Trinidad, Jose Eos. 2025. Subtle Webs: How Local Organizations Shape US Education. Oxford University Press.
(30% off with code: AUFLY30)
Abstract: In Subtle Webs, Jose Eos Trinidad reveals how organizations outside schools have created an invisible infrastructure not only to affect local school districts but also to shape US education. He illustrates this by providing a behind-the-scenes look at how local organizations in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City have transformed data and worked with high schools to address the problem of students dropping out. The book argues that changes in a decentralized system happen less through top-down policy mandates or bottom-up social movements and more through “outside-in” initiatives of networked organizations spread across various local systems. By detailing change across multiple levels and across multiple locations, Trinidad uncovers new ways to think about educational transformation, policy reform, and organizational change.
Author: Neha Jangeti
Hello! I am Neha Jangeti (pronounced nay-ha jan-geti). I am a Sociology PhD Student at the University of North Texas. My research areas include organizations, occupations, and work (OOW), reproductive health, and medical sociology.
Announcement: Virtual Texas Book Salon for Kim Pernell’s “Visions of Financial Order”; Join via Zoom on April 16.
Wednesday, April 16, 1-2pm Central
Zoom: https://utexas.zoom.us/j/96255280544
The Sociology Department at the University of Texas at Austin invites you to attend a virtual book salon to celebrate the publication of Professor Kim Pernell’s Visions of Financial Order (Princeton, 2024). Discussants include Marion Fourcade, Greta Krippner, and Marc Schneiberg
“In Visions of Financial Order, Kim Pernell traces the emergence of important national differences in financial regulation in the decades leading up to the crisis. To do so, she examines the cases of the United States, Canada, and Spain—three countries that subscribed to the same transnational regulatory framework (the Basel Capital Accord) but developed different regulatory policies in areas that would directly affect bank performance during the financial crisis. … Pernell argues that the different worldviews of national banking regulators reflected cultural beliefs about the ideal way to organize economic life to promote order, stability, and prosperity. Visions of Financial Order offers an innovative perspective on the persistent differences between regulatory institutions and the ways they shaped the unfolding of the 2008 global financial crisis.” – Princeton University Press
New Publication: “Does Wanting Diversity Mean Racial Diversity? How Race and Gender Influence Support for Corporate DEI Policies.” by Adia Harvey Wingfield & Antonia Roach
Wingfield, Adia Harvey and Antonia Roach. (2025.) “Does Wanting Diversity Mean Racial Diversity? How Race and Gender Influence Support for Corporate DEI Policies.”Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. Online first.
Abstract
In the wake of recent social movements, cultural changes, and emerging organizational norms, decisive majorities of White workers now agree with the premise that companies should strive for workplace diversity. That support rarely translates into an interest in race-conscious programming, yielding what sociologists describe as a “principle/policy gap.” Yet most of the research identifying principle/policy gaps relies on predominantly White samples. In this article, we draw from a sample of 85 Black, White, Asian American, and Latinx workers in the financial sector to examine whether the principle/policy gap is present among both White workers and those of color. Our interviews reveal mixed evidence of principle/policy gaps when it comes to race-based diversity programming. We also find that respondents’ preferences (or lack thereof) for race-conscious diversity are informed by intersections of race and gender, rendering race-based programming more attractive for some groups and gender-based initiatives more appealing for others.
Announcement: Socio-Economic Review Cafe — Cryptomarkets & Cryptocurrencies: Trust, Value, and Market Coordination on April 1st, 2025
Socio-Economic Review Cafe — Cryptomarkets & Cryptocurrencies: Trust, Value, and Market Coordination
The event will take place on Tuesday, April 1st, 2025:
7:30 AM PST (Vancouver)
9:30 AM CST (Central Time, US & Canada)
Register at this link: https://ucsd.zoom.us/meeting/register/x03uBBsnQlWh5HmhvpXf5g
Join us for an engaging SER Café event featuring a discussion with SER authors Ana Macanovic, Wojtek Przepiorka, Kobe De Keere, Martin Trans, and Stefania Milan.
Macanovic and Przepiorka’s paper, “The Moral Embeddedness of Cryptomarkets: Text Mining Feedback on Economic Exchanges on the Dark Web”, explores how cooperation is sustained in illegal cryptomarkets, online marketplaces where users trade illicit goods under conditions of anonymity. They show that while reputation systems structure exchange, their effectiveness depends on traders’ willingness to leave feedback, shifting moral norms from facilitating trust at the transaction stage to sustaining reputation as a collective good. De Keere, Trans, and Milan’s paper, “The Value of Crypto? Sociotechnical Imaginaries on Cryptocurrency in YouTube Content”, examines how cryptocurrencies are framed and valued in public discourse. Using a large-scale analysis of YouTube videos, they identify distinct imaginaries that shape how cryptocurrency’s value is constructed, contested, and legitimized.
Together, these papers offer insights into how decentralized markets function without traditional regulatory oversight, examining the mechanisms that sustain trust, reputation, and exchange, as well as the narratives that shape perceptions of value and legitimacy in digital economies.
As with all SER Café events, this session will prioritize dynamic conversation with the authors over lengthy presentations. Please come ready to engage, ask questions, and discuss these critical contributions to the field!
***
Articles:
“The Moral Embeddedness of Cryptomarkets: Text Mining Feedback on Economic Exchanges on the Dark Web” By Ana Macanovic and Wojtek Przepiorka. https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwad069
“The Value of Crypto? Sociotechnical Imaginaries on Cryptocurrency in YouTube Content” By Kobe De Keere, Martin Trans, and Stefania Milan. https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwae081
Announcement: Ethnography Summer School at The University of Texas at Austin; August 18-21, 2025
Ethnography Summer School
The University of Texas at Austin
August 18-21, 2025
The UT Austin Urban Ethnography Lab offers a four-day intensive course on ethnographic methods. The course provides an overview of ethnography as a “way of seeing” the social world and as a “way of doing” social scientific research. Participants will learn about different approaches to ethnography and the place(s) of theory in ethnographic research. They will also examine the need for warrants and puzzles in ethnography, the various ways of reconstructing subjects’ points of view, the role of reflexivity, and the ethical dilemmas present in hands-on research. Invited speakers from the Sociology Department will offer lectures on specific topics. Participants will have the opportunity to discuss their own projects with attending faculty and will be offered a workshop on qualitative data analysis software, and a presentation on human subjects protection protocols.
For more information: https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/sociology/research/urban-ethnography-lab/ethnography-summer-school.html
Call for Papers, Special Issue of ILR Review: Employee Ownership in the Contemporary Economy: Taking the High, Middle, or Low Road for Workers, Firms, and Society?
Call for Papers, Special Issue of ILR Review: Employee Ownership in the Contemporary Economy: Taking the High, Middle, or Low Road for Workers, Firms, and Society?
Submission Deadline: September 1, 2025
Special Issue Co-editors:
Edward J. Carberry (University of Massachusetts Boston), edward.carberry@umb.edu
Douglas Kruse (Rutgers University), dkruse@rutgers.edu
Andrew Pendleton (University of New South Wales), a.pendleton@unsw.edu.au
We invite submissions that deepen our understanding of the impacts of employee ownership on workers; job quality; management–labor relations; organizational structures and cultures; firm performance; and broader economic, social, and political outcomes. We welcome papers from all disciplines that use any methodological approach, focusing on any form of employee ownership within any context.
See the full Call for Papers here: http://shorturl.at/0Zjsn
New Publication: “Sousveillance Work: Monitoring and Managing-Up in Patrimonial Hollywood” by Julia M. Dessauer
Dessauer, J.M. Sousveillance Work: Monitoring and Managing-Up in Patrimonial Hollywood. Qual Sociol (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-024-09580-y
Abstract: How do workers come to know what their bosses need and want? This paper shows how laborers in patrimonial work environments learn to serve their bosses through bottom-up observation, rather than top-down instruction. The author uses the case of assistants in Hollywood to introduce the concept of sousveillance work, which is the labor of monitoring, anticipating, and fulfilling a boss’s mutable needs and wants. Drawing on 60 + interviews with professionals in Hollywood, the author reveals how sousveillance work helps assistants manage-up and mitigate volatility wrought by their patrimonial superiors. The concept of sousveillance work adds to research on labor and uncertainty in creative industries, and also helps to reveal how patrimonial systems are sustained in contemporary work environments.
New Publication: “The intergenerational reproduction of self-direction at work: Revisiting Class and Conformity” by Kaspar Burger, Francesca Mele, Monica Johnson, Jeylan Mortimer & Xiaowen Han
Kaspar Burger, Francesca Mele, Monica Johnson, Jeylan Mortimer, and Xiaowen Han. 2025. “The intergenerational reproduction of self-direction at work: Revisiting Class and Conformity.” Social Forces. Online First https://academic.oup.com/sf/advance-article/doi/10.1093/sf/soaf016/7996444?utm_source=advanceaccess&utm_campaign=sf&utm_medium=email
Abstract: In his path-breaking monograph, Class and Conformity, Melvin Kohn reasoned that parents prepare their children for the same conditions of work that they themselves experience. Kohn and his colleagues’ research focused on the influence of parental self-direction at work on parental child-rearing values and practices, as well as the self-directed values of children. The intergenerational transmission of occupational self-direction from parents to the succeeding generation of adult children, strongly implied by Kohn’s analysis, has not been empirically tested. Using two-generation longitudinal data from the Youth Development Study (N = 1139), we estimate a structural equation model to assess the intergenerational continuity of occupational self-direction. We find evidence supporting a key inference of Kohn’s analysis: that self-direction at work, a primary feature of jobs of higher social class standing, is transmitted across generations via self-directed psychological orientations, operationalized here as intrinsic work values. Intrinsic values also significantly predicted second-generation educational attainment, contributing further to the reproduction of socioeconomic inequality. The findings enhance understanding of the intergenerational transmission of advantage.
YDS data are publicly available at the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research archive, University of Michigan (ICPSR 24881).
WORK2025 Conference “Work in the Era of Unruly AI” from August 20-22, 2025 in Turku, Finland (also online)
The multidisciplinary, international WORK2025 conference is from August 20-22, 2025, at the University of Turku and online. WORK2025 offers 19 exciting research streams, five inspiring keynote talks, and nice breaks between the sessions to share knowledge, research results, and discuss new directions in research.
The main theme of WORK2025, “Work in the era of unruly AI,” will explore the “unruliness” of AI in contemporary working life. WORK2025 calls upon presentations and posters to address the main theme and various issues related to work and working life. WORK2025 welcomes abstracts from a wide variety of interdisciplinary, empirical, and theoretical perspectives.
Check out the streams and submit your abstract no later than February 20, 2025 at www.work2025.fi!
Special Issue Call for Papers OOW
Submission deadline: Tuesday, September 2, 2025
In 2023, an opinion piece in the New York Times posed a question: “why does everyone feel so insecure?” As the article delineates, “insecurity” is frequently described as the defining characteristic of our contemporary lives. However, despite the wide use of this concept in public debates as well as in the social sciences, socio-economic insecurity — and, to a lesser extent, its close cousin, “precarity” — have been subjected to very little theoretical conceptualization and/or dedicated research that seeks to systematize and concretize insecurity as a field of study. Our special issue aims to resolve this absence, with a particular focus on how socio-economic insecurity relates to the maintenance, reconfiguration, or legitimation of inequality.
Insecurity sets up an important puzzle for the social sciences: on the one hand, insecurity is felt by “everybody,” as Astra Taylor suggests in the New York Times, or at least a large and growing portion of the population. On the other, insecurity and precarity are the products of an economy that is increasingly unequal. In order to solve this puzzle, sociologists need to further investigate how experiences of insecurity vary and the ways in which economic and cultural factors shape different varieties of insecurity. We ask: Is everyone really experiencing insecurity? How is insecurity related to people’s structural conditions?
In order to address this puzzle, we welcome articles that address all aspects of socio-economic insecurity that go beyond orthodox economic framings and that can lead to empirical advancements, as well as theoretical developments, in how we understand insecurity vis-à-vis inequality. We invite submissions that use diverse methodological approaches, e.g. that explore subjective experiences of insecurity through in-depth qualitative or ethnographic research, that investigate generalizable or cross-national trends through quantitative data-based analyses, or that engage with mixed methodologies. We are particularly interested in sociological studies that address the following aspects of insecurity:
Topics for this call for papers include but are not restricted to:
· Research on insecurity that moves beyond a limited conceptualization of insecurity and precarity as primarily related to employment to one that engages with the financial aspects of people’s instability, the relationship between employment and finances, as well as the unequal ways in how people negotiate socioeconomic uncertainty in their lives overall. What are the connections between work precarity and insecurity in livelihoods? How do the manifestations of insecurity differ nationally and globally in various spheres of individuals’ lives (e.g. housing, food consumption, debt and finance)? How is insecurity related to intersectional inequalities pertaining to class, gender, race/ethnicity and sexual identity?
· Studies that employ an understanding of socio-economic insecurity that goes beyond a purely (macro)economic focus or the use of “objective” economic measures. We aim to deepen the focus on the subjective experiences of insecurity that are often linked to the decline in social status of previously secure social strata (e.g. the squeezed middle classes). What is the relationship between the objective and subjective insecurity experienced by individuals? What is the temporal construction of insecurity and how is present insecurity shaped by past experiences and projections/expectations of future conditions? How does insecurity contribute to redefining class positions and class boundaries? How do increases and decreases in insecurity influence social status threat or social status gains across the globe?
Guest Editors:
Dr. Lorenza Antonucci
University of Birmingham
United Kingdom
Dr. Elena Ayala-Hurtado
Princeton University
United States
Organizations, Occupations and Work 