Talking About Organizations Podcast Tom Galvin | Pedro Monteiro | Rohin Borpujari | Greetje Corporaal | Catherine Jackson | Miranda Lewis | Leonardo Melo Lins | Samantha Ortiz-Casillas | Sarah Otner | Ralph Soule | Frithjof Wegener

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We conclude our look at Lawrence Peter’s The Peter Principle by discussing why the Principle is timeless is its quality. Our contemporary experiences with hierarchies may have changed due to greater mobility of workers, but the Principle itself provokes our thinking about management. We also discuss how Peter used satire to present his points and why it seems to be so effective in this particular instance. Is satire a reasonable method to launch and disseminate ideas, and if so, how and when it is most suitable?

The diligent administrative assistant moves up to supervisor but fails. The assembly line worker is promoted to foreman but cannot do the job. A teacher earns a deputy principal position in a school but falls flat on their face. Why is that? Why does this seem to happen across organizations?
In The Peter Principle, Lawrence J. Peter and Raymond Hull not only provides answers to these questions, they delve into all the possible implications. The Principle goes like this, “In a hierarchy, everyone rises to their level of incompetence.” How they derived this principle the subject of our conversation that explores one of the funniest but more insightful book on the perils of organizational life ever written. 

We will provide our take on The Peter Principle, the book that provided the old adage, “In a hierarchy, everyone rises to their level of incompetence.” While the book was written as satire, it touched a nerve of many people frustrated about organizational life. A fun episode!

We conclude the episode by looking to the present day and how the negotiations over work visibility has evolved since the turn of the 21st century. Have the emergence of social media, emergence of general computing platforms over the proprietary systems from the 1990s, and increased competitive pressures driving quests for efficiency challenged or reinforced the arguments that Star and Strauss made in the article? Reviews and reactions are decidedly mixed.

In this episode, we focus on the emerging discourse from the 1990s on how automated systems would potentially change the very meaning of work. The discussion is on a seminal work of Susan Leigh Star and co-author Anselm Strauss, “Layers of Silence, Arenas of Voice: The Ecology of Visible and Invisible Work,” published in CSCW’s flagship journal, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, in 1999. The article focuses on the challenges and risks of automating work processes without due consideration of all the invisible work done in an organization that systems designers might overlook. Moreover, it addresses the unintended consequences of making invisible background work visible, such as making it easier for managers to monitor and control.