Category: Newsletter Content

New Publication: “The Internal Effects of Corporate ‘Tech Ethics’: How Technology Professionals Evaluate Their Employers’ Crises of Moral Legitimacy” by Rachel Y. Kim

On By Neha JangetiIn Announcements, Newsletter Content, PublicationsLeave a comment

Kim, Rachel Y. 2025. “The Internal Effects of Corporate ‘Tech Ethics’: How Technology Professionals Evaluate Their Employers’ Crises of Moral Legitimacy.” Socio-Economic Review. https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwaf043

Abstract: Big Tech firms use “tech ethics” to regain public trust and influence employees’ moral evaluations of their firms and their work. Unlike traditional professions, technology professionals lack institutionalized professional ethics. Consequently, corporate “tech ethics” serve as a primary source of formal ethical guidance. Analyzing thirty-two interviews with technology professionals employed at US-based Big Tech firms, this study demonstrates that respondents’ perceptions of the effectiveness of corporate “tech ethics” closely align with how they evaluate their firms’ crises and the ethicality of their own work. Those who trusted “tech ethics” tended to believe that their companies had adequately addressed their crises and defended their work as following rigorous ethical standards, while those who were doubtful or distrusting reported greater moral unease and professional disillusionment. By highlighting the effects of organizational legitimization strategies, this study contributes to research on the role of moral perceptions in professional employees’ work experiences and career trajectories.

Rachel Y. Kim is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at Harvard University. Her research interests include economic sociology, cultural sociology, the sociology of work and professions, science and technology studies, and qualitative methods. She is particularly interested in how professionals in the tech industry, especially in Silicon Valley, navigate issues of expertise, innovation, and moral legitimacy in the context of corporate ethics.

Rachel holds a B.A. in Sociology with Honors from the University of Chicago (2019). Before graduate school, she worked as a project coordinator at Loevy & Loevy, a civil rights law firm in Chicago.

New Publication: “Reclaiming the Class Struggle in Africa Today: Four Propositions on the Revolutionary Potential of the Urban Working Class in Africa and a Marxist Critique of Factory-Workerism” by Joshua Lew McDermott

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McDermott, Joshua Lew. 2025. “Reclaiming the Class Struggle in Africa Today: Four Propositions on the Revolutionary Potential of the Urban Working Class in Africa and a Marxist Critique of Factory-Workerism.” International Critical Thought 15(2). https://doi.org/10.1080/21598282.2025.2514615

Abstract: In Africa, the working class is defined less by industrial employment, stable jobs, and trade-unionism than by informal, flexible, casual, and precarious employment, by non-wage and own-account work. This is not an anomaly nor a passing phenomenon, but rather indicative of the inherent nature of capitalism. These realities do not, however, signal the end of socialist struggle nor the irrelevance of Marxism in Africa. This article challenges the trend of decentering class and capitalism in understanding so-called subaltern populations in urban Africa, while also identifying and tracing the history of, and countering what this article refers to as “factory-workerist” notions of socialism and class struggle that are dismissive of non-industrial urban workers and, by extension, the possibility of revolutionary socialism taking shape in Africa. In contrast, this work draws upon classical Marxism, especially Marx’s thoughts on the Silesian Weaver Uprising, to offer four propositions on the potential for successful socialist struggle comprised of irregular workers today, while also highlighting several cases of revolutions and social upheavals led by irregular workers in the 21st century across Africa and the world that illustrate the potential of socialist movements led by a predominately irregular working class. 

Joshua McDermott is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at Southeastern Louisiana University. He was recently awarded a Fulbright U.S. Scholar fellowship to conduct research and teach at Njala University in Bo, Sierra Leone. His research centers on irregular and informal labor in Africa, particularly how college-educated youth navigate informal economies amid structural unemployment.

While in Sierra Leone, Dr. McDermott will continue fieldwork for his first book, focusing on the political behavior and lived experiences of educated but economically marginalized individuals. His work addresses a globally relevant issue: the widespread nature of informality, which affects the livelihoods of a majority of the world’s workforce. Dr. McDermott aims to understand how informal labor impacts economic development, political stability, and community resilience.

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.

Message from the Chair

On By Nino BariolaIn Announcements, Newsletter ContentLeave a comment

By Alexandra Kalev

Dear Section Members,

I hope this message finds you all well, safe and healthy.  This is a trying period in so many ways, but I wanted to share several exciting pieces of information with you about section activities. 

1. Diversity in OOW: Our council is dedicating this year to initiating a journey toward increased diversity in OOW membership, research topics and methodologies. We have established a diversity committee to gather information about the meaning of and barriers to diversity in OOW and possible routes of action. You are likely to receive communication from this committee, announcing initiatives and/or seeking your input over the next couple of months.   

We have also established a mentor program, based on the earlier signup sheet. It is taking off in these very days, as mentors and mentees will be receiving introduction emails (with a special thank you to all those that volunteered to be mentors!). I am also attaching a new signup sheet for those who might have missed the earlier one. We believe mentoring is especially important, perhaps even more so right now, as graduate students and young scholars are more likely to feel isolated and to experience uncertainties regarding teaching, research and the job market. We see mentoring as part of our diversity efforts as well, hoping that it can also help section members from under-represented groups feel more connected to our section and find the section to be professionally nurturing. Please volunteer to become a mentor or sign up if you’d like to have a mentor. Thank you for all those that have done so already! 

2. The ASA online portal will open for submission on November 9, 2020. The deadline to submit is February 3, 2021 at 11:59pm EST. 

If you are an ASA session organizer interested in building/showcasing your session and using  our listserv to do so, please submit your session info to announcements@oowsection.org.

Please submit your papers to one of OOW sessions or roundtables (see below) and/or encourage your colleagues from underrepresented groups, or those that study topics outside the mainstream of OOW, to submit a paper. Open topic sessions will be formed according to the papers submitted.  

Broadening the Conversation about Racism in Organizations, Occupations, and Work 
Organizers: Elizabeth Berman, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, Victor Ray, University of Iowa

This panel is seeking papers that broaden the conversation about racism and racialization in organizations, occupations, and work. Submitted papers should touch on organizations, occupations, or work in some way, but may not be primarily grounded in these literatures. This is part of an effort to bring into the section new approaches to thinking about processes of racism in organizations, occupations and work and in OOW research.

Open Topics on Organizations, Occupations, and Work
Organizers:  Elizabeth Berman, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor; Sharla Alegria, University of Toronto; Nicole Denier, University of Alberta; Jiwook Jung, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Victor Ray, University of Iowa.

We welcome submission of all papers related to the topics of organizations, occupations, and/or work  

OOW Roundtables
Organizers: Angelina Grigoryeva, University of Toronto; Argun Saatcioglu, University of Kansas

3. OOW award nomination calls are out. Nominations for our Distinguished Scholar award, Weber Book award, Thompson Graduate Student Paper and Scott Article awards are due on March 31. This is a way to reward, celebrate and give publicity to work that excites you (even if it is your own!). Please nominate yourself or others.

4. Nomination for OOW section leadership. The nomination committee is seeking nominations for 2 new council members, a treasurer and a chair. Our past Chair, Michael Sauder is chairing the nomination committee. Please email him your nominations at michael-sauder@uiowa.edu. Serving on the OOW council is an opportunity to give back and to pave new ways, to meet new people and to be exposed to top notch work. Nominating someone is a flattering gift and can be a way to promote section diversity.

 Thank you for your participation in the section activities!

Message from the Chair

On By Annika WilcoxIn Announcements, New York, 2019, Newsletter ContentLeave a comment

By Michael Sauder

Dear OOW Members,

Greetings!  As I begin my term as section chair, I would like to give one last thank you to Emily Barman, the OOW Council—Nina Bandelj, Tim Bartley, Beth Popp Berman, Michael McQuarrie, Giacomo Negro (Secretary-Treasurer), David Pedulla, Melissa Wooten—and all of the people who worked on our section’s program for a very successful meeting in New York City. I want to give a special thank you to the Program Committee (Laura Doering, Ryan Finnigan, Adilia James, Tania Jenkins, Ken-Hou Lin, and Steven Vallas) and Roundtable organizers (Carla Ilten, Sarah Mosseri, and Jennifer Nelson) for their hard work. Finally, please join me in welcoming our two new council members, Sarah Thebaud and LaTonya Trotter, as well as Alexandra Kalev, OOW’s chair-elect.

OOW remains a vibrant and stimulating community of scholars, and I am excited to work to continue this tradition as we prepare for next year’s conference in San Francisco. Here are a few things to keep in mind as we move into the new academic year.

1) Be on the lookout for potential members of OOW. The larger our section, the more panels we have at ASA. While OOW remains one of the larger ASA sections, we have lost a few members in recent years because the annual Academy of Management meetings have been held at the same time as ASA’s meetings. One effective strategy (aside from proselytizing in the hallways) is to sponsor students who might be interested in the section. This is inexpensive — only $5 if they are already members of ASA — and a good way to promote future membership.

2) News and announcements for the section are published in two places: the OOW blog (https://oowsection.org) and our monthly newsletter. Let me take this opportunity to thank Annika Wilcox and Laura Adler for their excellent work on these outlets. If you have news or an announcement to share with the section, please send the item to me (michael-sauder@uiowa.edu) and/or Annika (amwilcox@ncsu.edu). I will also send out occasional updates and announcements on our section’s listserv, but—to limit the strain on everyone’s inboxes—most news will be posted on the blog and newsletter.

I look forward to working with everyone this year. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have questions or concerns about the section.

Book Review: The Mindful Elite

On By Annika WilcoxIn Essays, Newsletter ContentLeave a comment

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Max Coleman

As part of our July newsletter, Max Coleman contributes a review of a recently published book: The Mindful Elite by Jaime Kucinskas.

Max Coleman is a PhD student in sociology at Indiana University. His research lies at the intersection of mental health, culture, and social stratification. You can reach him at maxcole@iu.edu.

Sources of stress and anxiety are everywhere: in our jobs, in our intimate relationships, and even in our political climate. As Americans face disturbing rates of psychological distress, they have become eager for novel coping strategies. Enter meditation, a centuries-old practice that has spread rapidly in the last few decades. Yet meditation is not just a form of stress-relief: at its core, meditation offers an antidote to capitalist self-interest. By teaching individuals to detach from desire and focus instead on the neutral sensations of the body and breath, regular meditators find that they are not only calmer, but that they have more empathy, patience, and selflessness than non-meditators.

Why, then, has meditation—along with its Americanized cousin, “mindfulness”—faced such a backlash in recent years? Consider an article by Robert Purser, which recently appeared in the Guardian under the title “The Mindfulness Conspiracy.” While Buddhist meditation may have laudable goals, Purser wrote, it has been coöpted by a neoliberal system designed to reduce social issues to personal problems that can—and therefore must—be mastered with self-discipline. Building on the neuroscientific finding that “you can change your brain,” mindfulness has become a panacea for all social and emotional challenges. In this formulation, the source of one’s suffering is never in society itself; rather, suffering is based on our own maladaptive thinking, our neuroses, our clinging, our desire—and by liberating ourselves through meditation, we can not only cure these problems but render irrelevant their social foundations. Mindfulness, becomes a tool not of transformation, but of quiescence.

Continue reading “Book Review: The Mindful Elite” →