Tom Galvin

123: Markets as Politics — Neil Fligstein

March 11, 2025 Tom Galvin 0:03:43
We cover the economic sociology of Neil Fligstein, who countered the dominant 1990s-era neoclassical view of economics that failed to explain well various market behaviors being observed at the time. He argued for an alternative paradigm – a “political-cultural” model that suggested that the formation of markets was part of “state building” and subjected to various social institutions that belonged to the state.Read More

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122: Cultivation and Curation of Professional Knowledge

February 11, 2025 Tom Galvin
This month we discuss the importance and challenges of curating our domains of knowledge in organization studies and launch our new Resource Center!Read More

121: Rhetoric vs. Reality — Mark Zbaracki

January 21, 2025 Tom Galvin 0:03:46
This month we explore a renowned multiple-case study commonly assigned as foundational readings in organization studies programs. Mark Zbaracki’s “The rhetoric and reality of Total Quality Management” chronicled the development and introduction of Total Quality Management (TQM) into the corporate environment, only to find that in many cases its implementation did not align with the promises made by leaders about process improvements nor did firms fully exercise all the practices and activities that TQM required. The question that Zbaracki posed was more than to what extent did this rhetoric-reality unfold, but why?Read More

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120: Institutional Isomorphism — DiMaggio & Powell

December 3, 2024 Tom Galvin 0:04:21
In this episode, we discuss “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizations,” a ground breaking article by sociologists Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell in 1983. The authors argued that the traditional views of why organizations tended to assimilate one another was not explained by the pursuit of rationality or efficiency. Rather, they did so in response to many other stimuli such as regulatory pressures, professional norms, and the need to reduce uncertainty. But why “the iron cage revisited”? The article was inspired by Weber’s use of the metaphor to describe how bureaucratization was destined to enslave humanity. That it did not (at least not to the extent anticipated) spurred the question of why else do organizations model themselves after others in their fields.Read More

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119: Management & the Worker — Roethlisberger & Dickson

November 12, 2024 Tom Galvin 0:04:36
We return for another look at the Hawthorne Studies through Fritz Roethlisberger and William Dickson’s 1939 book Management and the Worker. The work chronicles five years of experiments that initially sought the optimal conditions for increased worker performance but evolved into an examination of the social controls that worker exercise over themselves for self-preservation against managerial decisions. It also includes an introspective look into the researchers themselves as they had to design new experiments to make sense of the surprising and contradictory findings. The book is incredibly detailed and laid the foundation for the development of the Human Relations tradition in organization studies.Read More

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117: Economic Sociology & Valuation – Marion Fourcade

September 17, 2024 Tom Galvin 0:03:46
Economic sociology bridges economics and sociology, exploring questions such as how social environments explain and influence economic activities. Of interest for this episode is the subfield of economic valuation, in which researchers have been studying how the monetary worth of something is formed or constructed. One influential work is Marion Fourcade’s “Cents and Sensibility: Economic Valuation and the Nature of ‘Nature’,” published in the American Journal of Sociology in 2011. The article explores the economic valuation of peculiar goods, things that are intangible or otherwise cannot be exchanged in a market yet have a social value, and uses a case study of the legal proceedings following oil spills in the US and France to explain why the monetary awards were calculated so differently from each other.Read More

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116: Resource Dependence Perspective — Pfeffer & Salancik

August 27, 2024 Tom Galvin 0:03:44
Resource Dependence Theory (RDT) represented a significant departure from extant literature on management and organization studies in the 1970s. Prior to the publication of Jeffrey Pfeffer and Gerald’s The External Control of Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective in 1978, the social context and environment surrounding organizations were little studied. In the book, Pfeffer & Salancik argued that the behaviors or organizations and their managers were driven by the context, because of the need for resources in order to survive. Thus, managerial decisions were based far more on how to manage interdependencies with external social actors than what would presumably lead to objectively better outcomes. They believe RDT explains more accurately the kinds of managerial behaviors observed and how organizations chose (and fired) their executives than other theories of the time.Read More

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115: Sociology of Science — Robert K. Merton

July 23, 2024 Tom Galvin 0:03:54
Robert K. Merton was a sociologist who founded the study of the sociology of science, how acts of research influence and are influenced by the contexts being studied. Two of his early essays exemplify this body of work whereby he and his research teams reflect on the challenges and difficulties of performing field work. In this episode, we examine two speeches delivered in 1947 – “The Machine, the Worker, and the Engineer” and “Selected Problems of Field Work in the Planned Community” – that exemplifies the effort to better understand how to study social change in organizations due to technology change.Read More

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114: Sociotechnical Systems — Trist & Bamforth (revisited)

June 6, 2024 Tom Galvin
With over 110 episodes in our catalogue, we decided it was time to take a step back and revisit one of our earlier episodes that continues to come up time and again. Episode 34, covering Trist & Bamforth’s study on the longwall method of coal-getting, was referenced in sixteen (16) episodes since its release. That is more than any other episode! This re-release includes a new supplement further the conversation to contemporary issues and a sidecast on the use of this study as a cautionary tale for professional education.Read More

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113: Sports & Gender – “A League of Their Own”

May 14, 2024 Tom Galvin 0:03:46
The rapid growth of women’s professional team sports has a history, and many contemporary women’s athletes have honored the legacy of past pioneers as their inspiration. Included in this legacy is the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) that existed from 1943 through 1954 in the U.S. and popularized through the 1992 film “A League of Their Own,” directed by Penny Marshall and starring a large ensemble cast including Geena Davis and Tom Hanks. In addition to describing the lived experiences of the league’s first players, it captures how deeply embedded and institutionalized baseball was in the US such that fears of losing it due to World War II and the drafting of players into military service caused baseball owners to create a women’s league. The movie touches on various important organizational themes such as gendering, innovation, and identity.Read More

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