Emily Barman – Organizations, Occupations and Work

By Emily Barman

Welcome to the new academic year; as the new semester either approaches or has already begun for many of you, ASA begins quickly to seem like a distant and hopefully fond memory. Before too much time elapses, I want to take this opportunity to provide an overview of where our Section is and some of the decisions we likely face moving forward.

First, to quickly recap our time at the ASA, I want to thank you all for a series of exciting and energetic sessions at this year’s conference in Philadelphia, including those convened by the Program Committee (composed of myself, Tarun Banerjee, Erin Kelly, Ming Leung, Polly Rizova, Klaus Weber) and by the OOW Roundtable organizers (Eric Dahlin, Nicole Denier, and Ken-Hou Lin), and the Chair’s Choice session on “Revisiting Organizations and Power,” as well as the papers presented in other sessions by our members. Continue reading “Message from the Chair” →

Emily Barman, OOW member, announces the publication of her new book, Caring Capitalism: The Meaning and Measure of Social Value (Cambridge University Press).

Book Summary
Companies are increasingly championed for their capacity to solve social problems. Yet what happens when such goods as water, education, and health are sold by companies – rather than donated by nonprofits – to the disadvantaged and when the pursuit of mission becomes entangled with the pursuit of profit? In Caring Capitalism, Emily Barman answers these important questions, showing how the meaning of social value in an era of caring capitalism gets mediated by the work of ‘value entrepreneurs’ and the tools they create to gauge companies’ social impact. By shedding light on these pivotal actors and the cultural and material contexts in which they operate, Caring Capitalism accounts for the unexpected consequences of this new vision of the market for the pursuit of social value.

Publisher link: http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/sociology/political-sociology/caring-capitalism-meaning-and-measure-social-value