3226 – National Science Foundation: Beyond Standard Grants: NSF’s Ten Big Ideas
The Sociology Program at NSF has organized a session at this year’s ASA Annual Meeting on funding opportunities at NSF beyond standard Sociology Program Grants.
Please check out the following recent publication by OOW member Meghan Elizabeth Kallman (in the International Public Management Journal): “Encapsulation, Professionalization and Managerialism in the Peace Corps.”
Much recent work has explored the implications of the pervasive professionalization that has occurred in recent decades across occupations and throughout organizational life. Using the case of the US Peace Corps, the current article expands this conversation into the institutionally complex world of international development organizations. Drawing on interview, documentary, and observational data, its goal is to offer a contextual analysis of how professionalism is understood and practiced within international development. I show how the application of managerialist models have led to an “encapsulation” of ideas of professionalization, and demonstrate how managerial encapsulation unfolds in practice. This analysis allows me to consider how encapsulation challenges and strains professional norms among Peace Corps staff. The article concludes with theoretical and practical implications.
As part of our July newsletter, Max Coleman contributes a review of a recently published book: The Mindful Elite by Jaime Kucinskas.
Max Coleman is a PhD student in sociology at Indiana University. His research lies at the intersection of mental health, culture, and social stratification. You can reach him at maxcole@iu.edu.
Sources of stress and anxiety are everywhere: in our jobs, in our intimate relationships, and even in our political climate. As Americans face disturbing rates of psychological distress, they have become eager for novel coping strategies. Enter meditation, a centuries-old practice that has spread rapidly in the last few decades. Yet meditation is not just a form of stress-relief: at its core, meditation offers an antidote to capitalist self-interest. By teaching individuals to detach from desire and focus instead on the neutral sensations of the body and breath, regular meditators find that they are not only calmer, but that they have more empathy, patience, and selflessness than non-meditators.
Why, then, has meditation—along with its Americanized cousin, “mindfulness”—faced such a backlash in recent years? Consider an article by Robert Purser, which recently appeared in the Guardian under the title “The Mindfulness Conspiracy.” While Buddhist meditation may have laudable goals, Purser wrote, it has been coöpted by a neoliberal system designed to reduce social issues to personal problems that can—and therefore must—be mastered with self-discipline. Building on the neuroscientific finding that “you can change your brain,” mindfulness has become a panacea for all social and emotional challenges. In this formulation, the source of one’s suffering is never in society itself; rather, suffering is based on our own maladaptive thinking, our neuroses, our clinging, our desire—and by liberating ourselves through meditation, we can not only cure these problems but render irrelevant their social foundations. Mindfulness, becomes a tool not of transformation, but of quiescence.
The ADVANCE-IT team at the University of Massachusetts Amherst is seeking a Postdoctoral Research Associate. The Postdoctoral Research Associate will work with an interdisciplinary team on an NSF ADVANCE Institutional Transformation Project. The project is entitled “Collaboration & Equity: the Resources, Relationships, and Recognition (R3) Model.” The team is focused around interventions in diversifying and supporting collaborative research, creating inclusive communities, and ensuring shared decision-making by providing resources, helping develop relationships, and ensuring recognition for collaborative work.
Duties will include: a) conducting a literature review to identify best practices in support of our interventions; b) supporting interventions on campus; c) conducting research on the impact of the interventions; d) sharing findings about the interventions through presentations and publications co-authored with members of the research team; e) creating toolkits based on successful interventions, for use at other universities; and f) assisting the PI or co-PIs in other activities associated with the ADVANCE project.
Continue reading “Job Posting: Postdoctoral Research Associate at The University of Massachusetts”
We are delighted to invite you to submit your abstracts to the forthcoming sessions on organizational sociology at the 4th ISA Forum of Sociology 2020 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The ISA Forum of Sociology of the International Sociological Association offers a unique forum to discuss current developments with a global scholarship.
The Research Committee on Sociology of Organization (RC17) will host a variety of sessions on the following 13 topics:
Continue reading “Call for Abstracts: ISA Forum of Sociology 2020”
Alexandra Kalev, Tel Aviv University
Sarah Thébaud, University of California, Santa Barbara
The Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Richmond invites applications from sociologists with a focus on critical race theory and expressive culture (ideally music). Please visit the following page for more information: https://richmond.csod.com/ats/careersite/JobDetails.aspx?site=1&id=1814
Please check out a recent publication from OOW member Christopher Andrews: The Overworked Consumer: Self-Checkouts, Supermarkets, and the Do-It-Yourself Economy.
Please check out the following recent publication from OOW members, Valery Yakubovich and Ryan Burg: “Friendship by assignment? From formal interdependence to informal relations in organizations” (published in Volume 72, Issue 6 of Human Relations).
Organizations, Occupations and Work 