Category: new book

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 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.

New Piece: “Civil servant exodus” by Jamie Kucinskas and Yvonne Zylan

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Kucinskas, Jamie and Yvonne Zylan. 2025. “Civil servant exodus: How employees wrestle with whether to stay, speak up or go.” The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/civil-servant-exodus-how-employees-wrestle-with-whether-to-stay-speak-up-or-go-261985

Based on The Loyalty Trap (Columbia University Press).

Authors:

Jamie L. Kucinskas is Associate Professor of Sociology at Hamilton College. An award-winning teacher and researcher, she studies how people strive to be moral citizens in a world dominated by organizational power and influence. Her most recent book, The Loyalty Trap (Columbia University Press), examines how federal civil servants responded to the Trump administration amid a leadership turn toward autocracy. Her first paper from this research, coauthored with Yvonne Zylan, appeared in American Journal of Sociology.

Yvonne Zylan is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Calgary and an attorney. She is the author of States of Passion: Law, Identity, and the Social Construction of Desire (Oxford University Press, 2011). Her research spans law and society, sexuality, social theory, political institutions, and social policy, with a focus on how law constitutes and is constituted by social life. She also examines resistance within state institutions and the dynamics of political institutions and social movements.

New Book: White-Collar Blues: The Making of the Transnational Turkish Middle Class by Mustafa Yavaş

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Yavaş, Mustafa. 2025. White-Collar Blues: The Making of the Transnational Turkish Middle Class. New York: Columbia University Press.

Description: White-Collar Blues follows the Turkish members of the global elite workforce as they are selected into, survive within, and opt out of coveted employment at transnational corporations. State-employed doctors, lawyers, and engineers were long seen as role models until Turkey followed the global tide of neoliberalism and began to embrace freer circulation of capital. As world-renowned corporations transformed Istanbul into a global city, Turkey’s best and brightest have increasingly sought employment at brand-name firms. Despite achieving upward mobility within and beyond Turkey, however, many Turkish professionals end up feeling disappointed, burned out, and trapped in their corporate careers. Drawing from more than one hundred interviews in Istanbul and New York City, Mustafa Yavaş develops a theory of middle-class alienation, explaining how so-called “good jobs” fail elite workers. Yavaş shows how educational investments in an increasingly competitive landscape lead to high hopes, which then clash with poor work-life balance, low intrinsic satisfaction, and a felt lack of meaning from labor in corporate workplaces. Highlighting the trade-off between freedom and financial security, White-Collar Blues reveals the hidden costs of conflating the quest for socioeconomic status with the pursuit of happiness.

Mustafa Yavaş is a sociologist studying inequality, work and occupations, immigration, social networks, and social theory. His scholarship focuses on economic and political sociology from a global perspective, motivated by longstanding questions concerning the division of labor and well-being, the dynamics of boundaries and identities, and the micro-macro problem.

Yavaş’s current research centers on neoliberal globalization, professional work, and job quality. His most recent article explains how high-paying positions at transnational corporations can leave their professional-managerial employees with a discouraging quality of working life. More broadly, his book, White-Collar Blues: The Making of the Transnational Turkish Middle Class (forthcoming from Columbia University Press in June 2025), explores the formation of a new Turkish upper-middle class and its discontents with work. 

To further his examination of transnational corporations and business professionals, Yavas is interested in exploring trends in American corporate work culture over the last century and the changing patterns of international migration since the 1970s. In a joint project with Anju Paul, he is also currently examining the rise of Dubai as a global city and its unique appeal to high-skilled workers from the Global South. Additionally, he is studying media control and democratic backsliding, focusing on the Turkish case via the landmark event of the Gezi Park Protests of 2013.

His previous research explored boundary processes in various social, economic, and political settings, including status homophily in social networks, residential segregation by income, collective identity formation in social movements, and political polarization in social media.

Yavaş received his PhD in Sociology from Yale University and his BSc and MSc in Industrial Engineering from Boğaziçi University, and briefly worked as an engineer before pursuing his PhD. Before joining Johns Hopkins, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher and an adjunct lecturer in the Division of Social Science at NYU Abu Dhabi.

New Book: Bringing Law Home: Gender, Race, and Household Labor Rights by Katherine Eva Maich

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Maich, Katherine Eva. 2025. Bringing Law Home: Gender, Race, and Household Labor Rights. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Description: The personal nature of domestic labor, and its location in the privacy of the employer’s home, means that domestic workers have long struggled for equitable and consistent labor rights. The dominant discourse regards the home as separate from work, so envisioning what its legal regulation would look like is remarkably challenging. In Bringing Law Home, Katherine Eva Maich offers a uniquely comparative and historical study of labor struggles for domestic workers in New York City and Lima, Peru. She argues that if the home is to be a place of work then it must also be captured in the legal infrastructures that regulate work. Yet, even progressive labor laws for domestic workers in each city are stifled by historically entrenched patterns of gendered racialization and labor informality. Peruvian law extends to household workers only half of the labor protections afforded to other occupations. In New York City, the law grants negligible protections and deliberately eschews language around immigration. Maich finds that coloniality is deeply embedded in contemporary relations of service, revealing important distinctions in how we understand power, domination, and inequality in the home and the workplace.

Katherine Maich is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University. Her research and teaching interests include law, gender, labor informality, domestic work, ethnography, and the Global South. Her research examines dynamics of inequality in the workplace and the extent to which external factors such as law, regulation, and policy mitigate those dynamics, and with what consequences.

With funding from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the Inter-American Foundation, her book, Bringing Law Home: Gender, Race, and Household Labor Rights, draws from over 24 months of ethnography in Lima, Peru and New York City, 120 in-depth interviews, and analysis of legislative transcripts. Through a Global South/North comparison, it focuses on the home as a site of paid labor and as a microcosm of social and symbolic boundaries, bringing feminist theory, race, gender, and migration into conversation with law and labor legislation.

One of her current projects (with Hilary Wething of the Economic Policy Institute) explores the effects of paid family leave on maternal mental health and time use for new mothers, and the second project (in collaboration with Oxfam America and Rural Sociology colleagues at Penn State) examines the reproduction of gender and racial inequality for migrant poultry plant and meatpacking plant workers.

She previously worked as a consultant for the International Labour Organization and the International Domestic Worker Federation by conducting fieldwork in Uruguay, Hong Kong, and South Africa on the complexities of domestic worker organizing at the international level. Drawing connections from community-based, local, and global social movements in practice provides inspiration for my own research and writing.

New Book: American Idle: Late-Career Job Loss in a Neoliberal Era by Annette Nierobisz and Dana Sawchuk

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 Nierobisz, Annette, and Dana Sawchuk. 2025. American Idle: Late-Career Job Loss in a Neoliberal Era. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Description: In American Idle, sociologists Annette Nierobisz and Dana Sawchuk report their findings from interviews with sixty-two mostly white-collar workers who experienced late-career job loss in the wake of the Great Recession. Without the benefits of planned retirement or time horizons favorable to recouping their losses, these employees experience an array of outcomes, from hard falls to soft landings. Notably, the authors find that when reflecting on the effects of job loss, fruitless job searches, and the overall experience of unemployment, participants regularly called on the frameworks instilled by neoliberalism. Invoking neoliberal rhetoric, these older Americans deferred to businesses’ need to prioritize bottom lines, accepted the shift toward precarious employment, or highlighted the importance of taking initiative and maintaining a positive mindset in the face of structural obstacles. Even so, participants also recognized the incompatibility between neoliberalism’s “one-size-fits-all” solutions and their own situations; this disconnect led them to consider their experiences through competing frameworks and to voice resistance to aspects of neoliberal capitalism. Employing a life course sociology perspective to explore older workers’ precarity in an age of rising economic insecurity, Nierobisz and Sawchuk shed light on a new wrinkle in American aging.

Annette Nierobisz is a sociology professor and the Ada M. Harrison Distinguished Teaching Professor of the Social Sciences at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. Dr. Nierobisz’s publications have examined a broad range of topics, from fear of crime among women who encounter sexual harassment in public spaces to the role played by the Canadian Human Rights Commission in the 2005 legalization of same-sex marriage in Canada. In her recently published book, American Idle: Late-Career Job Loss in a Neoliberal Era (Rutgers University Press 2025), Dr. Nierobisz and co-author Dr. Sawchuk of Wilfrid Laurier University investigate how a select group of older workers interpret their experience of losing a job in the aftermath of the 2008 Great Recession. This book extends Dr. Nierobisz’s longstanding research focus on the sociology of unemployment.

Dana Sawchuk is a professor of sociology at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada. She is the author of The Costa Rican Catholic Church, Social Justice, and the Rights of Workers, 1979–1996. Dr. Sawchuk is currently working on three research studies. First, focuses on the Climate Action and Knowledge Survey of first-year students at Laurier (with Dr. Debora VanNijnatten, Department of Political Science/North American Studies). The second involves researching older adults who lost their jobs in the U.S. Great Recession (with Dr. Annette Nierobisz, Carleton College). The third involves an analysis of advocacy and mobilization efforts by and on behalf of unpaid/family caregivers of older adults (with a research team led by Dr. Laura Funk, University of Manitoba). Alongside these research pursuits, Dr. Sawchuk is interested in the scholarship focusing on teaching, learning, and experimenting with innovative ways to engage students in the undergraduate classroom.

New Book: Major Trade-Offs: The Surprising Truths about College Majors and Entry-Level Jobs by Corey Moss-Pech

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Title: Major Trade-Offs: The Surprising Truths about College Majors and Entry-Level Jobs

Author: Corey Moss-Pech, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Florida State University

Publisher Link: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo246051255.html

Publisher’s description:
Humanities majors are used to answering the question, “So, what are you going to do with that degree?” The common misconception is that students in humanities programs don’t learn any useful skills for the real world. In Major Trade-Offs, sociologist Corey Moss-Pech argues that not only do humanities majors learn real-world skills, but they actually use them when they graduate. Despite this discrepancy, graduates with so-called practical degrees like business and engineering are much more likely to find employment, and they earn higher salaries. Why do we belittle a liberal arts education despite the valuable skills that students acquire during their studies?
 
Major Trade-Offs addresses this question by following students from different majors as they enter the workforce. To understand the relationship between majors and entry-level jobs, Moss-Pech conducted nearly 200 interviews with roughly ninety students from four majors at a large Midwestern university: engineering, business, English, and communications. He follows these students through their senior years, chronicling their internships and the support their universities provide in helping them pursue their career paths. He found that graduates from practical majors entered the labor market successfully, typically through structured internship programs. However, many ended up in entry-level jobs that, while well-paid, were largely clerical and didn’t necessarily require a degree to perform. On the other hand, liberal arts majors rarely accessed structured internships and were largely left to carve out their own paths, but did use their degree skills once they secured a job. These results challenge popular myths about the “marketability” of these different majors and offer a new vision for the future of higher education. Liberal arts skills are essential in the labor market, and yet educators and policymakers still push resources into the practical arts, perpetuating the myth that those majors are more valuable while depriving students of a well-rounded education and leaving them no better prepared for the workforce than liberal arts students.
 
Of interest to students, educators, and employers, Major Trade-Offs calls on colleges and universities to advocate for liberal arts majors, leveling the playing field for students as they plan for entry-level work.
 

New Publication: “The Loyalty Trap: Conflicting Loyalties of Civil Servants Under Increasing Autocracy” by Jaime Lee Kucinskas

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The Loyalty Trap: Conflicting Loyalties of Civil Servants Under Increasing Autocracy
by Jaime Lee Kucinskas 


Read an interview with the author about the research behind the book

Columbia University Press

Donald J. Trump took office threatening to run roughshod over democratic institutions, railing against the federal bureaucracy, and calling for dismantling the administrative state. How do civil servants respond to a presidential turn toward authoritarianism? In what ways—if any—can they restrain or counter leaders who defy the norms of liberal democratic governance?

The Loyalty Trap explores how civil servants navigated competing pressures and duties amid the chaos of the Trump administration, drawing on in-depth interviews with senior officials in the most contested agencies over the course of a tumultuous term. Jaime Lee Kucinskas argues that the professional culture and ethical obligations of the civil service stabilize the state in normal times but insufficiently prepare bureaucrats to cope with a president like Trump. Instead, federal employees became ensnared in intractable ethical traps, caught between their commitment to nonpartisan public service and the expectation of compliance with political directives. Kucinskas shares their quandaries, recounting attempts to preserve the integrity of government agencies, covert resistance, and a few bold acts of moral courage in the face of organizational decline and politicized leadership. A nuanced sociological account of the lessons of the Trump administration for democratic governance, The Loyalty Trap offers a timely and bracing portrait of the fragility of the American state.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jaime Lee Kucinskas is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Hamilton College. She is the author of The Mindful Elite: Mobilizing from the Inside Out (2019) and a co-editor of Situating Spirituality: Context, Practice, and Power (2022).

New Publication: “Subtle Webs: How Local Organizations Shape US Education” by Jose Eos Trinidad

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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.

Announcement: Virtual Texas Book Salon for Kim Pernell’s “Visions of Financial Order”; Join via Zoom on April 16.

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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