Author: Jessica Urzúa

Call for Papers: HJSR Special Issue 49 – Rural Action

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The Humboldt Journal of Social Relations (HJSR) invites submissions for its 2027 Special Issue 49, Rural Action in the United States: Community-Driven Strategies for Equity, Transformation and Participatory Research.

This special issue aims to advance scholarly and practice-based conversations about rural communities as dynamic sites of both structural inequity and transformative action. The editors welcome theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions examining the diverse forms, sites, and expressions of rural action across the United States.

Submission Information

  • Abstract deadline (250 words): June 1, 2026
  • Notification of selected abstracts: June 15, 2026
  • Full research articles (maximum 8,500 words) due: September 15, 2026
  • Commentaries and creative writing submissions (maximum 3,000 words) due: November 15, 2026

Abstracts should be sent to: hjsr@humboldt.edu

HJSR 2027 Co-Editors

  • Dawn Arledge, MA — California Center for Rural Policy
  • Nino Dzotsenidze, PhD — California Center for Rural Policy
  • Nick Ortiz, MA — California Center for Rural Policy

For additional information, please view the full call for papers here.

OOW Virtual Panel on Platform Work

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May 6th, 2-3 pm EDT (11am-noon PDT/ 7-8pm BDT)

We invite you to join our virtual panel on digital platform work featuring:

Dr. Elif Birced, Dr. Hatim Rahman, and Dr. Kathleen Griesbach.

Work on digital platforms has exploded in the past decade and continues to evolve with technology. Today, these platforms cover an ever-increasing range of jobs. This panel brings together research on various types of platform work, including content creation, professional services, and ride-hailing and delivery.  

Register for the Zoom link here: https://tinyurl.com/oowplatformpanel

Presenter Bios:

Elif Birced is a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT Sloan School of Management and Schwarzman College of Computing. Broady, her research is at the intersection of sociology of work, cultural production and social media. Specifically, she studies how technology is reshaping work, worker commitment, and control over work with a particular focus on social media platforms. She will be an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Villanova University, starting in Fall 2026. 

Hatim A. Rahman is an Associate Professor of Management and Organizations and Sociology (by courtesy) at Northwestern University. His research investigates how artificial intelligence is impacting the nature of work and employment relationships in organizations and labor markets. His award-winning book, Inside the Invisible Cage: How Algorithms Control Workers (University of California Press), investigates how digital labor platform organizations use algorithms to control workers’ job opportunities. 

Kathleen Griesbach is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. She is broadly interested in work and inequality, the significance of time and space for social experience, and the dynamic interplay between culture and economic life. Much of her research examines how temporal and spatial instability shape workers’ experiences, and how workers in turn pursue dignity, meaning, and a path forward amid economic instability. She received her PhD in Sociology from Columbia University and was previously a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne.

SER Café Event: Taxing the Super Rich

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Join us for the next SER Café event on the theme “Taxing the Super Rich.” This session will feature a discussion with recent Socio-Economic Review authors Marlies Glasius (University of Amsterdam) and Andy Summers (London School of Economics).

In her 2025 article “Tax talk in the Rich Lists: from celebrating to scrutinizing the super-rich,” Marlies Glasius examines journalism surrounding the Sunday Times and Forbes Rich Lists from 1995 to 2022 to analyze how media narratives about taxing the super-rich have evolved, showing that coverage of wealth taxation and tax avoidance changed markedly after the global financial crisis.

The second article, “‘But Switzerland’s boring’: tax migration and the pull of place-specific cultural capital,” by Sam Friedman, Victoria Gronwald, Andy Summers, and Emma Taylor, investigates how economic elites weigh taxation when deciding where to live, finding that attachment to place—particularly London’s cultural infrastructure—often outweighs the financial incentives of tax migration. Andy Summers will join the discussion to represent the author team.

The event will take place on 30 March 2026 at 09:00 PDT / 17:00 BST / 18:00 CEST. Please register at this link: https://ucsd.zoom.us/meeting/register/Wf4VkWXFS12d0lfYdkuBaA.

As with all SER Café events, this session will prioritize dynamic conversation with the authors over lengthy presentations. Come ready to engage, ask questions, and discuss. Our authors look forward to your questions and comments.

Team SER Café (Ezgi, Fan, and Kyungmo)
Socio-Economic Review

Developing and Communicating Your Scholarly Identity

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Virtual Event for Graduate Student Scholars of Organizations, Occupations, and Work

Date: February 19, 2026
Time: 2:00–3:30 PM Eastern / 11:00 AM–12:30 PM Pacific
Location: Zoom
Registration required: www.tinyurl.com/oowgradevent

This virtual event is an opportunity for graduate students who study organizations, occupations, and work to: 

  • meet peers with similar interests; 
  • learn about how to develop and effectively communicate your scholarly identity to others; and 
  • ask questions and receive advice from a panel of advanced grad students and recent PhDs in academia and in industry!

The event is open to any graduate student with these interests; membership in ASA or the OOW section is not required. 

By the end of the event, you will have learned and practiced how to effectively communicate your scholarly identity and research—an important skill for the job market, meeting new people at conferences, and just getting more comfortable talking to others about your research. Plus, you’ll get a chance to meet other grad students with similar interests and get your questions answered by people who successfully landed a postdoc or job—and have recent experience effectively communicating their research to others.

Register to receive the Zoom link: www.tinyurl.com/oowgradevent.

If you have any questions, please contact a member of the OOW Mentorship committee:

New Publication: “The Problem with Rapport in Interview-Based Studies”

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Rao, Aliya Hamid. 2026. “The Problem with Rapport in Interview-Based Studies.” Qualitative Sociology.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-025-09619-8

Abstract: Rapport is an orienting principle in qualitative research. It is a capacious concept which, in practice, is deployed by researchers in a wide variety of ways. Despite its definitional ambiguity, in interview-based studies, researchers often link rapport to obtaining more open and honest – and thus high-quality – data. While rapport has been critiqued in the ethnographic tradition, these critiques have not extended to the particularities of interview-based studies. I offer two critiques of rapport as an orienting principle in interview-based studies. First, I question the assumption that rapport is an unmitigated methodological positive and consider instances when it may not be particularly useful or may even be detrimental to data collection. Second, I argue that the privileged position rapport occupies as an ideal-type of researcher-participant relationship risks foreclosing other types of researcher-participant relationships. The overemphasis on rapport may serve to harm data transparency and epistemic accountability. I argue for de-centering rapport as an orienting principle for interview-based studies.

Author:

Aliya Hamid Rao is an Associate Professor at the London School of Economics (Department of Methodology).

Call for Applications: 2026 Warwick Summer School on Practice and Process Studies

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To Know is to Act: Revisiting and rethinking learning and knowing from practice & process perspectives

An international gathering dedicated to the study, advancement and future development of practice-based studies in organisation, administrative and social studies, University of Warwick, Tuesday 30 June and Wednesday 01 and Thursday 02 July 2026.

Keynote Speakers

  • Jean Lave, Professor Emerita, University of California, Berkeley
  • Erik Rietveld, Socrates Professor, Senior Researcher, University of Amsterdam
  • Callen Anthony, Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations, NYU Stern

Research Clinics & Faculty

Participants will have the opportunity to present their work in research clinics and receive feedback from peers and senior scholars, including:

  • Ann Langley, HEC Montréal & Warwick Business School
  • Davide Nicolini, Warwick Business School
  • Hari Tsoukas, University of Cyprus & Warwick Business School
  • Jörgen Sandberg, University of Queensland
  • Katharina Dittrich, Warwick Business School
  • Qian Li, Warwick Business School
  • Omid Omidvar, Warwick Business School
  • Ila Bharatan, Warwick Business School

Application Details

  • Application deadline: Friday, 28 February 2026
  • Notification & registration deadline: Monday, 31 March 2026
  • Format: In-person
  • Location: University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

Apply here: Application form
More information: Summer School webpage

For questions, please contact IKON@wbs.ac.uk.

New Book: The Meritocracy Paradox

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Emilio J. Castilla, The Meritocracy Paradox: Where Talent Management Strategies Go Wrong and How to Fix Them (Columbia University Press)

Description:
Drawing on decades of research, the book reveals why well-intentioned talent management strategies often fail to deliver fairness—and what organizations and their leaders can do to build workplaces where opportunities truly match merit.

Already endorsed by leading scholars and practitioners, The Meritocracy Paradox offers timely insights for anyone interested in equity, organizational performance, and the future of work.

For more information, go to: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-meritocracy-paradox/9780231208420/

Author information:
Emilio J. Castilla is the NTU Professor of Management and a Professor of Work and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is codirector of the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research. Castilla’s research focuses on organizations, networks, and workplace inequality, with a particular emphasis on the social dynamics of work and employment.

New Publication: “Workplace Productivity: Gender, Parenthood, and Career Consequences in the United States”

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Yavorsky, Jill, Yue Qian, and Rebecca Glauber. 2025. “Workplace Productivity: Gender, Parenthood, and Career Consequences in the United States.” Gender, Work & Organization 1–21. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gwao.70027

Main Findings: Using a novel survey experiment fielded among 975 US managers, we find that managers more severely penalize mothers, compared to fathers, when their job productivity decreases due to childcare issues outside their control. This result was primarily driven by men managers who gave fathers a greater benefit of the doubt when it came to their decreased productivity. 

Abstract: Many dual-earner parents face ongoing challenges to securing reliable and accessible childcare, which potentially affect their productivity at work and consequential career rewards. Although productivity can ebb and flow, limited research has examined how productivity changes influence parents’ access to organizational rewards, especially when productivity changes result from childcare issues outside their control. The answer to this question is crucial for understanding gender inequality given that childcare issues are more likely to affect mothers’ productivity and employers could enact gender biases toward mothers (or fathers) when their productivity changes. Using a novel survey experiment fielded among 975 US managers, we assessed how a parent’s productivity changes (because of childcare issues outside their control) influenced managers’ recommendations of future organizational rewards (pay, promotions, etc.) to the parent. First, we find that managers assigned lower career rewards to workers whose productivity decreased, relative to workers whose productivity increased or stayed constant. Second, managers more severely penalized mothers, compared to fathers, when their productivity decreased. Third, exploratory analyses suggested that the widened gender gap in career rewards among parents whose productivity decreased was driven by men managers who penalized fathers less than women managers, primarily because men managers did not view fathers’ decreased productivity as evidence of reduced competence, professional commitment, or interest in advancement. By revealing pro-male biases that help explain the greater penalties faced by mothers relative to fathers when their productivity declined, our findings expose potential long-lasting impacts of parents experiencing disruptions to childcare on gender inequality in the workplace.

Authors:

Jill Yavorsky is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Organizational Science at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte.

Yue Qian is a Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia.

Rebecca Glauber is a Professor of Sociology at the University of New Hampshire.


New Book: Managing Corporate Virtue

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Laure Bereni, Managing Corporate Virtue: The Politics of Workplace Diversity in New York and Paris (Oxford University Press, 2025)

Description:
A major tenet of contemporary capitalism holds that what is good for business can align with what is good for society. Efforts towards more diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplaces epitomize this rising ideology, termed responsible capitalism. An increasingly common managerial mantra is “diversity means business.” But how does it play out in the daily life of organizations?

Drawing on interviews with diversity managers, a historical review of practitioner literature, and observations from organizations in New York City and Paris, Managing Corporate Virtue goes beyond the rhetoric of DEI initiatives to uncover the concrete challenges faced by those tasked with implementing them. Laure Bereni reveals the persistent fragility of diversity efforts, which are often sidelined; subject to the variations of the legal, social, and political environment; and require constant efforts to sustain managerial support. Practitioners must prove their programs are neither merely virtue signaling nor the Trojan horse of political, legal, or moral pressures that would unsettle the corporate order. Ultimately, by exploring the day-to-day work of diversity managers in the United States and France, Bereni exposes the contradictions lurking beneath the neoliberal promise of harmony between profit and virtue.

Author information:
Laure Bereni is a Research Professor in sociology at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and a faculty member of Centre Maurice Halbwachs at École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Her work lies at the intersection of political sociology, the sociology of gender and race, and the sociology of work and organizations, with a comparative perspective between the United States and France. Her current research focuses on corporate virtue workers and programs – from DEI to environmental sustainability – as part of a broader critical reflection on responsible capitalism.

Availability:
The digital edition is available here and the print version will be released on November 24, 2025. Preorders are available through Oxford University Press with a 30% discount using the code AUFLY30.

Job Posting: Assistant or Associate Professor (tenure track) – UNC Charlotte

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The Department of Sociology and the School of Data Science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte invite applications for a tenure-track position at the rank of Assistant or Associate Professor.

  • Open substantive area, with specialization in advanced data analysis
  • Department of Sociology (and School of Data Science)
  • Position begins: August 2026
  • Application deadline: November 10, 2025

For full details and to apply, please visit the ASA Job Bank posting.