The Current War

Welcome to episode

139, our occasional movie episode where we discuss a film through an organizational lens.

This episode is about the famous War of the Currents from the late 19th century.

The film we watched is from 2017, The Current War, directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rayton and distributed by 101 Studios.

We also read two papers from Administrative Science Quarterly, Michael Tushman and Philip Anderson's Technological Discontinuities and Organizational Environments from 1986, and Benjamin Cole and David Chandler's A Model of Competitive Impression Management, Edison vs. Westinghouse in The War of the Currents from 2019.

To learn more about the film and these texts, please go to our website at www.talkingaboutorganizations.com.

This is Freddie Wagner calling from Düsseldorf in Germany.

Hi, this is Sarah calling from London.

[outro jingle] Welcome to Talking About Organizations, a podcast on organization and management studies graciously supported by our listeners.

This is a supplement to episode one thirty-nine, our occasional movie episode where we discuss a film through an organizational lens.

This episode is about the famous War of the Currents from the late nineteenth century.

The film we watched is from twenty seventeen, The Current War, directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon and distributed by One O One Studios.

We also read two papers from Administrative Science Quarterly, Michael Tushman and Philip Anderson's Technological Discontinuities and Organizational Environments from nineteen eighty-six, and Benjamin Cole and David Chandler's A Model of Competitive Impression Management: Edison versus Westinghouse in the War of the Currents from twenty nineteen.

The War of the Currents 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.