Category: Publications

New Book—”Saving Societies From Within: Innovation and Equity Through Inter-Organizational Networks” by Jerald Hage, Joseph J. Valadez, and Wilbur C. Hadden

On By Dilan ErenIn PublicationsLeave a comment

Saving Societies From Within: Innovation and Equity Through Inter-Organizational Networks that provides a new paradigm for sociology built on the idea of societal coordination via systemic coordinated inter-organizational networks or SCIONs These offer the possibility of creating much more organizational change and especially organizational adaptiveness than either coordination by markets or states (elections and regulations).  They build cooperation and provide a platform for learning including the tacit knowledge associated with different approaches to achieving the overall goals.

The book contains a detailed case study that provides lessons for managers interested in innovation and development.  The specific case is how NicaSalud, a SCION formed by USAID, rebuilt the health care system in Nicaragua after Hurricane Mitch, a major disaster.  It demonstrates not only how an inter-organizational network created an atmosphere of learning but also organizational adaptiveness. The study then examines how the amount of adaptiveness improved the effectiveness of the network. This research is also unusual in considering several other ways to measure inter-organizational network effectiveness, thus making a contribution to the inter-organizational network literature.

New Book: The Employable Sociologist

On By Julia DessauerIn PublicationsLeave a comment

The Employable Sociologist: A Guide for Undergraduates by Martha A. Martinez

This book addresses a gap in and outside academia: how to help Sociology undergraduates develop skills for career success while maintaining a sociologically rigorous approach. Matching sociological theories, methods, and knowledge with contemporary capitalistic managerial and work practices, it shows how sociology undergraduates are not only employable but have marketable advantages over graduates of other disciplines. A student following the program embodied in this book will actively nurture a strong sociological identity; create a job search plan integrating personal and disciplinary interests, values, and skills; design job application materials that provide the best fit for specific jobs and organizations; and launch a satisfying career path. Beyond an employment guide, it will facilitate the teaching of career development by Sociology faculty; increase students’ ongoing confidence in their potential; and provide a solid foundation for communicating the transformative power of Sociology to employers and managers in the government, business, and non-profit sectors.

Link: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-41323-0#about-this-book

New Book: We Thought It Would Be Heaven: Refugees in an Unequal America

On By Dilan ErenIn PublicationsLeave a comment

Sackett, Blair and Annette Lareau. 2023. We Thought It Would Be Heaven: Refugees in an Unequal America. University of California Press.

We Thought It Would Be Heaven: Refugees in an Unequal America reveals how organizational obstacles block access to valuable resources for recently resettled refugee families in the United States. This vibrant ethnography brings into focus the many complex organizations that refugee families (like all families) juggle in their day-to-day lives—workplaces, schools, financial institutions, and social service programs. These organizations are interconnected but not coordinated and are rife with hurdles and errors. Seemingly small organizational errors—missing a deadline, mistaking a rule, or misplacing a form—can tangle processes into “knots.” These minor mistakes grind systems to a halt, creating catastrophes as food stamps are cut off, educational opportunities are missed, and benefits are not accessed. Echoing Charles Perrow’s work on “normal accidents” in high-risk technology organizations, Sackett and Lareau find that the complexity, scrutiny, and necessity of proving deservedness increase the likelihood of errors and snags in procedures. Moreover, as refugee families navigate a complex web of social service organizations, problems in one arena can reverberate, creating new challenges in other institutions. By revealing the organizational obstacle course these newcomer families faced, We Thought It Would Be Heaven illuminates key mechanisms of inequality in America.

New Publication: Lucky Me-Acknowledging Class Privilege on an Elite College Campus

On By Dilan ErenIn PublicationsLeave a comment

Thornton, Jack R.2023. “Lucky Me: Acknowledging Class Privilege on an Elite College Campus.” Socius 9: 1-15.  https://doi.org/10.1177/23780231231212113.

Abstract

A growing literature highlights the experiences of first-generation, low-income (FGLI) students on college campuses. However, these studies often conflate the positions of middle- and upper-class students. Using interviews with undergraduates at one elite institution, the author shows how upper-middle-class students responded to upward and downward cross-class encounters. Perceiving a status threat from above, students responded to interactions with rich peers through stereotypical denigration. Yet prolonged exposure to the rich resulted in another tactic, selective legitimation, which maintained that wealthy individuals who performed “awareness” could be morally rehabilitated. Encounters with FGLI classmates led respondents to view themselves as lucky or “privileged” for having escaped hardship, leading to rituals of deference aimed at muting the salience of class difference. Finally, despite their heightened recognition of class inequality, respondents drew equivalences between the problems of rich and poor students, ultimately denying the relevance of privilege in determining individual worth.

New Publication: The Changing Role of Managers

On By Dilan ErenIn Announcements, PublicationsLeave a comment

The Changing Role of Managers (2023, AJS) by Letian Zhang.

This study argues that the increase in middle management in recent decades was accompanied by a shift in managerial roles. Increased task complexity and a new management philosophy have reduced the need for direct supervision but generated a greater demand for collaboration, leading to the emergence of a managerial class whose primary role is collaboration not supervision. The author analyzed a large volume of data to generate three sets of findings: (1) The expectations of the managerial role have quickly changed, in almost all sectors, to emphasize more collaboration and less supervision (2) This new managerial role is especially concentrated in innovation-focused firms. (3) Firms treating managers as collaborators have a higher proportion of middle managers than those still treating them primarily as supervisors. These findings suggest that the role of managers has fundamentally shifted and that accounting for changing managerial roles could explain a significant portion of the managerial growth.

New Publication: The fragility of artists’ reputations from 1795 to 2020

On By Dilan ErenIn Announcements, PublicationsLeave a comment

The fragility of artists’ reputations from 1795 to 2020 by Letian Zhang, Mitali Banerjee, Shinan Wang, and Zhuoqiao Hong.

Abstract

This study explores the longevity of artistic reputation. We empirically examine whether artists are more- or less-venerated after their death. We construct a massive historical corpus spanning 1795 to 2020 and build separate word-embedding models for each five-year period to examine how the reputations of over 3,300 famous artists—including painters, architects, composers, musicians, and writers—evolve after their death. We find that most artists gain their highest reputation right before their death, after which it declines, losing nearly one SD every century. This posthumous decline applies to artists in all domains, includes those who died young or unexpectedly, and contradicts the popular view that artists’ reputations endure. Contrary to the Matthew effect, the reputational decline is the steepest for those who had the highest reputations while alive. Two mechanisms—artists’ reduced visibility and the public’s changing taste—are associated with much of the posthumous reputational decline. This study underscores the fragility of human reputation and shows how the collective memory of artists unfolds over time.

New Publications

On By Julia DessauerIn PublicationsLeave a comment

Kincaid, R., & Reynolds, J. (2023). Unconventional Work, Conventional Problems: Gig Microtask Work, Inequality, and the Flexibility Mystique. The Sociological Quarterly, 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1080/00380253.2023.2268679

Gig work platforms often promise workers flexibility and freedom from formal constraints on their work schedules. Some scholars have questioned whether this “formal flexibility” actually helps people arrange gig work around non-work commitments, but few studies have examined this empirically. This paper examines how hours spent in microtask work – a form of gig work with high formal flexibility – influence work-to-life conflict (WLC) relative to conventional work hours, and how these relationships differ by workers’ gender and financial situation. Fixed-effects regressions using panel data from workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform (MTurk) suggest that microtask work hours are just as closely associated with WLC as conventional work hours. Moreover, microtask work disadvantages the same groups as conventional work (i.e. women and financially struggling workers). Only financially comfortable men seem immune from microtask hours’ association with WLC. This suggests that the benefits of gig work’s formal flexibility are often elusive. We argue that platforms like MTurk promote a flexibility mystique: the illusory promise that gig work empowers workers to set their own schedules and earn decent income without disrupting their personal/family lives. The gig economy’s expansion may thus do little to bring work-life balance to the masses or alleviate inequalities at the work-life nexus.

The Accidental Equalizer: How Luck Determines Pay After College by Jessi Streib

A startling discovery—that job market success after college is largely random—forces a reappraisal of education, opportunity, and the American dream.

As a gateway to economic opportunity, a college degree is viewed by many as America’s great equalizer. And it’s true: wealthier, more connected, and seemingly better-qualified students earn exactly the same pay as their less privileged peers. Yet, the reasons why may have little to do with bootstraps or self-improvement—it might just be dumb luck. That’s what sociologist Jessi Streib proposes in The Accidental Equalizer, a conclusion she reaches after interviewing dozens of hiring agents and job-seeking graduates.

Streib finds that luck shapes the hiring process from start to finish in a way that limits class privilege in the job market. Employers hide information about how to get ahead and force students to guess which jobs pay the most and how best to obtain them. Without clear routes to success, graduates from all class backgrounds face the same odds at high pay. The Accidental Equalizer is a frank appraisal of how this “luckocracy” works and its implications for the future of higher education and the middle class. Although this system is far from eliminating American inequality, Streib shows that it may just be the best opportunity structure we have—for better and for worse.

New Publication: “Rebooting One’s Professional Work: The Case of French Anesthesiologists Using Hypnosis”

On By Dilan ErenIn Publications, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Bourmault, N., & Anteby, M. (2023). Rebooting One’s Professional Work: The Case of French Anesthesiologists Using Hypnosis. Administrative Science Quarterly

Individuals deeply socialized into professional cultures tend to strongly resist breaking from their professions’ core cultural tenets. When these individuals face external pressure (e.g., via new technology or regulation), they typically turn to peers for guidance in such involuntary reinventions of their work. But it is unclear how some professionals may voluntarily break from deeply ingrained views. Through our study of French anesthesiologists who practice hypnosis, we aim to better understand this little-explored phenomenon. Adopting hypnosis, a technique that many anesthesiologists consider subjective and even magical, contradicted a core tenet of their profession: the need to only use techniques validated by rigorous scientific-based research. Drawing on interviews and observations, we analyze how these anesthesiologists were able to change their views and reinvent their work. We find that turning inward to oneself (focusing on their own direct experiences of clients) and turning outward to clients (relying on relations with clients) played critical roles in anesthesiologists’ ability to shift their views and adopt hypnosis. Through this process, these anesthesiologists embarked on a voluntary internal transformation, or reboot, whereby they profoundly reassessed their work, onboarded people in adjacent professions to accept their own reinvention, and countered isolation from their peers. Overall, we show a pathway to such reinvention that entails turning inward and outward (rather than to peers), a result that diverges significantly from prior understandings of professionals’ transformations.

New Publication: Gray Areas

On By Julia DessauerIn PublicationsLeave a comment

Gray Areas: How the Way We Work Perpetuates Racism and What We Can Do to Fix It

By Adia Harvey Wingfield

Labor and race have shared a complex, interconnected history in America. For decades, key aspects of work—from getting a job to workplace norms to advancement and mobility—ignored and failed Black people. While explicit discrimination no longer occurs, and organizations make internal and public pledges to honor and achieve “diversity,” inequities persist through what Adia Harvey Wingfield calls the “gray areas:” the relationships, networks, and cultural dynamics integral to companies that are now more important than ever. The reality is that Black employees are less likely to be hired, stall out at middle levels, and rarely progress to senior leadership positions.

Wingfield has spent a decade examining inequality in the workplace, interviewing over two hundred Black subjects across professions about their work lives. In Gray Areas, she introduces seven of them: Alex, a worker in the gig economy Max, an emergency medicine doctor; Constance, a chemical engineer; Brian, a filmmaker; Amalia, a journalist; Darren, a corporate vice president; and Kevin, who works for a nonprofit.

In this accessible and important antiracist work, Wingfield chronicles their experiences and blends them with history and surprising data that starkly show how old models of work are outdated and detrimental. She demonstrates the scope and breadth of gray areas and offers key insights and suggestions for how they can be fixed, including shifting hiring practices to include Black workers; rethinking organizational cultures to centralize Black employees’ experience; and establishing pathways that move capable Black candidates into leadership roles. These reforms would create workplaces that reflect America’s increasingly diverse population—professionals whose needs organizations today are ill-prepared to meet.

It’s time to prepare for a truly equitable, multiracial future and move our culture forward. To do so, we must address the gray areas in our workspaces today. This definitive work shows us how.

New Publication: Union Booms and Busts: The Ongoing Fight Over the U.S. Labor Movement

On By Julia DessauerIn PublicationsLeave a comment

Judith Stepan-Norris and Jasmine Kerrissey have a new book analyzing industry-level union density from 1900-2015, Union Booms and Busts: The Ongoing Fight Over the U.S. Labor Movement (Oxford University Press, June 2023). Everyone is invited to make use of the book’s publicly available data repository, including information on union membership and density, strikes, elections, unfair labor practices, employment size, race, gender, and occupation of workers.