Tag: bureaucracy

Call for Proposals: Comparative Sociology of Public Administration Book Volume Conference

On By Jessica UrzúaIn Announcements, Calls for ProposalsLeave a comment

Organizers Erin Metz McDonnell (University of Notre Dame) and Josh Pacewicz (Brown University) invite chapter proposals for an edited volume on the Comparative Sociology of Public Administration.

The project will bring together scholars through two in-person mini-conferences:

  • Late Fall 2026: University of Notre Dame
  • Late Spring 2027: Brown University

Across the globe, states are under pressure to expand social protection, confront democratic backsliding, and adapt to rapid technological change—all while maintaining legitimacy and inclusion in service delivery. Their ability to deliver varies, and politicians in many states have challenged aspects of public administration whose legitimacy mainstream political parties once took as a matter of course. For these reasons, accounts of everything from contemporary welfare regimes to political economies are incomplete without consideration of public bureaucracies. Yet scholarship on public administration remains fragmented along disciplinary, regional, and methodological lines—with particular bifurcation between scholarship on the United States, which tends to employ quantitative and formal models, and scholarship on public administration in other nations, which often employs historical and qualitative techniques to analyze how bureaucracies work in practice. Bringing together a comparative group of scholars is essential to advance a new generation of theory on how states actually work, generating insights across both geographic and methodological differences.

We aim to convene scholars across global contexts to produce an edited volume on the Comparative Sociology of Public Administration via a series of two mini-conferences. We welcome proposals on any aspect of everyday governance, with particular interest in proposed chapters on the following themes: making rights real, state (il)legibility projects, AI and technology in governance, administrative professionals and careers, democratic backsliding and bureaucratic resistance, administrative burdens and improving service delivery, coproduction of public services, and inequalities in public service provision.

Confirmed volume contributors include leading scholars of public administration (Elisabeth Clemens, Pamela Herd, Armando Lara-Millan, Celeste Watkins-Hayes, Michael Woolcock, and Nicholas Wilson), and we are soliciting additional chapter proposals via an open call. Participants will meet in person for two working groups, with travel costs borne by host institutions—Notre Dame’s Kellogg Center in Fall 2026 and Brown University’s Sociology Department in Spring 2027.

If you are interested in applying and would like to meet with us around ASA or over Zoom to chat, please contact us by email.

Organizers:

Email proposals to sociologypublicadmin@gmail.com

Please include in your proposal:

  • Title of Proposed Chapter
  • Name, affiliation, and contact information of author(s)
  • 500-word extended abstract

Deadline for Proposals: Monday, August 17, 2026

Anticipated Timeline:

  • September 1, 2026: Acceptances Announced
  • Early December 2026: Rough Drafts for Notre Dame Conference
  • Early June 2027: Revised Drafts for Brown Conference

New Publication: “The (State–Private) Ties That Bind: Status, Interactions, and Economic Development in India” by Aruna Ranganathan & Laura Doering

On By Neha JangetiIn Announcements, PublicationsLeave a comment

Ranganathan, Aruna, and Laura Doering. 2026. “The (State–Private) Ties That Bind: Status, Interactions, and Economic Development in India.” Sociology of Development 1–31. doi:10.1525/sod.2026.2893447.

Abstract: Governments often collaborate with the private sector to design and implement major economic initiatives. In studying such state–society collaborations, sociologists tend to focus on how institutional contexts shape outcomes. Although this institutional approach has been highly generative, it can overlook important micro-level interaction patterns between state and private-sector actors that also affect economic outcomes. In this study, we examine how bureaucrats in the Indian government interacted with private-sector representatives to design and implement an industrial crafts park. Drawing on ethnographic observations, interviews, and supplemental survey data, we show how bureaucrats’ status biases in favor of certain private-sector actors produced interaction patterns that blinded them to fatal flaws in the project’s design and ultimately contributed to its dramatic failure. By bringing an interactionist lens to state–society economic engagements, this study reveals how interaction patterns can aggregate to shape large-scale development outcomes. More broadly, it highlights an important but undertheorized pathway through which bureaucrats may inadvertently reinforce social stratification through the very projects intended to reduce economic inequality. We suggest that an interactionist approach to state–private collaborations and policy design can contribute to efforts to address global poverty.

Aruna Ranganathan holds the Dong Koo Kim Chancellor’s Chair in Social Entrepreneurship and is an Associate Professor at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business. Prof. Ranganathan is also affiliated with the Sociology department and the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at UC Berkeley. She was formerly an associate professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University. Ranganathan spent her childhood in the Middle East, India, and Singapore before graduating with honors from the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business with a BCom in organizational behavior and human resources. She also received an MS in international and comparative labor from Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations and an MS/PhD in management from MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

Laura Doering is an Associate Professor of Strategic Management and is cross-appointed in the Department of Sociology. As an economic sociologist, she examines how interactions and social psychological processes shape outcomes for households, organizations, and markets. Her research has been published in the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Sociological Science, Sociology of Development, and Journal of Business Venturing. Professor Doering’s research and writing have appeared in The New York Times, BBC News, The Globe and Mail, Salon, and other outlets.