Issue of RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences on:

Administrative Burdens as a Mechanism of Inequality in Policy Implementation

Edited by
Pamela Herd, Georgetown University
Hilary Hoynes, University of California Berkeley
Jamila Michener, Cornell University
Donald Moynihan, Georgetown University

This special issue invites empirical papers that seek to enlarge our understanding of how administrative burdens contribute to inequality in policy implementation processes and outcomes, and potential solutions to these problems. Administrative burdens are people’s experiences of policy implementation as onerous. Burdens include learning costs, i.e., the time and effort it takes to find information about public services and what is required to access them; compliance costs, which include the paperwork needed to demonstrate eligibility, and the time and financial costs required by administrative processes. Administrative burdens also take the form of psychological costs. Psychological costs include the experience of stigma from applying for and participating in an unpopular program. They might also arise via a sense of a loss of autonomy when people feel they are subject to intrusive or coercive state power, the stresses from not knowing whether one can negotiate administrative ordeals where critical resources hang in the balance, or the accumulation of frustrations that come with burdens, especially those seen as unjust or unnecessary.

Social scientists have grappled with this issue from specific disciplinary perspectives. Economics has focused on ‘take-up’ or how these barriers impede access, for eligible populations, to social welfare policies. Political science has explored how politics can shape the creation of burdens and how the experience of burdens can influence beliefs such as political efficacy and trust in government. Sociology has emphasized how these burdens, within the context of organizations, are both a function of and a contributor to gender, race, and class inequality. Public administration has clarified the organizational basis of administrative burdens, including the use of bureaucratic discretion. The goal of this issue is to bring insights from multiple disciplines to grapple with the broader implications of these burdens for inequality.

Please click here for a full description of the topics covered in this call for articles.

Anticipated Timeline

Prospective contributors should submit a CV and an abstract (up to two pages in length, single or double spaced) of their study along with up to two pages of supporting material (e.g., tables, figures, pictures, references that don’t fit on the proposal pages, etc.) no later than 5 PM EST on April 21, 2021 to:

https://rsf.fluxx.io

NOTE that if you wish to submit an abstract and do not yet have an account with us, it can take up to 48 hours to get credentials, so please start your application at least two days before the deadline. All submissions must be original work that has not been previously published in part or in full. Only abstracts submitted to https://rsf.fluxx.io

will be considered. Each paper will receive a $1,000 honorarium when the issue is published. All questions regarding this issue should be directed to Suzanne Nichols, Director of Publications, at journal@rsage.org and not to the email addresses of the editors of the issue.

A conference will take place at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City on February 25, 2022. The selected contributors will gather for a one-day workshop to present draft papers (due a month prior to the conference on 1/25/22) and receive feedback from the other contributors and editors. Travel costs, food, and lodging for one author per paper will be covered by the foundation. Papers will be circulated before the conference. After the conference, the authors will submit their revised drafts by 6/1/22. The papers will then be sent out to three additional scholars for formal peer review. Having received feedback from reviewers and the RSF board, authors will revise their papers by 11/1/22. The full and final issue will be published in the fall of 2023. Papers will be published open access on the RSF website as well as in several digital repositories, including JSTOR and UPCC/Muse.

Please click here for a full description of the topics covered in this call for articles.

SPPS ASA SESSIONS

The SPPS section is planning some excellent sessions for the 2021 Virtual Meetings. We encourage submissions in the new, extended abstract format:

Sharing and Visualizing Sociological Results (Open)

We invite submissions from all sociologists that demonstrate high impact visualization of important results from scholarly research, sociological practice and in public sociology. Visualization of sociological results both quantitative and qualitative is becoming more and more important in many settings. To submit please send examples of the visualizations suitable for presentation, as well a brief discussion about the role of the visualization in communicating the results of your work.

Using Sociology in Practice, Applied and Public Settings

Many sociologists work outside of academic settings both in part or in whole. We seek to highlight examples of such work, which can include writing reports, consulting, testifying in court, appearing in local and national media, writing op-eds, engaging in policy debates, etc. Please provide a brief abstract highlighting such efforts, including op-eds, abstracts or executive summaries of reports, policy briefs, accounts of testimony, and the like. Such submissions may be brief but should be long enough to make it possible to envision what a presentation at the meeting would entail.

SPPS Contributed Roundtables

We welcome any topics regarding Sociological Practice, including applied sociology and any topics in Public Sociology.   Please submit an abstract and include in that abstract what written format you may like. These could include the following: report or paper abstract, op-ed, report to community or other group, report to non-profit, government agency or company, etc.  

Please submit to these sessions! As in 2019, we will plan time for networking. Last year our sessions were interactive and led to interesting conversations.

Sociology in Practice Settings Symposium

The Sociology in Practice Settings Symposium will be a  day-long symposium during the virtual Annual Meeting from August 7-10, 2021. Sociologists employed in non-profit organizations, commercial industry, government, research centers, and other non-academic settings are invited to submit proposals for 10-minute lightning presentations, 15-minute roundtable discussion topics, a 20-minute panel on special topic, “Putting Emancipatory Sociology to Work,” and 45-minute workshops that address the context-specific opportunities and challenges of their work. Click here to read more about the event and to submit your abstract before February 3rd. (https://www.asanet.org/annual-meeting-2021/sociology-practice-settings-symposium)

Feel free to reach out to Sidra Montgomery (sidra.montgomery@gmail.com), Chair of the symposium planning committee, or Nicole Amaya (nvamaya@asanet.org) with any questions. We also encourage you to share this information with your colleagues!

Special Issue of the Journal of Professions and Organization: Diversity and Inclusion in Changing Professional Organizations

Editors:
Swethaa Ballakrishnen, University of California, Irvine
David Brock, Ben-Gurion University
Elizabeth Gorman, University of Virginia

Contemporary scholars have shed considerable light on processes of gender, racial-ethnic, and social class inequality in traditional professional organizations. Yet much has happened over the past two or three decades to reshape contexts for professional services, as well as the kinds of individuals who populate them. Alongside older organizational forms, there have been shifts to institutionalize new kinds of work resulting in larger and more bureaucratic organizational logics across professional fields. Many have established different kinds of transnational presences with continuing implications for the interrelated relationships between the local and the global across sites. Liberalized regulatory structures in many countries permit new organizational structures and forms of ownership. Artificial intelligence and information technology have replaced and transformed the work that professionals once have done and/or need to do much longer. New occupations that lack longstanding professional traditions, such as data scientists and project managers, are now providing “professional” knowledge-based services. These structural changes have, in turn, had important effects on individual capacities, outcomes, and experiences. At the broadest levels, inequality in income, status, and autonomy within professions has grown. At the same time, there have been new kinds of inequities buttressed as progress, and new rewards to interactional capital. The demographics of the kinds of individuals who seek (and are sought within) these professional milieus are changing, strategic corporate investments as they relate to global social movements have begun to offer new kinds of opportunities, and these changes have resulted in corresponding changes within professional experiences and environments.

What do these myriad changes and movements across different levels of analysis mean for gender, racial ethnic, class, and other forms of difference and inequality in professional organizations? At the individual level, do the same mechanisms of bias and exclusion previously identified in traditional professional service firms—such as stereotyping and preference for social similarity—continue to affect career outcomes as before? Do these changes have different implications for different demographic groups, or in different geographic sites? What career strategies do individual professionals utilize as they seek to navigate these changing waters? At the organizational level, what practices and structures promote or hinder diversity and inclusion? How have professional organizations sought to manage their increasing diversity? Which deliberate interventions are most effective, and which conflict with other organizational practices and goals? How, if at all, have clients influenced professional organizations’ efforts with respect to diversity and inclusion?

To address these and related questions, we invite scholarly papers from a wide range of disciplines and academic perspectives. We welcome submissions that address different levels of analysis (individual, firm, interactional, field) and make use of a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods. We especially encourage authors who investigate new forms of inequality, new managerial and organizational approaches to diversity and inclusion, and research on sites that are transnational, comparative, and/or global. If you have questions about whether you project might be a fit, please reach out to one or more of the guest editors (sballakrishnen@law.uci.edu, dmb@bgu.ac.il, eg5n@virginia.edu).

Deadline for full papers: June 15, 2021 Submit via: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jpo

For more information about Journal of Professions and Organization see academic.oup.com/jpo/pages/why-submit