New Publication: “Home but Not Free: Rule‐breaking, Withdrawal, and Dignity in Reentry” by Gillian Slee

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Slee, Gillian. 2025. “Home but Not Free: Rule-Breaking, Withdrawal, and Dignity in Reentry.” Criminology. https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12408

Abstract: Research on reentry has documented how material hardship, network dynamics, and carceral governance impede reintegration after prison, but existing scholarship has left underdeveloped other instances in which adverse outcomes stem from the institution’s socioemotional dynamics and people’s practical and emotional responses to bureaucratic indignities. Drawing on more than 2 years of ethnographic fieldwork with people on parole in Philadelphia, this study analyzes three sources of adversity that occur because reentry institutions’ or actors’ practices are incompatible with the behaviors and needs of system-involved people. I demonstrate how unrecognized vulnerability, discretion’s benefits and drawbacks, and risk-escalating rules contribute to adverse outcomes—withdrawal and rule-breaking—that sometimes lead to reincarceration. In failing to account for aspects of human agency and dignity, such as the ability to provide for oneself and to advance personal and familial well-being, parole guidelines often prompted withdrawal and subversion.

Gillian Slee is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Georgia. Her work focuses on understanding and ameliorating inequality in American state processes. To this end, she has studied issues and institutions with far-reaching consequences: public defense, eviction, child protective services, and parole.

Her projects ask questions such as: How do interactions and relationships shape outcomes for people involved in large government systems? What (or who) drives bureaucrats’ discretion? How does material hardship influence the exercise of rights and citizenship?

With each of her projects, Slee aims to humanize key state processes and demonstrate how institutions’ relational dynamics shape inequality. She uses a range of methods—ethnography, in-depth interviews, and statistics—and has published her work in Criminology, Theory and Society, Social Service Review, Politics & Society, and Journal of Marriage and Family.

Slee completed her Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Policy at Princeton University in 2024. She earned her M.Phil. in Criminology at the University of Cambridge, where she was a Herchel Smith Harvard Scholar. Slee graduated from Harvard College with a degree in Social Studies and a minor in Psychology. She completed her postdoc at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), where Slee was the Gerhard Casper Fellow in Rule of Law. Her research has been recognized with Centennial, Charlotte Elizabeth Procter, Marion J. Levy, Jr., and P.E.O. Scholar fellowships.

New Publication: “The Internal Effects of Corporate ‘Tech Ethics’: How Technology Professionals Evaluate Their Employers’ Crises of Moral Legitimacy” by Rachel Y. Kim

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Kim, Rachel Y. 2025. “The Internal Effects of Corporate ‘Tech Ethics’: How Technology Professionals Evaluate Their Employers’ Crises of Moral Legitimacy.” Socio-Economic Review. https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwaf043

Abstract: Big Tech firms use “tech ethics” to regain public trust and influence employees’ moral evaluations of their firms and their work. Unlike traditional professions, technology professionals lack institutionalized professional ethics. Consequently, corporate “tech ethics” serve as a primary source of formal ethical guidance. Analyzing thirty-two interviews with technology professionals employed at US-based Big Tech firms, this study demonstrates that respondents’ perceptions of the effectiveness of corporate “tech ethics” closely align with how they evaluate their firms’ crises and the ethicality of their own work. Those who trusted “tech ethics” tended to believe that their companies had adequately addressed their crises and defended their work as following rigorous ethical standards, while those who were doubtful or distrusting reported greater moral unease and professional disillusionment. By highlighting the effects of organizational legitimization strategies, this study contributes to research on the role of moral perceptions in professional employees’ work experiences and career trajectories.

Rachel Y. Kim is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at Harvard University. Her research interests include economic sociology, cultural sociology, the sociology of work and professions, science and technology studies, and qualitative methods. She is particularly interested in how professionals in the tech industry, especially in Silicon Valley, navigate issues of expertise, innovation, and moral legitimacy in the context of corporate ethics.

Rachel holds a B.A. in Sociology with Honors from the University of Chicago (2019). Before graduate school, she worked as a project coordinator at Loevy & Loevy, a civil rights law firm in Chicago.

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.