Associate Professor in Environmental Sociology at Utah State University

On October 20, 2021 By Diana EnriquezIn Job PostingsLeave a comment

Utah State University is inviting applicants for two tenure-track faculty positions.

Both positions are part of a department, college and university-wide cluster hire in social justice, equity, diversity and inclusion. Descriptions are below Please share with others in your networks who have research expertise in race and intersectionality.

Tenure-track position of Assistant Professor of the Sociology of Race and/or Ethnicity who employ mixed and/or qualitative methods, CLICK HERE FOR JOB AD. We especially welcome applications from scholars who take an intersectional approach to their research and teaching and whose research foci extends to other axes of inequality including but not limited to sexuality, gender identity, disability or immigrant status. This tenure-track, full-time (nine-month) position is based at the USU campus in Logan, Utah in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology.

Application review begins December 1, 2021. Search committee chair is Dr. Christy Glass, christy.glass@usu.edu.

Tenure-track position of Assistant or Associate Professor of Environment or Natural Resource Sociology, with expertise in environmental justice or governance of natural resources, CLICK HERE FOR JOB AD. We especially welcome applications from scholars whose research focuses on rural, indigenous, and/or marginalized populations, in the US or globally. This tenure-track, full-time (nine-month) position is based at the USU campus in Logan, Utah in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology.

Application review begins November 15, 2021. Search committee chair is Dr. Jessica Schad, jessica.schad@usu.edu.

Member Publication: Revaluing Work(ers): Toward a Democratic and Sustainable Future.

On October 18, 2021October 18, 2021 By Diana EnriquezIn PublicationsLeave a comment

New Book:

Schulze-Cleven, Tobias and Todd E. Vachon (Eds). 2021. Revaluing Work(ers): Toward a Democratic and Sustainable Future. New York, NY: Cornell University Press.

Book Description:
How can we build a future of work that meets pressing challenges and delivers for workers? Contemporary societies are beset by interrelated ecological, political, and economic crises, from climate change to democratic erosion and economic instability. Uncertainty abounds about the sustainability of democratic capitalism. Yet mainstream debates on the evolution of work tend to remain narrowly circumscribed, exhibiting both technological and market determinism.

This volume presents a labor studies perspective on the future of work, arguing that revaluing work—the efforts and contributions of workers—is crucial to realizing the promises of democracy and improving sustainability. It emphasizes that collective political action, and the collective agency of workers in particular, is central to driving this agenda forward. Moreover, it maintains that reproductive work—labor efforts from care to education that sustain the reproduction of society—can function as a crucible of innovation for the valuation and governance of work more broadly.

Book Cover Image at Publisher Webpage: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780913447222/revaluing-workers/#bookTabs=1

Job Posting: Assistant or Associate Professor in the Inter-Disciplinary Program (IDP) initiative–Sociology of Organizations at UT Austin

On October 15, 2021 By Diana EnriquezIn Job PostingsLeave a comment

Position Description

The Department of Sociology at The University of Texas at Austin is seeking to fill an advanced assistant professor or associate professor position in the area of work and organizations to begin in Fall 2022. The candidate’s field of study may be in Sociology (any subfield) or adjoining disciplines so long as their course of study and subsequent research centers on organizations, broadly defined.

The normal teaching load is two courses per long semester (four per academic year). Two courses will be offered in the Human Dimensions of Organizations program to advance their curricular offerings. These will reflect that program’s needs for introductory courses in the field, research methods instruction, and applications of organizational research. The precise content of the courses may be tailored to fit the candidate’s interests and background. Despite the split teaching load, the candidate will be a full member of the Sociology Department, though formal affiliation in a cognate department may be possible upon request.

Duties will include undergraduate and graduate teaching, research, and service to the Department of Sociology, the College of Liberal Arts, and the University.

Qualifications

Candidates must have a PhD. The Department is interested in candidates who will contribute to diversity and equal opportunity in higher education through their experience, teaching, research, and service.

The successful candidate will have a strong record of research and teaching.

Application Instructions

Applicants should upload a cover letter, a curriculum vitae, three letters of recommendation, relevant examples of scholarly work, a teaching statement, and a diversity statement through the online portal at: apply.interfolio.com/96185.

Applications must include a diversity statement addressing past or potential contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion through their research, teaching and/or service. In particular, the statement may highlight any experiences working with diverse populations – mentoring activities, research interests, committee service, courses taught, recruitment and retention activities – and describe how their professional skills, experience and/or willingness to engage in related activities would enhance campus diversity and equity efforts.

Please address any questions to Ken-Hou Lin (lin@austin.utexas.edu), chair of the search committee. The department will begin reviewing applications November 5, 2021 and continue until the position is filled.

UT Austin is committed to addressing the family needs of faculty, including dual-career couples and single parents. Salary is competitive and commensurate with experience and qualifications.

Position funding is subject to budget availability.

Call for Editorship Proposals for Contexts, JHSB, and the Rose Series

On October 15, 2021 By Diana EnriquezIn Calls for ProposalsLeave a comment

Call for Editorship Proposals for Contexts, JHSB, and the Rose Series

The ASA Publications Committee encourages applications for the editorships of Contexts, the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, and the ASA Rose Series.

The official term for the new editor (or co-editors) begins in January 2023, with the transition starting in summer 2022.

The editorial term is for an initial three years with an extension of one or two years possible.

Proposals are due December 1.

ASA Council will appoint the new editor in March 2022.

See complete application procedures and examples of previous successful proposals.

Call for Papers: EGOS 2022. The Impact of Organizational Practices on Workplace Inequality

On October 15, 2021 By Diana EnriquezIn Calls for PapersLeave a comment

EGOS 2022 – Vienna, Austria
Subtheme 60: “The Impact of Organizational Practices on Workplace Inequality and Diversity”

We would like to bring to your attention the colloquium on “The Impact of Organizational Practices on Workplace Inequality and Diversity,” which we are convening as part of the European Group of Organization Studies’ (EGOS) 38^th annual conference in Vienna, Austria. The conference will take place on July 7-9, 2022.

Our purpose is to bring together a group of researchers who share a concern for advancing our knowledge of the mechanisms through which organizations influence inequality and diversity in the labor market. We welcome papers from different disciplines and at all levels of analysis.

If you are interested, we encourage you to submit a short paper (3,000 words) before January 11, 2022.

You can access the full call for papers here.

Member Publication: Recovering “Lay Ignorance” in the Stanford Financial Group Ponzi Scheme

On October 14, 2021 By Diana EnriquezIn PublicationsLeave a comment

Please check out this publication by OOW member Camilo Arturo Leslie:

Camilo Arturo Leslie, Recovering “Lay Ignorance” in the Stanford Financial Group Ponzi Scheme, Social Forces, 2021;, soab054, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soab054

ABSTRACT:

The Stanford Financial Group’s 2009 collapse devastated more than 20,000 depositors across the Americas. News stories portrayed the $7.2 billion fraud as an elaborate production of ignorance, and its middle-class marks as silent dupes. Media accounts thus differed little from dominant schools of ignorance scholarship, which have emphasized how powerful organizations use their expertise to foist ignorance on passive publics. However, the notion that laypeople are voiceless in such processes is empirically and theoretically untenable. Drawing on interviews with 103 defrauded Stanford clients in the US and Venezuela, this article shows that laypeople play an active interpretive and storytelling role in producing “lay ignorance” in the course of transacting with institutions, personnel, technologies, or products they lack the means to comprehend. Repurposing the concept of “jurisdiction,” I frame “layperson” as a role marked by its distance from the forms of authority that comprise expertise. As my comparison of US and Venezuelan investors reveals, laypeople nonetheless stitch surrogate forms of normative and epistemic authority from inapposite sources to produce their “lay ignorance.” The resulting accounts, I demonstrate, draw opportunistically from laypeople’s institutional, cultural, and political contexts.

Member Publication: Pre-Automation: Insourcing and Automating the Gig Economy (+ public qualitative data set)

On October 11, 2021 By Diana EnriquezIn PublicationsLeave a comment

Please check out this publication and its public qualitative data set from some OOW members:

Vertesi, J. A., Goldstein, A., Enriquez, D., Liu, L., & Miller, K. T. (2020). Pre-Automation: Insourcing and Automating the Gig Economy. Sociologica, 14(3), 167–193. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/11657

ABSTRACT

This paper examines a strategic configuration in the technology, logistics, and robotics industries that we call “pre-automation”: when emerging platform monopolies employ large, outsourced labor forces while simultaneously investing in developing the tools to replace these workers with in-house machines of their own design. In line with socioeconomic studies of imagined futures, we elaborate pre-automation as a strategic investment associated with a firm’s ambitions for platform monopoly, and consider Uber, Amazon Flex and Amazon Delivery Services Partnership Program drivers as paradigmatic cases. We attempt detection of firms’ pre-automation strategies through analysis of patenting, hiring, funding and acquisition activity and highlight features of certain forms of gig work that lay the infrastructural foundations for future automation. We argue that certain forms of platform labor may be viewed dynamically as an intermediate arrangement that stages outsourced tasks for subsequent insourcing through automated technologies, and discuss the implications of this configuration for existing theories of outsourcing and technology-driven job displacement.

PUBLIC DATA: Diana Enriquez recently made the qualitative data from this study public for use here on Princeton’s Open Data project.

Member Publication: Unequal Reach: Cyclical and Amplifying Ties Among Agricultural and Oilfield Workers in Texas

On October 7, 2021 By Diana EnriquezIn PublicationsLeave a comment

Please check out the recent publication by OOW member Kathleen Griesbach:

Griesbach, Kathleen. “Unequal Reach: Cyclical and Amplifying Ties Among Agricultural and Oilfield Workers in Texas.” Work and Occupations, (August 2021). https://doi.org/10.1177/07308884211034208.

Abstract

What kinds of ties do agricultural and oil and gas workers form in the field, and how do they use them later on? Why do they use them differently? Scholarship highlights how weak ties can link people to valuable information, while strong ties can be critical for day-to-day survival. Yet many mechanisms affect how workers form and use social networks over time and space. Drawing on 60 interviews and observations with agricultural and oilfield workers in Texas, I examine how both groups form strong ties of fictive kinship when living together in the field far from home—pooling resources, sharing reproductive labor, and using the discourse of family to describe these relationships. Then I examine how they use these ties very differently later in practice. Oilfield workers often use their fictive kin ties to move up and around the industry across space, time, and companies: amplifying ties. In contrast, agricultural workers renew the same strong ties for survival from season to season, maintaining cyclical ties. The comparison highlights how industry mobility ladders, tempos, and geographies affect how workers can use their networks in practice. While both agricultural and oilfield workers become fictive kin in situations of intense proximity, structural differences give their networks unequal reach.

Call for Papers: Carework Network Virtual Symposium

On October 5, 2021 By Diana EnriquezIn Calls for PapersLeave a comment

Do you want a chance to have a pre-eminent care scholar read and respond to your work in dialogue with others? The Carework Network prioritizes mentoring and substantive exchange, and we are planning an exciting event for this Spring that builds on this tradition. See website for full details.

We will be hosting an interactive virtual symposium on March 1-3, 2022 titled Moving Past Emergency Responses: Care as Essential Infrastructure. Our goal is to build on the success of our two Global Summits (the next of which will be in Costa Rica in 2023) to bring together emerging and senior carework scholars to engage in meaningful dialogue about cutting edge issues in care scholarship and policy.

To that end, we will be hosting three Scholars-in-Dialogue sessions, a novel format that will feature established care scholars discussing three selected papers from innovative scholars at all levels. This is where you come in – bring us those interesting ideas percolating in the back of your head! The themes for the sessions are: Revisiting the Meaning(s) of Care, The Role of the State, and Technological Futures of Care.

We invite scholars at all levels and from all disciplines to share their biggest and best ideas, even if they are still in formation. We will select three of the submissions to be featured in each session, and these papers will form the basis of the conversation. It is our hope that this substantive exchange of ideas will make all of our work stronger, as we move to advance our field in this critical historical moment.

Scholars interested in submitting their work should submit a 2-3 page extended abstract to careworknetwork@gmail.com by October 15, 2021. Please indicate clearly which session you are submitting to. If selected, you will be notified by December 1, 2021 and expected to submit a full DRAFT paper by February 1, 2022.

We hope all of you will save the dates for the symposium. In addition to being able to attend the Scholars-in-Dialogue sessions, the event will also include a series of hands-on workshops focused on methodology, publishing, and activism.

Please feel free to reach out to any of us if you have any questions. More details are in the attachment.

The Virtual Symposium Subcommittee of the Carework Network.

Naomi Lightman (co-chair)

Mignon Duffy (co-chair)

Cindy Cain

Fiona MacDonald

Grazi Figueredo

Guillermina Altomonte

Katherine Ravenswood

Melissa Hodges

Pilar Gonalons Pons

Kim Price-Glynn

Amy Armenia

Job Posting: Open Rank position in Gender and Qualitative Methods at Maxwell School at Syracuse University

On October 5, 2021 By Diana EnriquezIn Job PostingsLeave a comment

Department, Rank, & Specialty: Sociology. Open Rank. Gender and Qualitative Methods.We seek a sociologist whose research focuses on gender, who does work in the US or internationally, and who uses qualitative methods, including ethnography, in their research. We are particularly interested in a scholar who works on and can teach courses on gender and intersectionality.Preference will be given to candidates who can contribute to other strengths in the sociology department (please visithttps://www.maxwell.syr.edu/soc/Faculty_Research_Areas/) and to Maxwell School-wide priorities.

Candidates must have a Ph.D. in Sociology or a related discipline. In addition, candidates must have a demonstrated record of success in scholarly achievement and productivity, including a substantial research profile on an upward trajectory, as well as a commitment to graduate and undergraduate teaching. Preference will be given to candidates who are currently a tenured associate or full professor. The department seeks candidates whose research, teaching, and service have prepared them to contribute to our commitment to diversity and inclusion in higher education.

Review of applications will begin November 1, 2021. For consideration, interested candidates must apply at www.sujobopps.com by completing a brief faculty application. Candidates must attach a letter of interest that includes a research statement, vita, one publication or writing sample, teaching statement, and a diversity statement. A list of the names with contact information for three references should be provided at the time of application. Letters will be solicited at the time of application.

Syracuse University is an equal-opportunity, affirmative-action institution. The University prohibits discrimination and harassment based on race, color, creed, religion, sex, gender, national origin, citizenship, ethnicity, marital status, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression, veteran status, or any other status protected by applicable law to the extent prohibited by law. This nondiscrimination policy covers admissions, employment, and access to and treatment in University programs, services, and activities.