Birced, Elif. 2025. “Empowered by Consumers: How Content Creators Use Relational Labor to Resist Labor Control.” Socio-Economic Review. https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwaf064

Abstract: Researchers often discuss consumers as a means of labor control. In contrast, I ask how workers leverage consumers to resist control over their labor process. Focusing on sponsored content creation as a case, I explain how creators prioritize audience interests to resist sponsors’ control over their creative decisions. Using semi-structured interviews with 39 content creators and observations of a conference session, I show that the managerial practices of sponsoring brands contradict audience expectations due to the relational labor that creators perform to build a sense of community, authenticity, and trustworthiness in the eyes of audiences. Second, I document the role of part-time content creation and YouTube’s paid channel memberships in enhancing creators’ capacity to be selective with sponsorship requests and resist brand interventions that may ultimately lead to a decline in audience engagement. I extend the literature by theorizing when consumers enable workers to resist labor control.

Elif Birced earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from Boston University in 2025 and is a Postdoctoral Associate at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the Schwarzman College of Computing during the 2025-26 academic year. 

Carter, Carrie. 2025. “Fight Like a Girl: Fitness Testing as Gendered Organizational Logic in the U.S. Army.” Gender, Work & Organization. https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.70048

Abstract: Organizational logics related to excellence and equity are changing rapidly in contemporary workplaces, yet limited research examines the impacts of specific policy initiatives, including why some fail—or even backfire. This study examines one such recent policy case: a temporary period of gender-neutral fitness testing in the United States Army. Drawing on 32 in-depth interviews with U.S. soldiers who served during this failed policy change, I examine how the historic and seemingly gender egalitarian practice of sex-normed fitness testing may reinforce inequality in this highly male-dominated organizational context. By comparing soldiers’ narratives about what it takes to be fit for service with the new organizational logics about combat readiness, I highlight how a masculine-typed “ideal soldier” is (a) embedded in the structure of sex-normed fitness standards, (b) reproduced in interactions among soldiers in the process of “doing gender,” and (c) ultimately internalized in soldiers’ evaluations of their own and others’ fitness for service. Findings expand our understanding of how interacting gendering processes may influence workers’ perceptions of organizational change, potentially producing paradoxical outcomes.

Carrie Carter is a sociology Ph.D. candidate at North Carolina State University specializing in gender, work and organizations. Her research explores how organizational policies, practices and culture impact equity and effectiveness, with a particular focus on the U.S. military.

Prechel, Harland, Amber Blazek, and Ernesto F. L. Amaral. 2025. “Toward Theory Consolidation: Stratification, Organizational, and Political-Legal Effects on Greenhouse Gas Emissions.” Energy Research & Social Science 128:104330. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2025.104330

Abstract: The purpose of this research is to understand the relationship between dimensions of the social structure and greenhouse gas emissions in U.S. fossil fueled electrical power plants. While environmental scholars have made important contributions to understanding society-environmental relations, theoretical growth and therefore the capacity to affect environmental policy is hampered by the lack of integration among different middle range perspectives. To address this issue, we adopt Robert Merton’s observation that theoretical advances require the ‘consolidation of groups of special [middle range] theories.’ We develop a conceptual framework and conduct an empirical analysis that includes core dimensions of the component parts of the social structure. Our geographic information systems analysis shows that electrical energy producing plants are disproportionately located near poor and minority communities. While controlling for physical characteristics of plants, our regression analysis shows that poor communities, region of the U.S. where the plant is located, subnational state environmental policies, ownership of the plant by another corporation, plant size, and the interaction between plant size and subnational state environmental policies all affect greenhouse gas emissions. We present graphs with predicted values from our regression model to illustrate the expected gas emissions, based on values of key independent variables, making complex statistical results more interpretable and meaningful.

Harland Prechel is Professor of Sociology, College of Liberal Arts Cornerstone Fellow, and Energy Institute Fellow at Texas A&M University. His primary areas of research are the corporation, economic sociology, political sociology, and environmental sociology. 

Ernesto F. L. Amaral is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Texas A&M University. His research is related to social demography, migration, and public policy analysis.