Category: Publications

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 Publication: “A Racialized Engine of Anxiety? Race, Reactivity, and the Uneven Tax of Credit Scores,” by Davon Norris 

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Norris, Davon. 2025. “A Racialized Engine of Anxiety? Race, Reactivity, and the Uneven Tax of Credit Scores.” Administrative Science Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392251339638.

Abstract: Research demonstrates that evaluations made via scores often induce anxiety and alter the behaviors of those being evaluated. Research further suggests that this so-called reactivity is not experienced equally. Yet, scholars do not fully understand what explains this variation. For whom does being scored induce reactivity, and why? Drawing on insights from W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, I argue that the experience of being scored differs across racial groups. I evaluate this claim by using a mixed-methods approach that combines interviews and an original national survey on consumer credit scoring. The interviews demonstrate that Black respondents’ credit scores exact a psychological and behavioral tax as the respondents indicate higher levels of anxiety and feeling that their score is a controlling factor in their lives. In contrast, White respondents recognize the importance of their credit scores for determining access to resources but do not see their scores as more significant beyond that. Survey analyses generalize these findings, showing substantial disparities in reactivity to credit scores between Black and White respondents even after the analyses account for economic factors like differences in their credit scores. These findings reveal credit scores as racialized engines of anxiety and yield new insight into the mechanisms that condition whether and to what extent being scored shapes behaviors.

Davon Norris is a sociologist who tries to understand how our tools for determining what is valuable, worthwhile, or good are implicated in patterns of inequality with an acute concern for racial inequality. Often, this means his work investigates the history, functioning, and consequences of a range of scores or ratings, from the less complex government credit ratings to the extremely complex algorithmic scores like consumer credit scores. By focusing on questions of valuation, his research speaks across an array of disciplines and brings into relief normative questions about the nature and possibility of ameliorating (racial) inequality and nurturing economic justice in the contemporary United States. 

Davon is a 3-time Buckeye, earning his B.S. in Accounting (2014), his M.A. (2018), and his Ph.D. in Sociology (2022) from The Ohio State University.

New Publication: “Tainted Leave: A Survey-Experimental Investigation of Flexibility Stigma in Japanese Workplaces” by Hilary J Holbrow

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Holbrow, Hilary J. 2025. “Tainted Leave: A Survey-Experimental Investigation of Flexibility Stigma in Japanese Workplaces.” Social Forces. https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaf063.

Abstract: Scholars posit that the flexibility stigma—a belief that workers who use flexible workplace policies, such as parental and sick leave—exacerbates gender inequality. However, a large body of research argues that the smaller number of men who take leaves face even more severe stigma than women because they violate norms of masculinity as well as the employers’ expectation that employees prioritize paid work. Empirical evidence in support of this claim comes largely from studies that estimate stigma using proxy measures such as leave uptake rates and pay inequality for leave takers. This study tests the gender deviance perspective more directly using survey experimental methods, in a setting where we would expect stigmatization of male leave takers to be particularly high—among workers in four elite firms in Japan. Drawing on data from over 8,000 employees, the results reveal that, even where the male breadwinner ideology is deeply entrenched, men’s leaves are no more stigmatized than women’s. To the contrary, there are no gender differences in stigmatization of sick leave, and women who take parental leave face more severe stigmatization than men. The results undercut claims that men face greater stigma when they take similar leaves as women, demonstrate the fallibility of proxy measures of stigma, and highlight how, in large Japanese firms, women remain doubly disadvantaged by the flexibility stigma.

Hilary J. Holbrow is Assistant Professor of Japanese Politics and Society. A sociologist by training, her scholarship examines social and economic inequality, work and organizations, immigration, and the intersections of gender, race, and ethnicity. She is an International Research Fellow at the Canon Institute for Global Studies in Tokyo, an Associate in Research at Harvard’s Reischauer Institute, and a member of the US-Japan Network for the Future. 

Her book manuscript on gender and ethnic inequality in Japanese white-collar workplaces explores how status hierarchies evolve in response to changing and economic and social conditions, and specifically whether Japanese women and immigrants will be able to achieve greater parity with Japanese men as Japan’s population declines. She is currently conducting survey, survey-experimental, and interview research to understand the sources of persistent gender inequality in Japan’s white-collar workplaces, the experiences of professional Asian migrants to Japan, and the effects of Japan’s trainee system on migrant outcomes. Her previous research has been published in International Migration Review, Work and Occupations, and Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

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 Publication: “Mapping Organizational Theory With SCRIPTS” by Jose Eos Trinidad

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Trinidad, Jose Eos. 2025. “Mapping Organizational Theory with SCRIPTS.” Sociology Compass, OnlineFirst: 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.70059.

Abstract: Organizational theory has developed in numerous directions that have been difficult to integrate. This review synthesizes them into seven perspectives, with theories focused within and beyond the organization (i.e., intra- and extra-organizational dynamics). It proposes the acronym SCRIPTS: structure, culture, relations, institutions, professions, transformation, and social conflict. Within organizations, structure focuses on theories of bureaucracy, management, routines, and decision-making, while culture focuses on shared values, identity, climate, and sensemaking. Relations involve studies of interpersonal and interorganizational networks. Institutions focus on the macro-dynamics of fields and isomorphism, and micro-dynamics of entrepreneurship and inhabited institutions. Professions refer to psychological factors shaping individual performance and sociological factors shaping work and occupations. Transformation involves episodic and gradual changes within organizations and across society. Social conflict involves power and competition, with key theories focused on gendered, racialized, and global inequalities. This paper introduces theories and concepts in the study of organizations by grouping similar perspectives, highlighting their domains within or beyond the organization, and underscoring their utility for researchers and leaders.

New Publication: “Positioning Stories: Accounting for Insecure Work” by Kathleen Griesbach

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Griesbach, K. (2025). “Positioning Stories: Accounting for Insecure Work”. American Sociological Review, OnlineFirst. https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224251328393

Abstract: How do structural features of work shape workers’ interpretations of precarity, or the stories they tell? This article draws on 120 interviews with four groups of workers who confront temporal and spatial instability: Texas-based agricultural and oilfield workers and NYC-based adjunct instructors and delivery workers. I find that rather than adopting one dominant individualizing story, as previous research suggests, workers instead move between what I call positioning stories: narratives that interpret their work’s particular structural features. In doing so, workers combine individualistic and structural frames to cope with their positional uncertainty. Depending on the specific tempo and geography of their work, workers account for spatial instability in stories about sacrifice and self-improvement; they interpret temporal instability in stories about addiction and the burden of time passing without progress. Workers combine these with stories highlighting meaning and exploitation in their labor process. These findings reveal how structural precarity impedes a cohesive narrative by disrupting identities and life projects, but it also undermines the credibility of individualistic accounts. The resulting narrative fragmentation may inspire a wide range of responses, from resignation to contestation.

New Publication: “Reconceptualizing Crisis: An Empirically Based Investigation” by Xiaoying Qi

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Qi, Xiaoying. 2025. “Reconceptualizing Crisis: An Empirically Based Investigation.” Sociological Inquiry. First online. https://doi.org/10.1111/soin.70016

Abstract: Crisis is predominantly characterized in terms of its detrimental consequences. Drawing on in-depth semi-structured interviews in Melbourne and Taipei, the article provides a critical and distinctive understanding of crisis. Crisis is conceptualized here as a disruptive prefiguring of new possibilities, both agentic and structural. In crisis, a situation of adversity is combined with a positive prospect of possibility previously unnoticed or unavailable that is exposed or generated by the disruption. Against the traditional or established tendency to define crisis as a moment or a turning point, the article argues that crisis is best understood as an unfolding dynamic process of change or courses of generative development. In explicating crisis, a counter-transformation approach is developed. Drawing on empirical data, the article expands the sociological understanding of crisis.

Xiaoying Qi, Australian Catholic University 
Associate Professor Xiaoying Qi was awarded a PhD from the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. Her thesis won the Jean Martin Award of the Australian Sociological Association, given biennially to ‘the best PhD thesis in social science disciplines from an Australian tertiary institution’. Her most recent book, Entrepreneurs in Contemporary China: Wealth, Connections, and Crisis, is published by Cambridge University Press. A previous book, Remaking Families in Contemporary China(Oxford University Press, 2021), won the Stephen Crook Memorial Prize of the Australian Sociological Association. An earlier book, Globalized Knowledge Flows and Chinese Social Theory (London & New York: Routledge, 2014), was awarded The Raewyn Connell Prize Special Commendation of The Australian Sociological Association. Qi has published articles in leading international journals, including American Journal of Cultural Sociology, British Journal of Sociology, Current Sociology, International Sociology, Journal of Sociology, Sociological Review, and Sociology. Research innovation is evidenced in Qi’s introduction of analytical concepts in sociology, including ‘intellectual entrepreneurs’, ‘paradoxical integration’, and ‘veiled patriarchy’. Qi has extensive teaching experience and received the National Citations for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning.

New Publication: “The Ghost of Middle Management: Automation, Control, and Heterarchy in the Platform Firm” by Janet A. Vertesi & Diana Enriquez 

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Vertesi, Janet A., and Diana Enriquez. 2025. “The Ghost of Middle Management: Automation, Control, and Heterarchy in the Platform Firm.” Sociologica 19(1):13–35. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/16415.

Abstract: In an effort to attend to the distinct organizational form of algorithmic management, we interrogate the arrangement of platform labor through the lens of the post-bureaucratic organization instead of that of the industrialized factory. Prior studies of gig workers rely heavily on sociological accounts of factory labor, but we posit that gig economy platforms represent a heterarchical organizational form, marrying the logics of industrial control induced by computational systems with the logics of post-bureaucracy inherited from flattening firms and downsizing middle management. In a technique we describe as automation by omission, we show how middle-managerial roles and responsibilities are excised entirely from the platform firm, how the vestigial traces of such roles are only imperfectly replaced by technical systems, and how “situated” managerial tasks essential to post-bureaucratic organizations are picked up by the worker, uncompensated. This heterarchical arrangement benefits the firm in multiple ways, while its competing structural conditions of labor leave workers to navigate multiple valuation systems at once. Appreciating gig work’s embedded post-bureaucracy shifts our understanding of common worker experiences such as peer-to-peer organizing and just-in-time scheduling illuminates dissonant accounts of empowerment and algorithmic despotism, and exposes new avenues for worker disenfranchisement.

Janet A. Vertesi Department of Sociology, Princeton University
Janet A. Vertesi is Associate Professor of Sociology and Associate Director of the Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education at Princeton University (USA). A sociologist of science, technology, and organizations, her ethnographies of NASA missions include Shaping Science (Chicago University Press, 2015) and Seeing Like a Rover (Chicago University Press, 2020), and she is a leader in the digitalSTS (Princeton University Press, 2014) community.

Diana Enriquez  Department of Sociology, Princeton University
Diana Enriquez completed her PhD in Sociology at Princeton University (USA). Her dissertation research focused on high-skill freelancers as a subset of the alternative workforce facing new challenges before and during COVID-19. Other research projects examine the role of platforms in managing gig workers and automation in the workplace. Her research interests include economic sociology, labor, law, and technology.

New Publication: “Location Matters: Everyday Gender Discrimination in Remote and On-Site Work” by Laura Doering & András Tilcsik

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Doering, Laura, and András Tilcsik. 2025. “Location Matters: Everyday Gender Discrimination in Remote and On-Site Work.” Organization Science 36(2):547–71. doi: 10.1287/orsc.2022.16949.

Read Article: https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.16949

Abstract: Remote work has dramatically transformed professional environments, sparking considerable scholarly interest in its impact on employees and organizations. Contributing to this burgeoning literature, we investigate how remote versus on-site work affects women’s experiences of gender discrimination. Given that work location can alter the gendered nature of interactions, we focus on everyday gender discrimination: slights and offenses that occur in interactions and are perceived by recipients as reflecting gender bias. Integrating gender frame theory and scholarship on virtual work, we argue that the gender frame tends to be less salient in remote settings. Thus, we predict that women experience less everyday gender discrimination when working remotely than on-site. Moreover, because the gender frame is likely to be more salient during on-site work for younger women and those who work with mostly men, we expect that these women experience a particularly pronounced reduction in everyday gender discrimination when working remotely. To test these predictions, we developed a new measure of everyday gender discrimination and conducted an original survey of 1,091 professional women who work in the same job both remotely and on-site. We find that women consistently report less everyday gender discrimination in remote versus on-site work. This effect is particularly pronounced for younger women and those who interact mainly with men. Overall, this study advances research on how work location shapes workers’ outcomes and experiences, enriches the literature on the trade-offs women face in virtual and on-site settings, and extends scholarship on the contextual factors shaping workplace discrimination.