Sarah Otner

133: Strategic Planning & Design – Henry Mintzberg

January 20, 2026 Sarah Otner 0:04:40
This month we return to Henry Mintzberg, covering a number of works covering broad themes of strategy development and organizational planning, along with critiques of extant design school works. We divided five works among us to discuss in which he argues about why strategies and plans so often seem to fail, why planners seem so out of touch with the rest of the organization, and why even the processes of strategy development and planning may be inherently flawed.Read More

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128: Meaningfulness of Work – Andrew Carton

August 12, 2025 Sarah Otner 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 Sarah Otner 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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123: Markets as Politics — Neil Fligstein

March 11, 2025 Sarah Otner 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 Sarah Otner
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

120: Institutional Isomorphism — DiMaggio & Powell

December 3, 2024 Sarah Otner 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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117: Economic Sociology & Valuation – Marion Fourcade

September 17, 2024 Sarah Otner 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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115: Sociology of Science — Robert K. Merton

July 23, 2024 Sarah Otner 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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113: Sports & Gender – “A League of Their Own”

May 14, 2024 Sarah Otner 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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105: Manifest & Latent Roles — Alvin Gouldner

September 12, 2023 Sarah Otner 0:03:47
Alvin Gouldner wrote the article, “Cosmopolitans and locals: Toward an analysis of latent social roles” in 1957 to propose that through the 1950s latent roles had been seriously overlooked by scholars. Manifest roles, described as those roles and role identities that are directly related to one’s defined position in the organizational structure, had been the sole focus. Latent roles comprised the complementary roles that members made salient but were not officially recognized. Instead, managers might dismiss such roles as “irrelevant, inappropriate, or illegitimate” to recognize formally despite them being essential in the organization’s social fabricRead More

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