Job Posting: New College of Florida

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New College of Florida, a small residential, nationally recognized liberal arts college, invites applications for a tenure-track assistant professorship beginning in August, 2024. Ph.D. is expected by that time and teaching experience is preferred. We seek candidates who can teach courses in social psychology/micro-sociology and guide students in the use of quantitative research. The areas of expertise are open, and we seek scholars who complement the scholarship and teaching of current professors; for example, new faculty in fields like sociology of science, sociology of sport, medical sociology, aging and life course, crime and law, demography, etc. New College is committed to excellence in teaching and research and encourages collaborative student-faculty scholarship. The teaching load is two courses per semester, sponsoring individual and group tutorials, and supervising independent study projects in January. Faculty members also provide academic advising, sponsor senior theses, and serve on baccalaureate committees. Professors are expected to maintain an active research program. Interested candidates should apply online at http://www.ncf.edu/employment and upload the following: a cover letter, c.v., statements of teaching and research interests, syllabi, teaching evaluations, one writing sample (article or chapter length), and unofficial graduate transcript(s). In addition, please identify three scholars to write letters of recommendation (they will receive a request through the system). According to Florida law, applications and meetings regarding applications are open to the public upon request. For questions about the application process or accommodations, please contact Ms. Kristi Fecteau at kfecteau@ncf.edu. Review of applications will begin on January 4 2024 and continue until the position is filled.

New College of Florida, an Equal Opportunity Employer, complies with all federal, state, and Florida Board of Governors regulations. In accordance with state law, all employees are subject to a background check at the time of hiring.

Job Posting: Postdoctoral Fellow in Public Policy, Colby College

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The Department of Sociology at Colby College is searching for a postdoctoral fellow in public policy to start September 1, 2024. The fellow will teach three courses in the first year of a two-year appointment and four in the second: introduction to policy analysis and other policy courses related to their substantive interests. These courses will provide early career scholars a chance to hone their teaching skills in a selective liberal arts college environment. Fellows will be expected to pursue an active research and publishing agenda and will receive mentoring from senior faculty. The fellow will also have the opportunity to take part in a new public policy colloquium series.

Areas of policy specialization are open. Although the position will be housed in the Department of Sociology, we will consider candidates from other social science disciplines. Candidates may be A.B.D. but a Ph.D. must be in hand prior to September 1, 2024.

A complete application must include: a curriculum vitae; letter of application that explains the candidate’s research and approach to teaching and teaching inclusively; representative samples of scholarship; and three letters of recommendation.

Please submit all of these materials via Interfolio: https://apply.interfolio.com/137995. Review of applications will begin February 12, 2024 and will continue until the position is filled. Questions about this position should be directed to: nlgross@colby.edu

OOW Book Discussion: January 22

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All OOW members are invited to participate in an informal, online discussion of Carolyn Chen’s Work, Pray, Code on January 22nd, 12-1pm EST. The book is a brisk, qualitative study of how work becomes religion in Silicon Valley. The conversation will be “book club style”, with everyone welcome to share ideas. (If you’d like to participate but time is short, focus on the introduction & chapter 4.) 

We hope students and faculty alike come to discuss and meet with fellow OOW members. To register and receive a zoom link, click here.

Questions? Contact Laura Doering (laura.doering@utoronto.ca).

Postdoc position in the ERC Starting Grant project ReWORCS: Returns to Work in Occupational, Relational, and Corporate Settings at Sciences Po Paris 

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Philipp Brandt(Assistant professor of sociology – SciencesPo) is looking for a postdoc to join his ERC Starting Grant project, “ReWORCS: Returns to Work in Occupational, Relational, and Corporate Settings,” at Sciences Po Paris for a duration of up to three years (2 + 1). The project aims to recover lived social experiences from large-scale administrative and trace datasets of work activities in different national and organizational settings. It has funding for five years, and the team will include several doctoral students. We will work closely together on the project’s implementation. You will have the opportunity to participate in Sciences Po’s academic life, attend workshops and summer schools, travel to conferences, and be the lead author on articles. The main requirements are a doctoral degree in sociology, coding and quantitative data analysis skills, and broad sociological interests. The Centre de Sociologie des Organisations will be the project’s institutional home, and collaborators worldwide will provide its intellectual foundation. The monthly gross salary is EUR 3500. The position comes with healthcare and other benefits. The start date should be no later than September 01, 2024, and ideally before. 

Tasks: 

– Assembling datasets, designing and implementing analyses, and interpretation of results – A substantial part of the technical work will focus on the design of new measures of work experiences and trajectories 

– Preparation of academic presentations 

– Writing of research articles 

– Coordination of doctoral student researchers and research assistants 

Requirements: 

– Doctoral degree in sociology (recently completed or imminent) 

– Broad sociological interests, including in different research methods and theoretical frameworks 

– Experience coding in R or Python

– Strong English skills 

– Excellent communication and collaboration skills 

Application: 

– Motivation letter (~700 words) 

– CV 

– Academic degree certificates 

– Single-authored writing sample of empirical research 

(advanced draft, published article, or thesis chapter) 

– Contact information for two references 

Submission: 

Please send your application materials to philipp.brandt@sciencespo.fr as a single .pdf or separate .pdfs. Don’t hesitate to reach out in the meantime with any questions you may have. 

APPLICATION DEADLINE: February 01, 2024 at 06.30 CET (a.m.). 

Project description: 

The rise of platforms and remote work has refashioned concerns about work security and flexibility in public debates. Academic studies have documented an increase in non-standard work over decades, including polarization of rewards, shifting occupational boundaries, and winding paths among women and other marginalized groups. These findings had important policy implications but left questions about the unfolding of individual labor market experiences amid the more noticeable changes. This project mobilizes new techniques and data sources and overcomes divisions in research on work to address those problems. 

The project has three parts. Work package 1 (WP1) uses national-level employment datasets of France, Germany, and the US to survey job trajectories in relation to earnings across institutional contexts. It advances analyses of occupational and other categorical effects by drawing attention to job change sequences. WP2 asks how workers organize work. It takes two strategic cases with detailed work records, one involving technical expertise and the other practical tasks. WP3 draws on a unique dataset of career descriptions in two areas of work and two countries to capture institutional and cultural effects on meaning construction to ask how workers redefine established jobs.

Job Postings: Copenhagen Business School

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Copenhagen Business School invites applications for two open positions in Organization Theory in the Department of Organization. The open positions include a two-year postdoc (with an optional additional third year of teaching) and a three-year assistant professor (with six months of teaching) on Jane Bjørn Vedel’s research program on how large-scale funding impacts organizational forms in higher education.

The successful candidates will work with her team in a collaborative project that aims at generating novel insights on a topic of significant societal importance and publishing them in high-impact journals within Organization and Management Theory. She is looking for candidates who can move to Copenhagen, have good qualitative skills, and who want to join her team in elucidating some of the main drivers of organizational change in academia.

Start date September 1, 2024, and deadline is January 29, 2024.

More information about the positions here:
https://shorturl.at/anAJK
https://shorturl.at/dsAY1

New Event: Socio-Economic Review Cafe—The Financialization of Households 

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Socio-Economic Review Cafe: The Financialization of Households 

Featuring a conversation with SER authors Marek Mikuš (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology), and Xiaojing Wang and Anne-Marie Ward (both of Ulster University)

Join us for a discussion of how the state and the financial economy are implicated in contemporary household finance. Bobek, Mikuš, and Sokol, in “Making sense of the financialization of households,” review the state-of-the-art literature on this topic and argue that household participation in the financial economy constitutes “a systematic transfer of value from the bottom of society to the top.” Wang and Ward advance a policy proposal for resolving household overindebtedness in their paper “Socio-economic framework for the design of national household insolvency systems,” that takes into account variations in political orientations to indebtedness and levels of social insurance provisions between countries.

Come and join us to discuss how socioeconomic research on household financialization can inform policy solutions for its negative consequences. The event will take place on Wednesday, January 24th, at 9AM PST/12PM EST/6PM CET. Register at this link! 

As with all SER Cafe events, we will facilitate a dynamic conversation with the authors. No lengthy talks. Our authors look forward to your questions and comments. 

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

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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.

Call for Submissions: EGOS 2024, Sub-theme: Organising beyond hierarchy?

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Sub-theme title: Organising beyond hierarchy?

Big societal challenges such as the climate crisis, proliferating democracy deficits, intensifying casualisation and digitalisation of work and widening inequalities require rethinking the ways we organise to achieve change. Professions and professional organizations have often challenged established bureaucratic was of organizing and have provided alternatives such as partnerships and collegial forms, aiming to maintain high degrees of autonomy. In this stream, we invite you to think about organising beyond hierarchies in professional settings in the public, private or civil sectors and to ponder with us how alternative forms of organising might challenge or affirm the status quo, lead to or stagnate progress, advance or hinder equalities.

Full call for papers:

https://www.egos.org/jart/prj3/egos/main.jart?rel=de&reserve-mode=active&content-id=1662944489704&subtheme_id=1669874217711

Submission deadline: Tuesday, January 9, 2024

Stream convenors:

Johan Alvehus, Lund University, Sweden

Perttu Salovaara, Helsinki University, Finland

Nela Smolović Jones, The Open University, United Kingdom

CFP: EGOS After the Crisis (?): Towards a new Politics of Professionalism Under pressure

On By Julia DessauerIn Calls for PapersLeave a comment

Due: Tuesday, January 9, 2024, 23:59:59 CET [Central European Time]

In this sub-theme we take an eco-systems approach to studying shifting state-organization-profession-user (inter)dependencies and their consequences on policy, organization and practice levels. We seek to contribute to the reinvention of professionalism as an increasingly political and economic endeavour, discussing (amongst others) the micro-political practices of priority setting, data-driven surveillance and modelling, economic rationing and repair work, as well as the (conflicting) valuations and accountability regimes these involve. At the same time, we acknowledge that the micro-political dynamics of organising professional work are both constitutive of and framed by wider institutional, ideological and macro-political rationalities.
 
We invite contributions that address the following themes and questions, but we are also interested in related contributions exploring a new politics of professionalism under pressure:

  • What new risks and uncertainties in the organization of expert work and the provision of health and welfare services are emerging in the ‘after-crisis’, and how do they exacerbate and/or create new pressures on professionals and professionalism?
  • What new (inter)dependencies emerge between state-level actors, organizations, professionals, and service users in times of uncertainty, scarcity and austerity and with what kinds of precariousness?
  • Technological innovations and new forms of knowledge create new possibilities, affordances, and challenges. How do professionals and organizations signal and respond to these developments, and how do they shape professionalism as a social and lived phenomenon?
  • How can this emerging set of questions around the micro, meso and macro politics and practices of professionalism be theorized as ‘professionalism under pressure’ in times of uncertainty and precariousness?

Further information: https://www.egos.org/jart/prj3/egos/main.jart?rel=de&reserve-mode=active&content-id=1662944489704&subtheme_id=1669874219503

Short papers should focus on the main ideas of the paper, this means, they should explain the purpose of the paper, theoretical background, the research gap that is addressed, the approach taken, the methods of analysis (in empirical papers), main findings, and contributions. In addition, it is useful to indicate clearly how the paper links with the sub-theme and the overall theme of the Colloquium, although not all papers need to focus on the overall theme. Creativity, innovativeness, theoretical grounding, and critical thinking are typical characteristics of EGOS papers.

Your short paper should comprise 3,000 words (incl. references, appendices and other material). Please take note of the Guidelines and criteria for the submission of short papers at EGOS Colloquia.

Job Posting: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland

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The Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland is looking to fill the position of a full professor of sociology with a focus on “micro-organizational sociology” (100%) starting February 1, 2025.

You are responsible for the area of organizational sociology that relates to processes of organizing. In teaching and research, you will contribute to the conceptual-theoretical and empirical development of the field. In your empirical work you approach processes of organizing within and between organizations from a sociological perspective.

The University of Lucerne explicitly encourages qualified female scientists to apply.

Application deadline is January 12, 2024.

For further information, see https://www.unilu.ch/en/university/personnel/human-resources-department/vacancies/full-professor-of-sociology-with-a-focus-on-micro-organizational-sociology-100-1946937/