James Jones. 2024. Racism and Resistance in the Halls of Congress. Princeton University Press

Racism continues to infuse Congress’s daily practice of lawmaking and shape who obtains congressional employment. In this timely and provocative book, James Jones reveals how and why many who work in Congress call it the “Last Plantation.” He shows that even as the civil rights movement gained momentum in the 1960s and antidiscrimination laws were implemented across the nation, Congress remained exempt from federal workplace protections for decades. These exemptions institutionalized inequality in the congressional workplace well into the twenty-first century. Combining groundbreaking research and compelling firsthand accounts from scores of congressional staffers, Jones uncovers the hidden dynamics of power, privilege, and resistance in Congress. He reveals how failures of racial representation among congressional staffers reverberate throughout the American political system and demonstrates how the absence of diverse perspectives hampers the creation of just legislation. Centering the experiences of Black workers within this complex landscape, he provides valuable insights into the problems they face, the barriers that hinder their progress, and the ways they contest entrenched inequality.

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Collins, Caitlyn, Megan Tobias Neely, and Shamus R. Khan. 2024. “‘Which Cases Do I Need?’ Constructing Cases and Observations in Qualitative Research.” Annual Review of Sociology.

This methodological review starts one step before Small’s classic account of how many cases a scholar needs. We ask, “Which cases do I need?” We argue that a core feature of most qualitative research is case construction, which we define as the delineation of a social category of inquiry. We outline how qualitative researchers construct cases and observations and discuss how these choices impact data collection, analysis, and argumentation. In particular, we examine how case construction and the subsequent logic of crafting observations within cases have consequences for conceptual generalizability, as distinct from empirical generalizability. Drawing from the practice of qualitative work, we outline seven questions qualitative researchers often answer to construct cases and observations. Better understanding and articulating the logic of constructing cases and observations is useful for both qualitative scholars embarking on research and those who read and evaluate their work.

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Harland Prechel’s Normalized Financial Wrongdoing: How Re-Regulating Markets Created Risks and Fostered Inequality received the 2023 Midwest Sociological Society Book Award.

In Normalized Financial Wrongdoing (Stanford University Press) , Harland Prechel examines how social structural arrangements that extended corporate property rights and increased managerial control opened the door for misconduct that contributed to the 2008 financial crisis and historically high levels of inequality. Beginning his analysis with the financialization of the home-mortgage market in the 1930s, Prechel shows how pervasive these arrangements had become by the end of the century, when the banks created political coalition with other economic sectors and developed strategies to participate in financial markets. The book examines political and legal landscapes in which corporations are embedded to answer two questions: First, how did banks and financial firms transition from being providers of capital to financial market actors in their own right? Second, how did new organizational structures cause market participants to engage in high-risk activities?

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Seppo Poutanen and Anne Kovalainen. 2023. Skills, Creativity and Innovation in the Digital Platform Era Analyzing the New Reality of Professions and Entrepreneurship. Routledge.

The book addresses several questions of the complex relationship between professions and technology.

Several interdisciplinary questions on professions, expertise and new powerful forms in economy have risen to the forefront in recent years in social sciences and humanities, neighboring disciplines such as business studies included. Professions and professional expert work as part of the traditional, constitutive societal powers, entrepreneurship as a new emerging power in societies and economies, and finally, digitalization and digital platforms possessing an inevitable transformative force globally have all been researched and addressed, but almost always entirely separately, as the disciplinary boundaries still govern the intellectual endeavors. The present book is intended as an intellectual contribution to disentangle and tie these three major topics together.

One of the most noteworthy global aspects in current societies is indeed the intensifying presence of technology, to the extent that we can talk about the omnipotence of technologies, a kind of technological imperative that prevails in society. This omnipotence, a new type of technological imperative emerges in the working lives of practicing professionals from medical doctors to lawyers and from teachers to preachers. Technological development through algorithmic decision-making and machine learning has introduced permeable processes through which technology has entered most professions and professional work, even if the ‘core’ of the professional identity would not have technology as part of it. Much as in our everyday life, where technologies govern and shape our consumption of goods and services, the societal and economic fabric is technologically impregnated.

Digital platforms have quickly become the key enablers of not only scaling up businesses but also creating new activities in societies, and managing practically all spheres of human life. Conditions and prospects for doing work are changing with the new technologies, and equally so for entrepreneurs and professionals. Platforms as enablers inevitably lead to new questions concerning organizing of work. How do technologies transform expertise within professions? Do algorithms require new types of professions, and if so, is this development visible already, are few of the key questions we explore in the book.

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.