ASA needs your help!
ASA is conducting usability testing as part of the effort to redesign its website. We are recruiting sociologists: teaching or research faculty, practitioners and graduate/undergraduate students, for one on one testing sessions with our User Experience (UX) consultant.
Lisa A. Keister is currently serving as OOW Section Chair for the 2015-2016 year. Lisa Keister is Gilhuly Family Professor of Sociology at Duke University. She conducts research on organizational startup and performance during China’s transition, wealth ownership in the U.S., the one percent, the role of religion in economic decision making, and immigration and its economic consequences. She is author/editor of numerous books and articles including Chinese Business Groups (Oxford 2000), Wealth in America (Cambridge 2000), Entrepreneurship (JAI 2005), Getting Rich: America’s New Rich and How they Got that Way (Cambridge 2005), Faith and Money: How Religious Belief Contributes to Wealth and Poverty (Cambridge 2011), and Religion and Inequality (Cambridge 2014). She graciously responded to our queries on the state of the field, her research and the Annual Meeting in Seattle.
Continue reading “Meet Your Council: Chair Lisa A. Keister, Duke University”
Ivar Berg, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, remembered for his “warmth, humor, quick wit and encyclopedic knowledge” (as quoted by OOW Section member Jerry Jacobs) passed away on January 1st. A few of Ivar Berg’s accomplishments are highlighted in the NYT obituary, and Arne Kalleberg will be writing up a longer entry for ASA’s Footnotes later this month. An overview of Ivar’s career can also be found here.
By Howard Aldrich
Which of these two papers, on the same theme, would you read first: “Patterns of Vandalism during Civil Disorders as an Indicator of Target Selection” or “Mad Mobs and Englishmen? Myths and Realities of the 2011 Riots”? The former is wordy and boring, not reflecting the passion and chaos that typically characterize riots, whereas the latter is cheeky and informative, conveying a sense of an author who’s keen to connect with readers. Sadly, the boring title was chosen by my co-author and I in 1972 for our otherwise well-executed study of civil disorders in US cities in the late 1960s, thus consigning it to the dustbin of academic history. It reported on the only large-scale longitudinal study of small businesses that were at risk of being targeted and convincingly showed that there was an implicit logic to the choice of targets by people involved. Despite being published in the flagship journal of the American Sociological Association, it has been cited only 64 times in the past 43 years. By contrast, the “Mad Mobs” book, published only a few years ago (2011), has already been cited 52 times.
I believe some, but not all, of the difference in the perceived usefulness of these two papers reflects their authors’ choices of titles.
So, what makes for a “good” title? Let me offer four suggestions, based on my experience with writing dozens of titles, good and bad.
Continue reading “Can you live up to the titles you choose for your papers?”
The Organization and Management Theory (OMT) Division of Academy of Management is looking for reviewers. OMT received/ is receiving a large number of submissions using the following keywords
and is looking for reviewers to match these topics.
Graduate students, junior faculty, and other new scholars are welcome, as well as those not planning to attend the conference (although, as always, please consider submitting your work!).
You can sign-up to review at http://review.aom.org or submit at http://submission.aom.org.
The 8th edition of the Medici Summer School in Management Studies for doctoral students and young researchers will be held in Paris, June 6th – June 11th, 2016. The school is organized and sponsored by Alma GS (University of Bologna), HEC Paris (Society and Organizations Research Center and the HEC Foundation), and MIT Sloan School of Management (Economic Sociology PhD Program). The theme this year is “Organizational Bases of Inequality.”
http://www.medicisummerschool.it/
http://sociology.mit.edu/programs
Continue reading “Medici Summer School in Management Studies”
The web page, including the call for abstracts and agenda info, is at http://www.irle.ucla.edu/events/PrecariousWork.php . Full call can also be found below.
Continue reading “Reminder: ASA Seattle Precarious Work Miniconference Abstract Deadline”
Mijs, Jonathan J.B. 2016. The Missing Organizational Dimension of Prisoner Reentry: An Ethnography of the Road to Reentry at a Nonprofit Service Provider. Sociological Forum 31(2): forthcoming.Abstract: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2701506
Happy New Year, All
With the ASA 2016 submission deadline just around the corner (specifically, 3:00pm EST on Wednesday, 1/6), we have so far received relatively few submissions to the joint OOW/Soc of Law session on “Organizations as Legal Persons.” So we’re writing to remind you of the Call for Papers (appended below), and to encourage you to send in your work, if you have anything either written or in progress. We welcome not only research manuscripts, but also research designs, talking points, theoretical reflections, and other expressions of interest.
Despite the prominence of such Supreme Court cases as “Citizens United” and “Hobby Lobby”, the changing socio-legal understanding of corporate personhood is a topic that has only recently forced itself into the public eye. We hope that the upcoming ASA session will jump-start a serious sociological conversation on the subject, but we recognize that many researchers with relevant things to say may not yet have fully metabolized those things into their research pipeline.
So we see this ASA session as a forward-looking endeavor, and we are perfectly willing to entertain early drafts, thinkpieces, and agenda-setters, as well as more fully-formed empirical research papers. If you have something that you’ve been mulling over, reading up on, or outlining, please don’t hesitate to send it in! In the end, the session will be as open-ended or as formal as the submissions warrant; but we can’t know what you’re working on unless you share it with us.
Thank you for your submissions — whether already arrived or still on the way, and whether to this topical joint session or to the OOW open-submission sessions. We look forward to reading your work — and to seeing you in Seattle next summer!
With best wishes,
The OOW 2016 Program Committee
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Organizations as Legal Persons
(co-sponsored by the Section on Sociology of Law and the Section on Organizations, Occupations and Work).
Recent legal decisions (such as Citizen’s United and Hobby Lobby), coupled with recent public debates about corporate and personal responsibility (such as the anti-sweatshop movement and the wave of “complicity” objections to providing services for same-sex marriages), suggest a profound rethinking of the legal and cultural relationship between organization as “legal persons” and the “natural persons” who own, run, work for, buy from, and live near them. We invite papers that explore these and related developments, situating corporate personhood in historical, political, cultural, theoretical and/or empirical context. What forces are driving the current reexamination of corporate personhood? How do recent developments relate to larger societal trends and historical legacies? What impacts are these developments likely to have, and what research agendas might they suggest?
Session Organizer: Mark C. Suchman, Brown University
On December 18th, the existing GSS website will be replaced by a new site at http://gss.norc.org/
Past users of the GSS website should find essentially the same information and content that existed on the old site. Among the major changes are the following:
Organizations, Occupations and Work 