyond that of explanation and description to include appreciation, then maybe my work on managerial humor, jazz, irony, and metaphor also count as contributions to organization theory.

For the last 10 years or so I have concentrated most of my research attention on finding practical applications of dynamic organizational culture and identity models in the hope that more people in OMT will understand through example how descriptive theorizing works. Based on our applied interest in branding, Majken and I have moved into the field of marketing. We take an interpretive view on branding as practice and strive to understand not only how managers make symbolic use and meaning of branding practices, but how other employees of organizations who have access to the same symbolic resources use them in their own ways and for their own purposes. This emphasis on the “how” of practice leads us to the theory-practice interface that Andy Van de Ven has written about so compellingly. We have a two-year grant from the Tuborg Foundation in Denmark to study how recent developments in the Carlsberg Group (including the acquisition of France’s Brasserie Kronenbourg and Russia’s Baltika) affect the organization’s corporate brand, brand management efforts and culture. There may be time yet for a return to the fold of theory!

What worries me most is the future of not just OMT but of higher education itself. I keep wondering when our students are going to apply the critical thinking skills we teach them to expose the follies inherent in the way we organize our own work. The performance-focused publish or perish mentality driving so many academic lives, alongside the (false, in my view) efficiency of large class sizes (presumably permitting faculty more time to concentrate on publishing), not only may be counterproductive to the accumulation of knowledge it is intended to serve, but also detracts significantly from our mission and our will to educate students effectively.

If I understand correctly, you are a professor emerita at the University of Virginia, and a visiting professor at Copenhagen Business School and Gothenburg University. Where do you call home these days? How have your affiliations with so many wonderful universities and colleagues shaped your perspective on organization theory and education more generally?

I have moved around a lot in my career and the moves have brought insight into many aspects of organization theory and theorizing that I do not think I could have gained otherwise. I attribute it to my adoption of the multiple perspective approach and to my devotion to helping to build interpretive research into a respectable sub-discipline of organization theory. Switching between institutions brought with it intellectual freedom that I find increasingly threatened within traditional academic roles, and this is something I value highly. I feel I could not have achieved whatever I have managed to do without it.

The result of having so many affiliations is that I don’t really have one home, I have many. That said, Copenhagen Business School provided much needed intellectual support and nurtured me when I was in the earliest developmental stage of my career. I had experienced little of this support in the US where I was often criticized for holding interpretive interests, whereas at CBS’s Institute for Organization, the faculty were all social constructionists. So CBS and Denmark have had a special place in my heart ever since I moved there in 1990, which was only 5 years after earning my PhD.

Today I spend as much time at home painting (my aspirational second career is as an artist) as I do working at the institutions that hire me to play the part time role of visiting professor. More and more I concentrate my academic work on projects and places that build art and/or design into the business curricula. For example, I have a 5-year visiting professorship at Gothenburg University, where I am affiliated with a joint program between the School of Business, Economics and Law (my employer) and the School of Craft and Design, a partnership known as Business Design Lab started up by Ulla Johansson. I also work a bit with Stefan Meisiek of the Copenhagen Business School on his Enterprise Lab, an approach to teaching business content using the studio pedagogy of art and design schools. I am hoping soon to honor an invitation to serve as artist-in-residence for the IEDC Bled School of Management in Slovenia. Danica Purg, the founder and dean of the school has developed an MBA program that brings art into its leadership curriculum. Not only that, but over the last 25 years she has built a school that is wonderfully beautiful, a work of art in its own right. Some of the faculty at IEDC have promised to help me devise teaching methods for using the VSI to create new kinds of classroom experiences. We will all have to wait to see what happens next.

Tags: Distinguished Educator | Mary Jo Hatch