Rohin Borpujari

137: Science as a Vocation – Max Weber

June 2, 2026 Rohin Borpujari 0:03:33
We return once more to Max Weber and look at one of his most important and noteworthy speeches, “Science as a Vocation.” The speech includes a number of major themes such as what is the worth of science, what are the roles of junior academics as they establish themselves as scientists, and what constitutes proper teaching. Controversial in its day, but required reading for many graduate programs today.Read More

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136: Bureaucracy (revisited) – Max Weber

April 28, 2026 Rohin Borpujari 0:03:31
We are revisiting an older episode, our Episode 6 on Weber’s bureaucracy. The original episode explored the work objectively, trying to understand how Weber was encouraging the use of rational rules and hierarchical systems to foster greater stability in society rather than efficiency. But it never seemed to happen as bureaucracies became a dominant organizational form. By re-reading Weber through the lens of institutional logics, we hope to better understand why this is the case.Read More

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135: Boundary Work in Science – Thomas Gieryn

March 10, 2026 Rohin Borpujari 0:04:38
We continue our series of discussions on the sociology of science and cover a seminal article that is commonly found as required reading in doctoral programs -- Thomas Gieryn’s 1983 article “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from non-Science” from the American Sociological Review. This commentary draws from three different historical case studies to explore where the boundary is between what is or should be considered science or the autonomy granted to scientists and what is considered other forms of intellectual pursuit.Read More

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130: History and Philosophy of Science – Thomas Kuhn

October 13, 2025 Rohin Borpujari 0:04:01
A culmination of Kuhn’s earlier works on the philosophy and history of science, Scientific Revolutions challenges the notion that science progresses along a predictable or linear path where discoveries are made at readily identified and verifiable times and the academic community embraces these advancements largely as they come.Read More

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129: Socialization and Training – The Private SNAFU Video Series

September 9, 2025 Rohin Borpujari 0:03:30
For this year’s movie episode, we elected to take on a video series used during World War II to help socialize US Army rules and procedures among forces either deployed or getting ready to deploy. Private SNAFU was a series of black-and-white animated shorts of three to five minutes in length recounting various misadventures of the title character as he goes to war.Read More

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128: Meaningfulness of Work – Andrew Carton

August 12, 2025 Rohin Borpujari 0:04:19
We discuss Drew Carton’s 2018 article “’I’m not mopping the floors, I’m putting a man on the moon’: How NASA leaders enhanced the meaningfulness of work by changing the meaning of work” from Administrative Science Quarterly that delves into the reality behind the myth of the highly motivated NASA janitor during the 1960s.Read More

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127: The Problem of Embeddedness – Mark Granovetter

July 8, 2025 Rohin Borpujari 0:03:51
We discuss Mark Granovetter's 1985 paper, "Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness." He argued that economic behavior is not the product of isolated rational calculations, nor is it fully determined by social norms. Instead, individuals are embedded in a complex network of relationships that simultaneously provides structure and allows for personal discretion.Read More

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125: Institution and Action — Steven Barley

May 13, 2025 Rohin Borpujari 0:03:44
We discuss an important article by Steven Barley on the introduction of new technologies into established organizations. His study of the fielding of CT scanners in two hospitals showed how established organization structures and patterns of behavior influenced actions undertaken by radiologists and the new CT technologists, which in turn changed the structures in the hospital. This study contributed to a greater understanding of the relationships between institutions and action.Read More

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123: Markets as Politics — Neil Fligstein

March 11, 2025 Rohin Borpujari 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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121: Rhetoric vs. Reality — Mark Zbaracki

January 21, 2025 Rohin Borpujari 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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