Tom Galvin

134: Normal Accidents — Charles Perrow

February 10, 2026 Tom Galvin 0:04:18
We are discussing Charles Perrow’s book Normal Accidents that addresses the risks associated with complex, tightly coupled high-risk technological systems, utilizing a framework developed through analyses of numerous accidents and incidents involving nuclear energy, petrochemicals, aircraft, ships, and many other platforms or facilitiesRead More

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133: Strategic Planning & Design – Henry Mintzberg

January 20, 2026 Tom Galvin 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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131: Commitment and Community – Rosabeth Moss Kanter

November 11, 2025 Tom Galvin 0:04:32
We return to the works of Rosabeth Moss Kanter and discuss one of her better known books "Commitment and Community" that examines the origins and life cycle of numerous communes that sprang up in the US from the mid-19th century to the 1960s. Written based on her dissertation study at a time when hippie communes were popular, she wondered what drove people to start or join these communes and what factors enabled the communes’ survival.Read More

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130: History and Philosophy of Science – Thomas Kuhn

October 13, 2025 Tom Galvin 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 Tom Galvin 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 Tom Galvin 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 Tom Galvin 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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126: Labor and Monopoly Capital — Harry Braverman

June 10, 2025 Tom Galvin 0:04:00
In this month’s episode, we discuss Harry Braverman’s book Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the 20th Century. Along with his criticism of how work had been systematically deskilled over time, he was also highly critical of many of the seminal authors and schools of thought that he felt enabled this shift. Among his targets were scientific management under Frederic Taylor, but also the human relations school, the Hawthorne Studies, Joan Woodward, and other seminal authors we have covered in this program. Hmm, what gives? Listen and find out.Read More

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125: Institution and Action — Steven Barley

May 13, 2025 Tom Galvin 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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124: Postcolonial Theory — Anshuman Prasad

April 8, 2025 Tom Galvin 0:03:25
Anshuman Prasad (1954-2023) was a leading scholar and development of postcolonial theory and bringing it to the domain of management and organization studies. The theory strove to explain the significance influences and impacts that Western colonialism had on non-Western cultures and its implications for organizations located in non-Western settings. We are reading two of his many works, one about the specific use of science as a tool of colonialism and the other is a book chapter that summarizes the works of the early postcolonial theorists.Read More

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