France Winddance Twine has a book (NYU press) available for pre-order with a discount through this website.
SUMMARY: An inside account of gender and racial discrimination in the high-tech industry
Why is being a computer “geek” still perceived to be a masculine occupation? Why do men continue to greatly outnumber women in the high-technology industry? Since 2014, a growing number of employment discrimination lawsuits has called attention to a persistent pattern of gender discrimination in the tech world. Much has been written about the industry’s failure to adequately address gender and racial inequalities, yet rarely have we gotten an intimate look inside these companies. In Geek Girls, France Winddance Twine provides the first book by a sociologist that “lifts the Silicon veil” to provide firsthand accounts of inequality and opportunity in the tech ecosystem. This work draws on close to a hundred interviews with male and female technology workers of diverse racial, ethnic, and educational backgrounds who are currently employed at tech firms such as Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter, and at various start-ups in the San Francisco Bay area. Geek Girls captures what it is like to work as a technically skilled woman in Silicon Valley.
With a sharp eye for detail and compelling testimonials from industry insiders, Twine shows how the technology industry remains rigged against women, and especially Black, Latinx, and Native American women from working class backgrounds. From recruitment and hiring practices that give priority to those with family, friends, and classmates employed in the industry, to social and educational segregation, to academic prestige hierarchies, Twine reveals how women are blocked from entering this industry. Women who do not belong to the dominant ethnic groups in the industry are denied employment opportunities, and even actively pushed out, despite their technical skills and qualifications.
While the technology firms strongly embrace the rhetoric of diversity and oppose discrimination in the workplace, Twine argues that closed social networks and routine hiring practices described by employees reinforce the status quo and reproduce inequality. The myth of meritocracy and gender stereotypes operate in tandem to produce a culture where the use of race-, color-, and power-evasive language makes it difficult for individuals to name the micro-aggressions and forms of discrimination that they experience.
Twine offers concrete insights into how the technology industry can address ongoing racial and gender disparities, create more transparency and empower women from underrepresented groups, who continued to be denied opportunities.
UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business offers a unique opportunity to champion new ideas, collaborate across boundaries, and continually learn in a workplace committed to increasing diversity and creating a welcoming environment for all. Our distinctive culture is captured within our four Defining Leadership Principles: Question the Status Quo, Confidence Without Attitude, Students Always, and Beyond Yourself. These principles distinguish Berkeley Haas as a unique environment, conducive to teamwork, collaboration, and career growth.
The Berkeley Culture Initiative aims to usher in the next generation of culture research, one that draws on a wide range of data sources and computational methods to uncover different facets of culture within and across organizations and industries. We partner with organizations and academics from a wide diversity of disciplines and industries to lead these efforts, with the ultimate goal of leveraging research insights to help organizations function more effectively and advance academic understanding.
The Initiative puts on various events throughout the year to promote discussion and create a shared research agenda between academia and industry, culminating in our annual Culture Conference. Through talks, discussions, and activities led by leaders from industry and academia, the conference convenes leading academic researchers studying organizational culture and a set of strong-culture company leaders to deepen the dialogue about how to address various culture-related challenges, such as fostering a culture of innovation and inclusion, introducing large-scale cultural change and tracking its progress, and understanding the impact of culture on firm and employee performance.
Directs and administers an independent program with complete responsibility for administrative and programmatic activities.
Has primary responsibility for operational administration for all research, conferences, programs, and other initiatives.
Facilitates efforts of various departments, managers and outside constituencies to ensure interdisciplinary collaboration.
Develops networks of foundations, and partners who will support and participate in this initiative.
Works directly with other centers and programs within Haas and UC Berkeley at large.
Manages collaboration with corporate partners, as well as research vendors, academics at other universities, government entities, and more.
Identifies and pursues funding opportunities and revenue streams.
Pursues other opportunities to expand initial projects or sponsorships.
Raises enough money to meet annual targets for both operational expenses and to start and grow a $10 million endowment.
Creates revenue opportunities such as conference sponsorships, sponsored research projects, and gifts.
Seeks out and leads the application effort for research grant funding.
Participates in advanced program budgeting and accounting processes to support financial infrastructure of initiative.
Works with department financial manager and faculty directors to set annual budget.
Reviews quarterly financial reports to ensure BCI is staying within its budget and achieving financial goals.
Manages financial and HR resources.
Leads the process of hiring research assistants and event coordinators.
Supervises the day-to-day activities of research assistants and event coordinators.
Oversees contracting, purchasing, hiring of research vendors, and similar tasks.
Assesses program’s effectiveness and recommends changes to program’s content, policies and procedures accordingly.
Develops and measure KPIs to assess the initiative’s effectiveness.
Works with faculty directors to assess research and programmatic initiatives to adjust to meet stakeholders’ needs.
Serves on committees representing the program, participating in short term and long term planning.
Represents the program at institute- and school level meetings.
Works with faculty directors to plan and institute quarterly, annual, and longer-term research studies and programs.
Assists in developing research, participates in professional conferences and provides public relations support.
Develops programming for the Initiative including the Annual Culture Conference, the Quarterly Newsletter, the Fireside Chat Series, and other new programs that increase the comprehensiveness of BCIs offerings to the academic and practitioner communities.
Professional Learning and Growth
Embraces the principle of being a “student always” by engaging in opportunities for training, workshops, seminars, continuing education pertinent to the position, or at the suggestion of the supervisor.
Actively contributes to a team environment that fosters and promotes a culture of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) within the unit and at Haas.
Engages in ongoing education to promote diversity, equity, inclusion & belonging by completing University sponsored certifications & training sessions (Ie: MEP Workshop, Implicit Bias Certification, LinkedIn Learning workshops, and other workshops & seminars offered by the University or Haas, as they are made available) or by engaging in external seminars & resources related to DEIB.
Exemplifies Haas’ four Defining Leadership Principles: (1) Question the status quo; (2) Confidence without attitude; (3) Students always; and (4) Beyond yourself.
Salary & Benefits
This is an exempt, monthly paid position. Annual salary will be commensurate with experience up to $142,500.00.
For information on the comprehensive benefits package offered by the University visit:
Please submit your cover letter and resume as a single attachment when applying.
Please upload the document in the Resume section, then skip the (optional) Cover Letter upload section.
Other Information
This is a one-year contract position with the possibility of extension. The minimum posting duration of this position is 14 calendar days.
The department will not initiate the application review process prior to March 11, 2022.
Conviction History Background
This is a designated position requiring fingerprinting and a background check due to the nature of the job responsibilities. Berkeley does hire people with conviction histories and reviews information received in the context of the job responsibilities. The University reserves the right to make employment contingent upon successful completion of the background check.
Equal Employment Opportunity
The University of California is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or protected veteran status. For more information about your rights as an applicant see:
CITATION: Hoffmann, Elizabeth A. “Moralizing the Law: Lactating Workers and the Transformation of Supervising Managers.” Law & Society Review 56, no. 1 (March 2022): 28–52. https://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12588.
ABSTRACT: The Lactation at Work Law amended the Fair Labor Standards Act to mandate employer accommodation of employees’ breast milk expression. Interviews with employees, human resource specialists, and supervising managers in nine industries found that some organizations’ supervising managers, who initially perceived accommodations only as a legal mandate furthering managerial goals, over time changed to understanding lactation accommodations through a children’s-health lens that created morality-driven motivations for legal compliance–a “moralization of the law.” Educational discussions with lactating employees not only provided these supervising managers with insights into lactation at work, but also sensitized them to ethical issues surrounding lactation accommodations.
Neely, Megan Tobias. 2022. Hedged Out: Inequality and Insecurity on Wall Street. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
About the Book:
Who do you think of when you imagine a hedge fund manager? A greedy fraudster, a visionary entrepreneur, a wolf of Wall Street? These tropes capture the public imagination of a successful hedge fund manager. But behind the designer suits, helicopter commutes, and illicit pursuits are the everyday stories of people who work in the hedge fund industry—many of whom don’t realize they fall within the 1 percent that drives the divide between the richest and the rest. Hedged Out gives readers an outsider’s insider perspective on Wall Street and its enduring culture of inequality.
Hedged Out dives into the upper echelons of Wall Street, where elite white masculinity is the standard measure for the capacity to manage risk and insecurity. Facing an unpredictable and risky stock market, hedge fund workers protect their interests by working long hours and building tight-knit networks with people who look and behave like them. Using ethnographic vignettes and her own industry experience, Neely showcases the voices of managers and other workers to illustrate how this industry of politically mobilized elites excludes people on the basis of race, class, and gender. Neely shows how this system of elite power and privilege not only sustains itself but builds over time as the beneficiaries concentrate their resources. Hedged Out explains why the hedge fund industry generates extreme wealth, why mostly white men benefit, and why reforming Wall Street will create a more equal society.
Use source code 21W2240 for a 30% discount at UCPress.
Hi OOW Members! Today we have a brief interview with Professor Brooke Harrington, an editor from the journal Journal of Professions and Organizationpublished through Oxford University Press. Professor Harrington is here to tell us a little more about the journal and to invite OOW members to submit relevant articles for consideration to this journal. You can also see Professor Harrington’s comments from the recent Meet the Editors event. (Interview by Diana Enriquez, OOW Blog Managing Editor)
Q&A for OOW Blog
Diana Enriquez, editor: Could you highlight some of the articles this journal has published recently that you’ve enjoyed reading?
Professor Harrington: Here are some personal favorites. The third and fourth papers on this list both won our annual “Best Paper” competition in recent years—an award that comes with a $500 prize for the winner and $250 for each of the runners up.
Bévort, Frans & Suddaby, Roy (2016). Scripting professional identities: How individuals make sense of contradictory institutional logics, Journal of Professions and Organization, 3(1): 17–38. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/jpo/jov007
Dezalay, Yves & Garth, Bryant (2016). ‘Lords of the dance’ as double agents: Elite actors in and around the legal field, Journal of Professions and Organization, 3(2): 188–206. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/jpo/jow006
Ahuja, Sumati, Nikolova, Natalia, & Clegg, Stewart (2017). Paradoxical identity: The changing nature of architectural work and its relation to architects’ identity. Journal of Professions and Organization, 4(1): 2-19. doi: 10.1093/jpo/jow013
Armour, John & Sako, Mari. 2020. AI-enabled business models in legal services: From traditional law firms to next-generation law companies? Journal of Professions and Organization, 7(1): 27–46. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/jpo/joaa001
Diana: Are there any special issues or thematic areas you’re hoping to address in the next year?
Professor Harrington: As the journal’s title suggests, the articles we publish center on the themes of professional work and organizations such as professional service firms. Within those categories, there is a lot of diversity, encompassing work from many different kinds of professions, organizations and countries. Before I became editor of JPO, I published my own work there on an emergent profession almost no one had ever heard of before—wealth management—which involved work and employment patterns that were broadly transnational, involving almost every country in the world. I found the reviewers and editors at the journal very receptive to this work, because of their own wide-ranging perspective and openness to novel, off-the-beaten path work. I’m very keen to continue that tradition.
So we’re looking for innovative work that is rigorous theoretically and methodologically, more so than we are looking for any particular themes within the realms of professions and professional organizations. That means, we seek papers that add something new to ongoing scholarly conversations about professions and organizations: either pointing out things that previous work has missed, or perhaps resolving conflicts and other gaps in the literature. The world of work is changing so quickly, due to technology, the pandemic and global trade, that there are always new insights to be had. The key task for authors is to show us how their unique data or analysis contributes to, expands or even explodes existing scholarly models. As editors and reviewers, we’re eager to help authors develop their ideas in those directions, so that their work can generalize and be cited as widely as possible. That’s what publishing with JPO years ago did for me as an author; now as editor, I want to pass along that gift of encouragement and rigorous, engaged dialogue.
Diana: Is there anything else you’d like the OOW community to know about this journal?
Professor Harrington: Given the questions we received at the OOW “Meet the Editors” panel session on Friday, February 25, I’d like to let everyone reading this know that JPO is very welcoming of papers using non-US data, as well as of qualitative work. Of course we welcome US-based and quantitative work, as well as multi-method and cross-national comparative papers, too! Because the journal was founded by scholars working in the Middle East and Europe, we can also readily call upon networks of reviewers who are familiar with a wide variety of research settings and methods.
Each paper is assigned three reviewers based on subject matter expertise, and then undergoes what we think is one of the quickest and most constructive review processes among the top journals. Since we are all authors, as well as editors, it has been extremely important to us to ensure the constructiveness of expert feedback in the review process, and to avoid wasting authors’ time; our average time from first submission to first editorial decision letter (e.g., reject, revise and resubmit, or rarely, accept) is 25 days.
Diana: Thank you for time, Professor Harrington! And for OOW members: please consider submitting to the Journal of Professions and Organization!
Hi OOW members! Check out this new publication from Michael Wallace, Allen Hyde and Todd Vachon:
CITATION:
Wallace, Michael, Allen Hyde, Todd E. Vachon. 2022. “Political Party Control, Union Strength, and Neoliberalism: Accounting for Rising Income Inequality across the 50 U.S. States since 1950.” Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rssm.2022.100677
ABSTRACT:
This paper uses power resource theory to investigate the determinants of rising income inequality in the U.S. states from 1951–2018. Specifically, we analyze how political party control of national- and state-level government, presidential and gubernatorial election cycles, union strength and state right-to-work laws affect the Gini index and the Theil index—two measures that tap middle-class and upper-tail income inequality. A major contribution is to probe more deeply than previous research the historical and regional contingency of these processes by examining contrasting patterns between the Keynesian (1951–1980) and neoliberal (1981–2018) periods and between the Non- South and the South. We conduct three primary analyses. First, we explore the effects of these determinants over the entire period, net of other covariates. Second, we explore historical contingency by investigating how these effects differ during the Keynesian and neoliberal periods. Third, we explore regional contingency by examining differences in effects between the Non-Southern and Southern regions of the country. We find consistent evidence that political and labor power resources matter in the determination of income inequality; moreover, how they matter differs in substantively and theoretically important ways across period and region. We conclude with a discussion of what the results suggest for future developments in U.S. income inequality.
Citation: Misra, Joya and Kyla Walters. 2022. Walking Mannequins: How Race and Gender Inequalities Shape Retail Clothing Work. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Summary: In malls across the United States, clothing retail workers navigate low wages and unpredictable schedules. Despite these problems, they devote time and money to mirror the sleek mannequins stylishly adorned with the latest merchandise. Bringing workers’ voices to the fore, sociologists Joya Misra and Kyla Walters demonstrate how employers reproduce gendered and racist “beauty” standards by regulating workers’ size and look. Interactions with customers, coworkers, and managers further reinforce racial hierarchies. New surveillance technologies also lead to ineffective corporate decision-making based on flawed data. By focusing on the interaction of race, gender, and surveillance, Walking Mannequins sheds important new light on the dynamics of retail work in the twenty-first century.
You can buy it here with the source code 21W2240 at checkout for a discount!
This article develops a theory of how disruptive events could reduce racial and gender inequality in organizations. Despite pressure from regulators and advocates, racial and gender inequality in the workplace remains high. The article theorizes that because such inequality is often reinforced by organizational inertia, disruptive changes that shake up old hierarchies, break down routines, and shift culture could offer an opportunity for racial minority and women workers to advance. The author tests this theory by examining 37,343 mergers and acquisitions in the United States from 1971 to 2015. Using a difference-in-differences design, the author finds that although acquisitions lead to occupational reconfigurations that favor higher-skilled workers, they also improve the managerial representation of racial minorities and women and reduce racial and gender segregation in the acquired workplace. These findings suggest that certain radical organizational changes could significantly reduce racial and gender inequality.
Hi OOW members! Please check out this new article from OOW member Daniel Auguste, Stephen Roll and Mathieu Despard:
CITATION:
Daniel Auguste, Stephen Roll, Mathieu Despard, The Precarity of Self-Employment among Low- and Moderate-Income Households, Social Forces, 2022;, soab171, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soab171
ABSTRACT:
Many people in the United States have achieved economic stability through self-employment and are often seen as embracing the entrepreneurial spirit and seizing opportunity. Yet, research also suggests that self-employment may be precarious for many people in the lower socioeconomic strata. Drawing on a unique dataset that combines longitudinal survey data with administrative tax data for a sample of low- and moderate-income (LMI) workers, we bring new evidence to bear on this debate by examining the link between self-employment and economic insecurity. Overall, our results show that self-employment is associated with greater economic insecurity among LMI workers compared with wage-and-salary employment. For instance, compared with their wage-and-salary counterparts, the self-employed have 78, 168, and 287 percent greater odds of having an income below basic expenses, and experiencing an unexpected income decline and high levels of income volatility, respectively. We also find that differences in financial endowment and access to health insurance are key drivers in explaining the relationship between employment type and economic insecurity, as being able to access $2,000 in an emergency greatly lowers the odds of budgetary constraint, whereas lack of health insurance increases those odds. These findings suggest that formal work arrangements with wages and benefits offered by an employer promotes greater economic stability among LMI workers compared with informal work arrangements via self-employment. We discuss implications of these results for future research and policy initiatives seeking to promote economic wellbeing through entrepreneurship.
Organizations, Occupations and Work 