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.

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.

Announcement: Socio-Economic Review Cafe on Friday, June 27th

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Socio-Economic Review Cafe:
Featuring a conversation with SER authors Robert Manduca (University of Michigan).

Join us for a discussion of comparative-historical reflections on the measurement and common practices in wealth studies. Robert Manduca’s article “Should social insurance programs count as wealth? Augmented wealth in research and policy” combines the design of a case study with cross-national quantitative analysis to illustrate the importance of the local contextualization of wealth measurement. The paper joins the emerging literature, bringing the comparative-historical insights back to the literature on wealth inequality and stratification.

The event will take place on Friday, June 27th, at 8:00 AM PDT / 11:00 AM EDT / 5:00 PM CET. Register at this link!

As with all SER Cafe events, we will facilitate a dynamic conversation with the authors rather than lengthy talks. Come ready to engage.

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.

Announcement: Summer 2025 Gender, Professions, and Organizations Writing Workshop at ASA Annual Meeting

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Summer 2025 Gender, Professions, and Organizations Writing Workshop at ASA Annual Meeting

Register for the semi-annual Gender, Professions, and Organizations Writing Workshop at the ASA Annual Meeting on Friday, August 8. Spots are limited; sign up here.

The semi-annual Gender, Professions, and Organizations Writing Workshop is back this summer from 9 am to 5 pm on Friday, August 8, 2025 – the day of pre-conference activities for the ASA annual meeting in Chicago. 

The Summer 2025 GPO organizing team welcomes anyone working on gender, professions, and organizations (broadly defined; if you’re unsure if your work applies, it likely does). Our goals are to foster connection and collaboration, build community across career stages, and dedicate time for writing. We encourage new and returning participants! 

The full-day workshop is organized into two standalone sessions, each with time for connecting and writing, and a lunch break in between. Participants are welcome to join for the morning, afternoon, or both. 

Anyone registered for ASA is welcome to join the workshop at no additional cost; however, space is limited. Participants should bring their own charged laptop computers (and possibly an extension cord) and snacks to share, as additional funding is not available. 

Please contact one of the current organizers with any questions. Register by July 27, using this form. 

Kristen McNeill (kristen.mcneill@graduateinstitute.ch, Assistant Professor, Geneva Graduate Institute)

Former organizers: Sharla Alegria, Melissa Abad, Ethel Mickey, Elizabeta Shifrin, Rodica Lisnic, Kathrin Zippel, Laura Kramer, Christina Falci, Laura Hirshfield, Julia McQuillan, Enobong Hannah (Anna) Branch, Shauna Morimoto, Firuzeh Shokooh Valle

Job Posting: HEC Paris, Doha is Hiring Two Faculty Members

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HEC Paris, Doha, is excited to share with the OOW section members that they are hiring two faculty members at HEC Paris, Doha!

HEC Paris, Doha, is a branch campus of HEC Paris and operates in close coordination with, and under the same standards as, those in Paris. Join them as they build and grow a faculty of researchers and educators who will have an impact on society.

Applications are accepted on a rolling basis; however, the team aims to move relatively quickly, so early applications are encouraged.

Faculty Opening (open-rank) in Management/OB, with preference for those who focus on leadership, negotiations, or board governance. https://akadeus.com/announcement/9268

Faculty Opening (open-rank) in Entrepreneurship and Innovation https://akadeus.com/announcement/9267

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.