Call for Abstracts: Organizations in a Plural Society

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International Conference on Organizational Sociology

Trondheim, December 8/9, 2022

Deadline for submission of abstracts is June 15, 2022

www.icos2022.com

Joint conference by

Organizers:
Nadine Arnold (VU Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Cristina Besio (HSU Hamburg, Germany)
Michael Grothe-Hammer (NTNU Trondheim, Norway)
Uli Meyer (JKU Linz, Austria)
Kurt Rachlitz (NTNU Trondheim, Norway)

Our society is characterized by an ever-expanding number of organizations and organizational forms – a “hyper-organization” so to say (Bromley & Meyer 2015). Without doubt, organizations have a significant impact on the development of society. They have conquered nearly all areas of social life and new organizational forms nowadays diffuse even into areas which traditionally were coordinated in an informal and community-based manner (e.g., childcare, housekeeping, personal assessments and career advice, hunting, weddings, and funerals). This conference aims at disentangling the relation and mutual influence between the manifold forms of organization and a plural society. In particular, we focus on the entanglement of organizations with heterogeneous expectations.

Organizations are usually faced with a myriad of expectations by numerous groups, individuals, and systems. Such expectations stem from a plurality of societal areas ranging from micro to macro and from local to global. They include moral, ethical, political, and environmental concerns (Hoffman 2001; Roth & Valentinov 2020) as well as macro-level values and norms attributable to differing “value spheres” (Weber 2009), “institutional logics” (Friedland & Alford 1991), “orders of worth” (Boltanski & Thévenot 1999), “function systems” (Luhmann 1994), and more.

Many of these expectations tend to be competing or contradictory and, accordingly, scholars have observed that heterogeneous requests often lead to conflicts (e.g. Battilana & Dorado 2010; Kraatz & Block 2010; Ocasio & Radoynovska 2016; Pache & Santos 2010, 2013). Nevertheless, organizations are usually quite successful in coping with these demands on a day-to-day basis (Besio & Meyer 2014; Binder 2007; McPherson & Sauder 2013). Moreover, organizations are not only coping with such societal demands; they are also crucial in shaping and enacting these as well (Will et al. 2018). However, we still know surprisingly little about the impact of their internal solutions on broader societal contexts and co-shaping societal trends (Apelt et al. 2017). 

In the handling of heterogeneous expectations, new organizational forms play a central role (Brès et al., 2018). These are often constitutional hybrids (Alexius & Furusten 2019) which are capable of orchestrating different societal requests and respond to broader societal developments such as digitalization, global health crises or climate change. In the past, Max Weber (1976) identified bureaucracies as crucial for the emergence and maintenance of rational-legal authority, which is a core characteristic of modern society. But how is society affected by the current decline of large bureaucratic organizations (Davis 2015) and the rise of new and unconventional organizational forms? And what role do the remaining conventional forms of organization still play in context of these developments (du Gay & Vikkelsø 2016)?

Considering that on the one hand organizations actively shape specific meanings of combined expectations (e.g., through advisory and lobbying activities), while on the other hand they mediate different requests in their everyday activities, formal structures and projects, we might ask:

  • How do organizations combine different domains and rationalities (e.g., moral missions and economic demands) and what are the societal implications?
  • How can organizations innovate and become drivers of new expectations in organizational fields and broader social contexts? 
  • In which ways do organizations shape new grand challenges such as digitalization, global health crises, large-scale disasters, or climate change and vice versa? 
  • How do macro-societal pluralities spawn new organizational forms, structures, and processes, and what impact do these new aspects of organization have in turn on society? 

We invite papers that address these or similar questions revolving around the role and relevance of organizations in and for our plural society. The conference will take place at NTNU in Trondheim, Norway, December 8-9, 2022. Please submit an abstract of 2-3 pages to icos.submission@gmail.com by June 15, 2022. Decisions on acceptance will be made until the end of July.

This conference is a joint conference of the “Organization & Society” Research Group of the Department of Sociology and Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), the Section on Organizational Sociology of the German Sociological Association (DGS) and the Research Committee on Sociology of Organization (RC17) of the International Sociological Association (ISA). Participation at the conference is free including food and beverages during the sessions and breaks. We will also offer a range of social activities including a visit of Trondheim’s magical Christmas Market.

We greatly appreciate you being or becoming a member of either the ISA Research Committee “Sociology of Organization” and/or the German Section on Organizational Sociology. Without our members we would not be able to organize conferences such as this.

Call for Participants: Fake News? Perspectives from Cultural Sociology

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ASA Section on Cultural Sociology presents:
Culture in Contemporary Life (CCL) Series
Fake News? Perspectives from Cultural Sociology

What is fake news? Who determines it? Can we rely on fact checkers and how should they judge? Is fake news simply a pejorative term used to silence voice of dissent? How is this label being used? What are the responsibilities of social media platforms in the production and dissemination of fake news? How can sociologists and particularly cultural sociologists contribute to this area of research? 


Speakers:
Francesca Tripodi (the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Gary Allan Fine (Northwestern University)

Jaron Harabam (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) 

Date:

March 29, 2-3 pm ET
Zoom link: https://umich.zoom.us/j/93933529816

For questions or comments, please contact Alejandra Cueto Piazza (alejandra_irene_cueto_piazza@brown.edu)

Call for Submissions: Special Issue on Global Health in Studies in Comparative International Development

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Special Issue on Global Health in Studies in Comparative International Development:

Call for Papers (Deadline: August 25, 2022)

While the coronavirus has focused public attention on the problems of global health as never before, the study of global health has frequently taken place on the margins of the disciplines of sociology and political science. Yet, disciplinary social sciences bring theoretical lenses, methodological concerns, and references to literature that often make these contributions quite distinct from traditional public health approaches. What do disciplinary social sciences have to contribute to the study of politics, power, and inequality in global health? How does the inclusion of voices and findings from the Global South unsettle foundational theory that social science disciplines in the Global North take for granted? What can the disciplines gain by moving comparative study of health problems, particularly those in the Global South, from the periphery to the fore?

This special issue on global health seeks to critically challenge the absence of race and racism in mainstream international relations theory (Dionne and Turkmen 2020) and the “epistemic parochialism” of major social science disciplines (Farber and Harris 2022) by highlighting important new work in the emergent sociologies and political sciences of global health (Noy 2019; Harris and White 2019; McInnes, Lee, and Youde 2019).

Submissions to the special issue need not focus on COVID-19 and may consider the politics, power relations, and inequality of other important (or neglected) public health issues, including but not limited to global health governance, intellectual property issues, comparative healthcare access and/or health disparities, non-communicable disease, and misinformation and the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge. Interesting paper topics might examine, for example, international organizations through race and/or gender lenses; could demonstrate how the domain of global health offers new ways for thinking about foundational concepts like the developmental state; might explore how new technologies, institutions, and actors are shifting power equilibria in global health; could critically explore the role of powerful actors, such as pharmaceutical companies and private foundations, that have frequently been ignored by social scientists studying global health politics; or could provide evidence that challenges our understanding of major theories from policy diffusion to the fundamental cause theory.  

The review process will prioritize (1) submissions that have wide-ranging impact on and/or force rethinking of major theories the disciplines take for granted; (2) submissions with novel findings and/or methodological approaches that are ideally comparative in focus; (3) submissions from researchers in the Global South; and (4) submissions which draw on cases that have not historically received a great deal of attention in the sociology and political science canons. Submissions from outside sociology and political science are welcome, including from researchers who have interdisciplinary training and/or work in interdisciplinary spaces, but should clearly articulate how they speak to the above themes.  

Word count for all submissions should not exceed 10,000 words including notes, references, tables and figures. The abstract is not included in the word count. Longer submissions will not be considered. Authors may include further material in an online appendix.

The deadline for submission is August 25, 2022.  Submissions should be made through the submissions portal at https://www.editorialmanager.com/scid/default1.aspx. Authors should indicate that their submission is for the Special Issue on Global Health in the “Notes to Editor” section of the submission site.

Further questions about the submission process may be directed to SCID.journal@gmail.com. Substantive questions about the special issue for may be directed to the co-editors Kim Yi Dionne (kdionne@ucr.edu) and Joseph Harris (josephh@bu.edu).

New Publication: Varieties of Gendered Capitalism: Status Beliefs and the Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship

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Hi OOW! Today we’re sharing a new article by Daniel Auguste:

CITATION: Auguste, Daniel. Varieties of Gendered Capitalism: Status Beliefs and the Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship.” Social Currents. https://doi.org/10.1177/23294965211053836

ABSTRACT:

Gender status research demonstrates that the power of gender status beliefs in shaping gender inequalities is rooted in the fact that these beliefs are institutionalized and operate at the societal level to shape social relations of inequality at the individual level. However, recent empirical analyses linking gender status beliefs to gender inequality in entrepreneurship have only examined the effect of individual gender, not that of societal-level gender status beliefs, on gender inequality in entrepreneurship. This study fills this gap in this literature by examining the potential effect of societal-level gender status beliefs on gender inequality in entrepreneurship, using data from 51 countries. The results show that gender inequality in entrepreneurship is greater in societies where gender status beliefs are stronger. For instance, gender inequality in entrepreneurship is greater in societies where status beliefs about gender differences in leadership competency and the right to employment are stronger. However, the results also show that these beliefs are more strongly associated with gender inequality among nascent entrepreneurs than established business owners. These findings support feminist scholars’ claim that gender status advantage is pervasive in modern institutions and suggest that gender status advantage may manifest differently across stages of the entrepreneurship process.

New Book: Lactation at Work: Expressed Milk, Expressing Beliefs, and the Expressive Value of Law

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Hi OOW members! We’re excited to share news about Elizabeth Hoffmann‘s book, Lactation at Work: Expressed Milk, Expressing Beliefs, and the Expressive Value of Law!

SUMMARY:

In recent decades, as women entered the US workforce in increasing numbers, they faced the conundrum of how to maintain breastfeeding and hold down full-time jobs. In 2010, the Lactation at Work Law (an amendment to the US Fair Labor Standards Act) mandated accommodations for lactating women. This book examines the federal law and its state-level equivalent in Indiana, drawing on two waves of interviews with human resource personnel, supervising managers, and lactating workers. In many ways, this simple law – requiring break time and privacy for pumping – is a success story. Through advocacy by allies, education of managers, and employee initiative, many organizations created compliant accommodations. This book shows legal scholars how a successful civil rights law creates effective change; helps labor activists and management personnel understand how to approach new accommodations; and enables workers to understand the possibilities for amelioration of workplace problems through internal negotiations and legal reforms.

  • Utilizes data from three sets of organizational actors: human resource personnel, supervising managers, and lactating employees, in order to observe the application of law into policy, and policy into day-to-day work experiences from three different perspectives
  • Draws on two-waves of data, one from immediately after the law was passed in real-time and another about 5 years later
  • Engages both organizational theory and law and society scholarship to demonstrate a key intersection of two important scholarly areas to help understand how a law’s application evolves within organizations

Call for Participants: Talking about Walking Mannequins, Zoom Discussion

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Talking about Walking Mannequins

Wednesday, March 30th, 11:15 AM EST / 8:15 AM PST via Zoom.

Register now for more details, and to join as the authors and a panel of expert discussants explore this important new book.

Authors:

  • Joya Misra (Sociology and Public Policy, and Director of the Institute for Social Science Research, UMass Amherst)
  • Kyla Walters (Sociology, Sonoma State University)

Discussants:

  • Maxine Craig (University of California, Davis), author of Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race
  • Eileen Otis (Northeastern University), author of Markets and Bodies: Women, Service Work and the Making of Inequality in China 
  • Dennis Nickson (University of Strathclyde), coauthor of Aesthetic Labour 

New Publication: Geek Girls: Inequality and Opportunity in Silicon Valley

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Hi OOW members!

France Winddance Twine has a book (NYU press) available for pre-order with a discount through this website.

SUMMARY: An inside account of gender and racial discrimination in the high-tech industry

Why is being a computer “geek” still perceived to be a masculine occupation? Why do men continue to greatly outnumber women in the high-technology industry? Since 2014, a growing number of employment discrimination lawsuits has called attention to a persistent pattern of gender discrimination in the tech world. Much has been written about the industry’s failure to adequately address gender and racial inequalities, yet rarely have we gotten an intimate look inside these companies. In Geek Girls, France Winddance Twine provides the first book by a sociologist that “lifts the Silicon veil” to provide firsthand accounts of inequality and opportunity in the tech ecosystem. This work draws on close to a hundred interviews with male and female technology workers of diverse racial, ethnic, and educational backgrounds who are currently employed at tech firms such as Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter, and at various start-ups in the San Francisco Bay area. Geek Girls captures what it is like to work as a technically skilled woman in Silicon Valley.

With a sharp eye for detail and compelling testimonials from industry insiders, Twine shows how the technology industry remains rigged against women, and especially Black, Latinx, and Native American women from working class backgrounds. From recruitment and hiring practices that give priority to those with family, friends, and classmates employed in the industry, to social and educational segregation, to academic prestige hierarchies, Twine reveals how women are blocked from entering this industry. Women who do not belong to the dominant ethnic groups in the industry are denied employment opportunities, and even actively pushed out, despite their technical skills and qualifications.

While the technology firms strongly embrace the rhetoric of diversity and oppose discrimination in the workplace, Twine argues that closed social networks and routine hiring practices described by employees reinforce the status quo and reproduce inequality. The myth of meritocracy and gender stereotypes operate in tandem to produce a culture where the use of race-, color-, and power-evasive language makes it difficult for individuals to name the micro-aggressions and forms of discrimination that they experience.

Twine offers concrete insights into how the technology industry can address ongoing racial and gender disparities, create more transparency and empower women from underrepresented groups, who continued to be denied opportunities.

Job Posting: Executive Director, Berkeley Culture Initiative, Haas School of Business

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MORE INFORMATION AND APPLICATION HERE.

Departmental Overview

UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business offers a unique opportunity to champion new ideas, collaborate across boundaries, and continually learn in a workplace committed to increasing diversity and creating a welcoming environment for all. Our distinctive culture is captured within our four Defining Leadership Principles: Question the Status Quo, Confidence Without Attitude, Students Always, and Beyond Yourself. These principles distinguish Berkeley Haas as a unique environment, conducive to teamwork, collaboration, and career growth.

For more information about the Haas School of Business visit: https://haas.berkeley.edu/about/

The Berkeley Culture Initiative aims to usher in the next generation of culture research, one that draws on a wide range of data sources and computational methods to uncover different facets of culture within and across organizations and industries. We partner with organizations and academics from a wide diversity of disciplines and industries to lead these efforts, with the ultimate goal of leveraging research insights to help organizations function more effectively and advance academic understanding.

The Initiative puts on various events throughout the year to promote discussion and create a shared research agenda between academia and industry, culminating in our annual Culture Conference. Through talks, discussions, and activities led by leaders from industry and academia, the conference convenes leading academic researchers studying organizational culture and a set of strong-culture company leaders to deepen the dialogue about how to address various culture-related challenges, such as fostering a culture of innovation and inclusion, introducing large-scale cultural change and tracking its progress, and understanding the impact of culture on firm and employee performance.

To learn more about the Berkeley Culture Initiative, visit https://haas.berkeley.edu/culture/

Responsibilities:

Directs and administers an independent program with complete responsibility for administrative and programmatic activities.

  • Has primary responsibility for operational administration for all research, conferences, programs, and other initiatives.

Facilitates efforts of various departments, managers and outside constituencies to ensure interdisciplinary collaboration.

  • Develops networks of foundations, and partners who will support and participate in this initiative.
  • Works directly with other centers and programs within Haas and UC Berkeley at large.
  • Manages collaboration with corporate partners, as well as research vendors, academics at other universities, government entities, and more.

Identifies and pursues funding opportunities and revenue streams.

  • Pursues other opportunities to expand initial projects or sponsorships.
  • Raises enough money to meet annual targets for both operational expenses and to start and grow a $10 million endowment.
  • Creates revenue opportunities such as conference sponsorships, sponsored research projects, and gifts.
  • Seeks out and leads the application effort for research grant funding.

Participates in advanced program budgeting and accounting processes to support financial infrastructure of initiative.

  • Works with department financial manager and faculty directors to set annual budget.
  • Reviews quarterly financial reports to ensure BCI is staying within its budget and achieving financial goals.

Manages financial and HR resources.

  • Leads the process of hiring research assistants and event coordinators.
  • Supervises the day-to-day activities of research assistants and event coordinators.
  • Oversees contracting, purchasing, hiring of research vendors, and similar tasks.

Assesses program’s effectiveness and recommends changes to program’s content, policies and procedures accordingly.

  • Develops and measure KPIs to assess the initiative’s effectiveness.
  • Works with faculty directors to assess research and programmatic initiatives to adjust to meet stakeholders’ needs.

Serves on committees representing the program, participating in short term and long term planning.

  • Represents the program at institute- and school level meetings.
  • Works with faculty directors to plan and institute quarterly, annual, and longer-term research studies and programs.

Assists in developing research, participates in professional conferences and provides public relations support.

  • Develops programming for the Initiative including the Annual Culture Conference, the Quarterly Newsletter, the Fireside Chat Series, and other new programs that increase the comprehensiveness of BCIs offerings to the academic and practitioner communities.

Professional Learning and Growth

  • Embraces the principle of being a “student always” by engaging in opportunities for training, workshops, seminars, continuing education pertinent to the position, or at the suggestion of the supervisor.
  • Actively contributes to a team environment that fosters and promotes a culture of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) within the unit and at Haas.
  • Engages in ongoing education to promote diversity, equity, inclusion & belonging by completing University sponsored certifications & training sessions (Ie: MEP Workshop, Implicit Bias Certification, LinkedIn Learning workshops, and other workshops & seminars offered by the University or Haas, as they are made available) or by engaging in external seminars & resources related to DEIB.
  • Exemplifies Haas’ four Defining Leadership Principles: (1) Question the status quo; (2) Confidence without attitude; (3) Students always; and (4) Beyond yourself.

Salary & Benefits

This is an exempt, monthly paid position. Annual salary will be commensurate with experience up to $142,500.00.

For information on the comprehensive benefits package offered by the University visit:

https://ucnet.universityofcalifornia.edu/compensation-and-benefits/index.html

How to Apply

Please navigate to this link. Job ID: 31878

Please submit your cover letter and resume as a single attachment when applying.

Please upload the document in the Resume section, then skip the (optional) Cover Letter upload section.

Other Information

This is a one-year contract position with the possibility of extension. The minimum posting duration of this position is 14 calendar days.

The department will not initiate the application review process prior to March 11, 2022.

Conviction History Background

This is a designated position requiring fingerprinting and a background check due to the nature of the job responsibilities. Berkeley does hire people with conviction histories and reviews information received in the context of the job responsibilities. The University reserves the right to make employment contingent upon successful completion of the background check.

Equal Employment Opportunity

The University of California is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or protected veteran status. For more information about your rights as an applicant see:

Click to access poster_screen_reader_optimized.pdf

For the complete University of California nondiscrimination and affirmative action policy see:

http://policy.ucop.edu/doc/4000376/NondiscrimAffirmAct

New Publication: Moralizing the Law: Lactating Workers and the Transformation of Supervising Managers

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Hi OOW! Check out this new publication from by Elizabeth Hoffmann:

CITATION: Hoffmann, Elizabeth A. “Moralizing the Law: Lactating Workers and the Transformation of Supervising Managers.” Law & Society Review 56, no. 1 (March 2022): 28–52. https://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12588.

ABSTRACT: The Lactation at Work Law amended the Fair Labor Standards Act to mandate employer accommodation of employees’ breast milk expression. Interviews with employees, human resource specialists, and supervising managers in nine industries found that some organizations’ supervising managers, who initially perceived accommodations only as a legal mandate furthering managerial goals, over time changed to understanding lactation accommodations through a children’s-health lens that created morality-driven motivations for legal compliance–a “moralization of the law.” Educational discussions with lactating employees not only provided these supervising managers with insights into lactation at work, but also sensitized them to ethical issues surrounding lactation accommodations.

New Publication: Hedged Out: Inequality and Insecurity on Wall Street

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Hi OOW members! Check out this new book by Megan Tobias Neely:

CITATION:

Neely, Megan Tobias. 2022. Hedged Out: Inequality and Insecurity on Wall Street. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

About the Book:

Who do you think of when you imagine a hedge fund manager? A greedy fraudster, a visionary entrepreneur, a wolf of Wall Street? These tropes capture the public imagination of a successful hedge fund manager. But behind the designer suits, helicopter commutes, and illicit pursuits are the everyday stories of people who work in the hedge fund industry—many of whom don’t realize they fall within the 1 percent that drives the divide between the richest and the rest. Hedged Out gives readers an outsider’s insider perspective on Wall Street and its enduring culture of inequality.

Hedged Out dives into the upper echelons of Wall Street, where elite white masculinity is the standard measure for the capacity to manage risk and insecurity. Facing an unpredictable and risky stock market, hedge fund workers protect their interests by working long hours and building tight-knit networks with people who look and behave like them. Using ethnographic vignettes and her own industry experience, Neely showcases the voices of managers and other workers to illustrate how this industry of politically mobilized elites excludes people on the basis of race, class, and gender. Neely shows how this system of elite power and privilege not only sustains itself but builds over time as the beneficiaries concentrate their resources. Hedged Out explains why the hedge fund industry generates extreme wealth, why mostly white men benefit, and why reforming Wall Street will create a more equal society.

Use source code 21W2240 for a 30% discount at UCPress.