Call for Abstracts: ISA RC17 Sociology of Organizations, Gwangju 2027

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The Research Committee on Sociology of Organizations (RC17) invites abstract submissions for 27 themes at the upcoming ISA conference in Gwangju, Republic of Korea, July 4–10, 2027. The themes cover a wide range of current topics in organizational sociology.

XXI ISA World Congress of Sociology
Gwangju, Republic of Korea
July 4-10, 2027

Deadline for abstract submissions: October 14, 2026, 23:59 UTC/GMT
Maximum abstract length: 300 words

The Research Committee on Sociology of Organizations (RC17) invites abstracts for 27 themes open for abstract submissions, covering a wide range of current themes in organizational sociology.

Please find below the RC17 themes open for abstract submissions. Click on the theme title to read the full Call for Abstracts and submit your contribution.

·         Business and Society Relations In Twenty-First-Century East Asia
organized by Jiwook Jung

·         DEI, Aging, and Corporate Responsibility: Organizations, Discrimination, and the Care of Older Adults
organized by Soohan Kim

·         Diversity and Organizations – Debates from Transnational, National or Regional Perspectives
organized by Maja Apelt, Matthias Schneider and Nina Hossain

·         Educational Organizations, Diversity, and Digital Technologies: Examining Inclusion and Exclusion
organized by Svenja Hammer, Robert Aust and Caroline Vincent

·         Forging Global Alliances: Food Security, Preparedness, and Agroecological Resilience In Turbulent Times
organized by Allison Loconto and Hilde Bjørkhaug

·         Governing Digital Transformation In Organizations
organized by Angela Graf, Sabine Pfeiffer, Klarissa Lueg and Marco Blank

·         Meta-Organizations and Alternatives to Dominant Orders
organized by Héloïse Berkowitz, Florence Lanzi and Fabian Maier

·         Micro-Sociology of Organizations: What Can It Offer?
organized by Nadine Arnold and Lars Klemsdal

·         Organization and Expertise: Producing, Stabilizing, and Contesting Knowledge
organized by Kathia Serrano Velarde and Leopold Ringel

·         Organization, De-Institutionalization, and Alienation: Education, Care, and Welfare and the New Authoritarianism
organized by Dirk Michel-Schertges and Michael Grothe-Hammer

·         Organizational and Algorithmic Rationalities: Decision-Making, Power and Control In Contemporary Organizations
organized by Marco Joestingmeier and Uli Meyer

·         Organizations Shaping and Being Shaped By Migration
organized by Yingjian Liang

·         Organizing Creativity with AI: Creative Industries, Organizational Fields, and the Reconfiguration of Expertise
organized by Angela Graf, Sabine Pfeiffer and Marco Blank

·         Organizing Education
organized by Kathia Serrano-Velarde and Rebecca Ye

·         Organizing Political Displacement: Expertise, Bureaucracy and the Neutralization of Conflict
organized by Amel Boubekeur

·         Organizing Waste for Livable Lives
organized by Nadine Arnold, Héloïse Berkowitz, Simone Di Cecco, Karine Guiderdoni-Jourdain and Devi Vijay

·         Organizing from the South: Coloniality, Emergences and Alternatives In Latin America
organized by Alba González Vega, Lorena Litai Ramos and Ayde Cadena López

·         Policy Change In Overorganized Societies
organized by Patrick Castel and Henri Bergeron

·         Professions and Organisations Facing Turbulent Times: The Role of Technology
organized by Lia Tirabeni and Lara Maestripieri

·         Racial Inequality In Organisations: The Role of Attitudes, Emotions and Organisational Culture
organized by Carolin Schütze

·         Senior Employment In Organizations
organized by Christophe Baret, Tomohiko Moriyama and Kihong Kim

·         Systems, Decisions, and Organization: From Cybernetic Legacies to Contemporary Challenges
organized by Ayumi Higuchi and Michael Grothe-Hammer

·         The AI-Magicalized Double Movement: Transforming Social Institutions
organized by Jelica Stefanovic Stambuk and Nikola Lazic

·         The Contested Worth of Academic Knowledge
organized by Kate Williams and Liz Dean

·         The Futures of Doing Research In the Social Sciences In the Era of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI): What Can We Do? What Should We Do?

organized by Inga Gaizauskaite, Michael Grothe-Hammer, Dirk Michel-Schertges and Markus S. Schulz

·         The Organization of Ignorance
organized by Robert Van Krieken

·         The Social Regulations of Shared Objects and Spaces In Organizations
organized by Nathalie Saadia Richebé and Lea Holm-Jensen

Abstracts must be submitted through the ISA Conference System to one specific theme/session. Please consult the individual theme page for the full description and accepted language(s).

We very much encourage you to submit your work and to share the Call for Abstracts with colleagues who may be interested.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

We hope to see many of you in Gwangju!

Best wishes,
Michael Grothe-Hammer
Robert van Krieken
Program Coordinators, RC17 Sociology of Organizations

2026 ASA OOW SECTION AWARDS

On By Michelle T. LeeIn Awards, Chicago 2025Leave a comment

Congratulations to the 2026 award recipients for their achievements!

David Su won the James Thompson Graduate Paper Award for his paper “Gaming the Algorithm: Algorithmic Literacy, Tactical Innovation, and Collective Resistance in China’s Platform Economy.”

Dr. Benjamin Shestakofsky won the 2026 Max Weber Book Award for his book, Behind the Start-Up: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality (University of California Press, 2024).

Christopher I. Rider (not pictured), James B. Wade (center), Anand Swaminathan (right), and Andreas Schwab (left) won the W. Richard Scott Article Award for their paper, “Racial Disparity in Leadership: Evidence of Valuative Bias in the Promotions of National Football League Coaches,” published in American Journal of Sociology.

Dr. Phyllis Moen received the Rosabeth Moss Kanter Distinguished Career Award for 2026.

ASA Thematic Session: How Can Sociology Disrupt the Status Quo in U.S. Health Policy?

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OOW members attending the 2026 American Sociological Association Annual Meeting may be interested in the following thematic session:

Session 20834: How Can Sociology Disrupt the Status Quo in U.S. Health Policy?

Saturday, August 8, 2:00–3:30 p.m.
Sheraton, Second Floor, Metropolitan Ballroom East

Description: Under the current presidential administration, we have seen significant threats to healthcare access, public health, and health promoting social policies in the U.S. Despite our discipline’s theoretical frameworks and methodological tools, sociologists have often ceded health policy leadership opportunities to adjacent fields. This session asks: How can sociologists more meaningfully impact health policy? What core sociological insights can animate research agendas to disrupt the status quo in health policy? How can we position existing scholarship and produce new knowledge to meet this political moment? This panel will feature scholars working across multiple areas to invite a conversation on how our discipline can catalyze change in health policy.

Presider: Emily Parker, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Moderator: Sorcha Brophy, Columbia University

Panelists:

  • Tiffany Joseph, Northeastern University
  • Jennifer Karas Montez, Syracuse University
  • Josh Pacewicz, Brown University
  • Megan Reynolds, University of Utah

Call for Proposals: Comparative Sociology of Public Administration Book Volume Conference

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Organizers Erin Metz McDonnell (University of Notre Dame) and Josh Pacewicz (Brown University) invite chapter proposals for an edited volume on the Comparative Sociology of Public Administration.

The project will bring together scholars through two in-person mini-conferences:

  • Late Fall 2026: University of Notre Dame
  • Late Spring 2027: Brown University

Across the globe, states are under pressure to expand social protection, confront democratic backsliding, and adapt to rapid technological change—all while maintaining legitimacy and inclusion in service delivery. Their ability to deliver varies, and politicians in many states have challenged aspects of public administration whose legitimacy mainstream political parties once took as a matter of course. For these reasons, accounts of everything from contemporary welfare regimes to political economies are incomplete without consideration of public bureaucracies. Yet scholarship on public administration remains fragmented along disciplinary, regional, and methodological lines—with particular bifurcation between scholarship on the United States, which tends to employ quantitative and formal models, and scholarship on public administration in other nations, which often employs historical and qualitative techniques to analyze how bureaucracies work in practice. Bringing together a comparative group of scholars is essential to advance a new generation of theory on how states actually work, generating insights across both geographic and methodological differences.

We aim to convene scholars across global contexts to produce an edited volume on the Comparative Sociology of Public Administration via a series of two mini-conferences. We welcome proposals on any aspect of everyday governance, with particular interest in proposed chapters on the following themes: making rights real, state (il)legibility projects, AI and technology in governance, administrative professionals and careers, democratic backsliding and bureaucratic resistance, administrative burdens and improving service delivery, coproduction of public services, and inequalities in public service provision.

Confirmed volume contributors include leading scholars of public administration (Elisabeth Clemens, Pamela Herd, Armando Lara-Millan, Celeste Watkins-Hayes, Michael Woolcock, and Nicholas Wilson), and we are soliciting additional chapter proposals via an open call. Participants will meet in person for two working groups, with travel costs borne by host institutions—Notre Dame’s Kellogg Center in Fall 2026 and Brown University’s Sociology Department in Spring 2027.

If you are interested in applying and would like to meet with us around ASA or over Zoom to chat, please contact us by email.

Organizers:

Email proposals to sociologypublicadmin@gmail.com

Please include in your proposal:

  • Title of Proposed Chapter
  • Name, affiliation, and contact information of author(s)
  • 500-word extended abstract

Deadline for Proposals: Monday, August 17, 2026

Anticipated Timeline:

  • September 1, 2026: Acceptances Announced
  • Early December 2026: Rough Drafts for Notre Dame Conference
  • Early June 2027: Revised Drafts for Brown Conference

New Publication: “The Moralization of Gender (In)Equality: Contested Hybrid Repertoires Among Men in High-Tech Organizations” by Dr. Tair Karazi-Presler

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Karazi-Presler, Tair. 2026. “The Moralization of Gender (In)Equality: Contested Hybrid Repertoires Among Men in High-Tech Organizations.” Men and Masculinities. doi:10.1177/1097184X261465812 

Abstract: This article examines how men negotiate the moral meanings of gender (in)equality in high-tech organizations that publicly promote gender equality while reproducing persistent inequality regimes. Based on 35 in-depth interviews, the analysis conceptualizes their accounts as contested hybrid moral repertoires: morally charged and contested ways of making sense of gender (in)equality in ostensibly egalitarian organizations. Three intertwined dynamics emerged. First, men challenge gender hierarchy by supporting gender equality and recognizing women’s exclusion. Second, they reinforce hierarchy through tensions between political correctness and authenticity, framing restraint as a burden and spontaneity as sincerity. Third, they preserve privilege through discourses of unfairness, reverse discrimination, and lost power. Drawing on the cultural sociology of morality, the article extends scholarship on hybrid masculinities by foregrounding moral sense-making and contributes to the sociology of gender and organizations by showing how moral evaluations and claims to legitimacy become mechanisms through which gender inequality is reproduced.

Postdoctoral Associate, MIT Sloan — AI in Healthcare

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The MIT Sloan School of Management, in collaboration with the Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) program in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, invites applications for a Postdoctoral Associate to join a participatory action research project on worker-centered AI implementation in healthcare. The project — a partnership between MIT researchers, a large healthcare system, and the union representing its frontline workers — develops and evaluates concrete strategies for engaging frontline workers in decisions about how AI technologies are adopted and implemented in their workplaces.

The appointment is for one year beginning September 1, 2026 (or an earlier mutually agreed date), with the possibility of renewal contingent on funding. The Postdoctoral Associate should expect to work from Cambridge, MA, with regular travel to the field site in Central Massachusetts. The position is eligible for MIT benefits.

The Postdoctoral Associate will be mentored by Professors Erin Kelly, Kate Kellogg, and Zana Buçinca, and will collaborate with the broader project team, the SERC postdoctoral fellow cohort, and the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research (IWER) community. Requirements include strong qualitative research skills and demonstrated experience working with multiple stakeholders. See full description at https://apply.interfolio.com/188620.

New Publication: “Participant Observation in the 21st Century: How the Digital Dimension Matters for All Ethnographers.” 

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Crooke, Catherine L. 2026. “Participant Observation in the 21st Century: How the Digital Dimension Matters for All Ethnographers.” Qualitative Research 26(2): 457–477. https://doi.org/10.1177/14687941261420113

Abstract: Scholarship on participant observation in the digital era has produced a proliferation of labels—virtual ethnography, digital ethnography, and netnography, among others—that often position digitally attuned methods as specialized departures from ethnography’s core. This framing risks obscuring the relevance of digital practices for ethnographers whose research questions do not centrally concern technology. The present article proposes that attention to the multifaceted digital dimensions of social life enhances participant observation even for those who study social processes whose center of gravity is offline. Drawing on a multiyear ethnographic study initiated shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic, I emphasize that much ostensibly ‘in-person’ work unfolds through screens and digital infrastructures. Consciously engaging these environments expands ethnographic insight in three key ways: increasing the surface area of observable interaction, foregrounding participants’ extended social networks, and illuminating collaborative interpretive work among research participants.

Catherine L. Crooke is a lawyer and PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at UCLA. She uses qualitative methods to study law, migration, work, organizations, and professions. Her dissertation draws on over four years of participant observation and nearly 100 interviews with Los Angeles-based legal service providers to examine the U.S. immigration system as a site of both legal promise and institutional erosion. Foregrounding the everyday experiences of immigration lawyers, she shows how institutional instability reshapes professional practice and transforms the meaning of legality itself. More broadly, her project offers a framework for understanding how professionals sustain moral commitments within institutions marked by constraint.

Catherine’s scholarship appears in Law & Society Review, Law & Social Inquiry, and Qualitative Research, and has received support from numerous funding agencies including the Ford Foundation, the American Sociological Association’s Minority Fellowship Program, the Center for Engaged Scholarship, and the Center for Institutional Courage. She holds a JD from Yale Law School, an MSc from the University of Oxford, and a BA from Columbia University.

New Publication: “The Inauthenticity of Organizational Diversity Initiatives: Perspectives from the Tech Industry”

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Wilcox, Annika and Neeraj Rajasekar. 2026. “The Inauthenticity of Organizational Diversity Initiatives: Perspectives from the Tech Industry.” The Sociological Quarterly.  https://doi.org/10.1080/00380253.2026.2644528

Abstract: Organizations often use diversity initiatives to craft an image of moral goodness while doing little to address workplace inequalities. This disconnect is intensified in the U.S. technology industry, where companies attempt to claim identities as progressive diversity supporters despite obvious patterns of inequality and discrimination. How do tech employees make sense of this contradiction? This study combines the sociology of diversity, sociology of organizations, and organizational authenticity literatures to analyze, via 31 in-depth interviews, how employees of a large U.S. tech company evaluate diversity initiatives in the U.S. tech industry. Results show that tech workers question the authenticity of high-tech diversity programs: they frame technology companies as lacking commitment to diversity, overemphasizing conformity to diversity-related norms, and demonstrating dubious inconsistency in their approach to diversity. Nonetheless, they moderate their criticisms by noting that tech companies do “try” to take responsibility for diversity. Interviewees voiced these impressions similarly across race and gender. We therefore argue that the (in)authenticity of diversity initiatives can be a unifying concern amongst individuals with differing social identities. As diversity initiatives exist largely due to social pressures, they will need to overcome issues of inauthenticity in order to survive widespread sociopolitical critiques.

Annika Wilcox is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology, Social Work, and Criminal Justice at East Stroudsburg University. Her research examines how organizational inequalities are reproduced and challenged, primarily focusing on diversity/DEI discourse and initiatives. Her work has appeared in outlets such as Social Science Research, Sociological Forum, and Research in the Sociology of Work.  

Neeraj Rajasekar is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Sociology/Anthropology department at University of Illinois, Springfield. He completed his PhD in Sociology from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, in 2021. He has written scholarly articles and book chapters about diversity discourse, diversity attitudes, racial attitudes, racial inequality, and the history of multiculturalism in the United States. His publications have appeared in Sociology of Race & Ethnicity, Social Currents, Sociological Forum, and other journals.

New Publication: “Jurisdictional Gerrymandering: The Authority of Problems without Solutions” by Shira Zilberstein

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Zilberstein, Shira. 2026. “Jurisdictional Gerrymandering: The Authority of Problems without Solutions.” Social Problems. doi:10.1093/socpro/spag024

Abstract: This paper develops the concept of jurisdictional gerrymandering to explain how professionals selectively invoke boundaries around their expertise to frame their role and maintain authority in solving problems that extend beyond their jurisdiction. Drawing on a study of artificial intelligence (AI) model development for healthcare, I analyze how AI practitioners position their work in relation to health equity, an issue they acknowledge cannot be solved through technology. Rather than claiming full authority over equity solutions or deferring to other domains, AI practitioners engage in jurisdictional gerrymandering by critiquing, projecting, and dissolving jurisdiction for different aspects of defining and solving health equity. This process enables them to retain authority to participate in health equity problem solving through moral alignment without accountability for solutions. In contrast to jurisdictional models of professional authority or networked expertise, jurisdictional gerrymandering unbundles defining and solving problems. It reveals a key mechanism through which authority is maintained without asserting control or claiming to be able to achieve solutions. Jurisdictional gerrymandering enables problem frames to continually serve as justifications for technological projects and expert interventions regardless of solutions, shedding light on tensions between innovation, expertise, and responsibility for social problems.

Shira Zilberstein is a PhD candidate in sociology at Harvard University and a fellow in the Science and Technology Studies program at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her research focuses on cultural sociology, science and technology studies and organizations, as well as theory and methods. She is interested in the production, interpretation and evaluation of ideas and the dynamics between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic forms of knowledge in institutional and technical settings. To this end, she has conducted research on grassroots artists, international non-governmental organizations, American college students, academics and journalists. Her dissertation focuses on applied interdisciplinary research collaborations in the field of artificial intelligence. The project studies the ways in which social impact is understood and structured by organizational incentives and decision-making processes that define and seek to address social needs.

New Publication: “The (State–Private) Ties That Bind: Status, Interactions, and Economic Development in India” by Aruna Ranganathan & Laura Doering

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Ranganathan, Aruna, and Laura Doering. 2026. “The (State–Private) Ties That Bind: Status, Interactions, and Economic Development in India.” Sociology of Development 1–31. doi:10.1525/sod.2026.2893447.

Abstract: Governments often collaborate with the private sector to design and implement major economic initiatives. In studying such state–society collaborations, sociologists tend to focus on how institutional contexts shape outcomes. Although this institutional approach has been highly generative, it can overlook important micro-level interaction patterns between state and private-sector actors that also affect economic outcomes. In this study, we examine how bureaucrats in the Indian government interacted with private-sector representatives to design and implement an industrial crafts park. Drawing on ethnographic observations, interviews, and supplemental survey data, we show how bureaucrats’ status biases in favor of certain private-sector actors produced interaction patterns that blinded them to fatal flaws in the project’s design and ultimately contributed to its dramatic failure. By bringing an interactionist lens to state–society economic engagements, this study reveals how interaction patterns can aggregate to shape large-scale development outcomes. More broadly, it highlights an important but undertheorized pathway through which bureaucrats may inadvertently reinforce social stratification through the very projects intended to reduce economic inequality. We suggest that an interactionist approach to state–private collaborations and policy design can contribute to efforts to address global poverty.

Aruna Ranganathan holds the Dong Koo Kim Chancellor’s Chair in Social Entrepreneurship and is an Associate Professor at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business. Prof. Ranganathan is also affiliated with the Sociology department and the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at UC Berkeley. She was formerly an associate professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University. Ranganathan spent her childhood in the Middle East, India, and Singapore before graduating with honors from the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business with a BCom in organizational behavior and human resources. She also received an MS in international and comparative labor from Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations and an MS/PhD in management from MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

Laura Doering is an Associate Professor of Strategic Management and is cross-appointed in the Department of Sociology. As an economic sociologist, she examines how interactions and social psychological processes shape outcomes for households, organizations, and markets. Her research has been published in the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Sociological Science, Sociology of Development, and Journal of Business Venturing. Professor Doering’s research and writing have appeared in The New York Times, BBC News, The Globe and Mail, Salon, and other outlets.