New Publication: “Know Your Place: Fractured Epistemic Privilege among Women in State Organizations” by Tair Karazi-Presler

Karazi‐Presler, Tair. 2024. “Know Your Place: Fractured Epistemic Privilege among Women in State Organizations.” Sociological Forumhttps://doi.org/10.1111/socf.13021

Abstract: Based on 67 in-depth interviews, this article explores how women in positions of power in two major organizational fields in Israel—the military and government ministries—develop different types of gender knowledge. In the military, an extremely and publicly gendered organization, the interviewees demonstrate gender reflexivity and pragmatic literacy of power relations. In the government ministries, which tend to conceal and even repress gendered power, the interviewees demonstrate (neoliberal) feminist consciousness and a limited ability to conceptualize power relations. The contribution of this article is threefold. First, it challenges the common view that gender reflexivity and feminist consciousness are causally related by emphasizing fractured epistemic privilege among women in different organizational contexts. Second, it demonstrates that women’s survival practices produce gender knowledge, which in turn produces gender practices in organizational contexts. Third, it argues that different types of gender knowledge develop as a byproduct of the gendered power-relation characteristics of each specific organizational context. Accordingly, this article offers a framework for analyzing emerging forms of gender sociopolitical knowledge in organizations as an additional dimension of gender inequality and a possible basis for transforming it.

New Publication: “Profiles Among Women Without a Paid Job and Social Benefits: An Intersectional Perspective Using Dutch Population Register Data” by Lea Kröner, Deni Mazrekaj, Tanja van der Lippe, and Anne-Rigt Poortman

Kröner, L., Mazrekaj, D., van der Lippe, T., & Poortman, A. R. (2024). Profiles Among Women Without a Paid Job and Social Benefits: An Intersectional Perspective Using Dutch Population Register Data. Social Policy & Administrationhttps://doi.org/10.1111/spol.13080

Abstract: Despite their potential vulnerability and untapped work potential, research on the group of women without a paid job and social benefits is limited. This study is the first to identify profiles among women in this group based on their intersecting economic, sociodemographic and contextual characteristics. A cluster analysis conducted on Dutch population register data from 2019 challenges previous research that lumped women without a paid job and social benefits into a single group. Rather, we reveal three distinct profiles: ‘Dutch empty nesters (i.e., mothers with adult children) in affluent households’, ‘Migrant women in urban living areas’ and ‘Dutch, educated mothers with affluent partners’. The identification of these three profiles can mark a significant step in developing tailored active labour market policies for women without a paid job and social benefits.


New Publication: “Doing Genders: Partner’s Gender and Labor Market Behavior” by Eva Jaspers, Deni Mazrekaj, and Weverthon Machado

Jaspers, E., Mazrekaj, D., & Machado, W. (2024). Doing Genders: Partner’s Gender and Labor Market Behavior. American Sociological Review, 89(3), 518-541https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224241252079

Abstract: Partnered men and women show consistently gendered patterns of labor market behavior. We test whether not only a person’s own gender, but also their partner’s gender shapes hours worked. We use Dutch administrative population data on almost 5,000 persons who had both male and female partners, whose hours worked we observe monthly over 15 years. We argue that this provides a unique setting to assess the relevance of partner’s gender for labor market behavior. Using two-way fixed effects and fixed-effects individual slopes models, we find that both men and women tend to work more hours when partnered with a female partner compared to a male partner. These results align with our hypothesis that a partner’s gender influences labor market behavior. For women, we conclude that this finding may be (partly) explained by marital and motherhood status. Additionally, we discovered that women decrease their hours worked to a lesser extent when caring for a child if they have a female partner. Finally, we found that for men, the positive association between own and partner’s hours worked is weaker when one has a female partner, indicating a higher degree of specialization within these couples.

Michigan Stone Center Call for Visiting Fellow Applications

The Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics (CID) at the University of Michigan is now accepting applications for a Visiting Fellow for the 2025-26 academic year. CID aims to produce cutting-edge research on social inequality, especially wealth inequality, train the next generation of inequality scholars, build data infrastructure, and increase data accessibility. The fellowship provides an early-career, tenure-track social scientist studying social inequality with funded time to pursue their research in an intellectual community defined by a culture of engagement and collaboration. 

Notably, we are committed to making this support equitably available to scholars, regardless of whether they are able to relocate to Ann Arbor for the year. Thus, we offer both a nonresidential and a residential option.

To learn more and apply, visit https://inequality.umich.edu/cid-visiting-fellowship/

Applications are due October 15. 

New Book: From Skepticism to Competence: How American Psychiatrists Learn Psychotherapy by Mariana Craciun

Craciun, Mariana. 2024. From Skepticism to Competence: How American Psychiatrists Learn Psychotherapy. University of Chicago Press. 

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo215859800.html

While many medical professionals can physically examine the body to identify and understand its troubles—a cardiologist can take a scan of the heart, an endocrinologist can measure hormone levels, an oncologist can locate a tumor—psychiatrists have a much harder time unlocking the inner workings of the brain or its metaphysical counterpart, the mind.  

In From Skepticism to Competence, sociologist Mariana Craciun delves into the radical uncertainty of psychiatric work by following medical residents in the field as they learn about psychotherapeutic methods. Most are skeptical at the start. While they are well equipped to treat brain diseases through prescription drugs, they must set their expectations aside and learn how to navigate their patients’ minds. Their instructors, experienced psychotherapists, help the budding psychiatrists navigate this new professional terrain by revealing the inner workings of talk and behavioral interventions and stressing their utility in a world dominated by pharmaceutical treatments. In the process, the residents examine their own doctoring assumptions and develop new competencies in psychotherapy. Exploring the world of contemporary psychiatric training, Craciun illuminates novice physicians’ struggles to understand the nature and meaning of mental illness and, with it, their own growing medical expertise.

New Publication: “Authoritarian Innovation in the United States: The Role of Dual Subnational Systems of Labor Governance” by Chris Rhomberg

Rhomberg, Chris. 2024. “Authoritarian Innovation in the United States: The Role of Dual Subnational Systems of Labor Governance.” Journal of Industrial Relations. https://doi.org/10.1177/00221856241260770

Abstract: I apply Curato and Fossati’s (2020) concept of “authoritarian innovation” to analyze historic changes in labor governance in the United States that have undermined democratic participation in the workplace and in the polity. Drawing from comparative political economy and welfare state theories, I argue that since the 1930s the U.S. has had not one unified, national labor regime but two competing, subnational regimes: the New Deal and its legacy in the industrialized North and West Coast and a counter-regime based initially in the former Confederate Southern states. The more anti-union, anti-welfare, and anti-democratic Southern regime survived the Civil Rights era of the 1960s and 1970s, gained ascendance nationally with the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s, and expanded its boundaries in the 2010s into the deindustrialized Midwest. The “dual regime” analysis highlights critical transitions and divergent paths in the reshaping of American democracy.