The Conversational Firm
Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social Media
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
A fast-growing social media marketing company, TechCo encourages all of its employees to speak up. By promoting open dialogue across the corporate hierarchy, the firm has fostered a uniquely engaged workforce and an enviable capacity for change. Yet the path hasn't always been easy. TechCo has confronted a number of challenges, and its experience reveals the essential elements of bureaucracy that remain even when a firm sets out to discard them. Through it all, TechCo serves as a powerful new model for how firms can navigate today's rapidly changing technological and cultural climate.
Catherine J. Turco was embedded within TechCo for ten months. The Conversational Firm is her ethnographic analysis of what worked at the company and what didn't. She offers multiple lessons for anyone curious about the effect of social media on the corporate environment and adds depth to debates over the new generation of employees reared on social media: Millennials who carry their technological habits and expectations into the workplace.
Marshaling insights from cultural and economic sociology, organizational theory, economics, technology studies, and anthropology, The Conversational Firm offers a nuanced analysis of corporate communication, control, and culture in the social media age.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Turco, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, spent 10 months studying the pseudonymous social media marketing firm "TechCo," a 600-person company in an urban area; this thoughtful but ultimately disappointing book-length case study is the result. TechCo knew it needed to undergo some major changes; "The old ways of doing things," the CEO said, "don't work anymore." Turco launched a major study of the company, focusing on its efforts to adopt values popularized by big tech companies (Facebook, Google, etc.) such as openness and transparency. They implemented some of the familiar trappings of an open office a wiki, an open-plan space and worked on replicating a digital-native culture in which open communication and employee autonomy were highly valued. Investigating what had worked and what hadn't, Turco made some unexpected findings: employees pushed back on getting more decision-making responsibilities and had difficulty getting past fear of management reprisal when encouraged to speak honestly about problems. However, she concludes that ongoing, open dialogue is worth striving for as long as leadership can check its assumptions at the door. This is an interesting case study, but the book is neither entertaining enough to be a story, nor educational enough to be prescriptive.
