Description: Drawing on decades of research, the book reveals why well-intentioned talent management strategies often fail to deliver fairness—and what organizations and their leaders can do to build workplaces where opportunities truly match merit.
Already endorsed by leading scholars and practitioners, The Meritocracy Paradox offers timely insights for anyone interested in equity, organizational performance, and the future of work.
Author information: Emilio J. Castilla is the NTU Professor of Management and a Professor of Work and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is codirector of the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research. Castilla’s research focuses on organizations, networks, and workplace inequality, with a particular emphasis on the social dynamics of work and employment.
1 – Organizations We invite paper submissions under the broad topic of organizations, including studies that assess the implications of their structures, norms, policies, and practices. (Session Organizer) Elizabeth A. Armstrong, University of Michigan; (Session Organizer) Matthew Clair, Stanford University
2 – Professions and Occupations We invite paper submissions on the broad topic of professions and occupations, including studies that focus on their emergence, evolution, and implications. (Session Organizer) Nicholas Occhiuto, Hunter College; (Session Organizer) Alexandrea Ravenelle, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
3 – Gender Inequality in Organizations We invite paper submissions under the topic of gender inequality in organizations. (Session Organizer) Sharla Alegria, University of Toronto; (Session Organizer) Alexandra Kalev, Tel-Aviv University
4 – Labor Markets We invite paper submissions under the broad topic of labor markets, including studies that examine their structures, dynamics, and consequences. (Session Organizer) Koji Chavez, Indiana University; (Session Organizer) Steve McDonald, North Carolina State University
5 – Future of Work We invite paper submissions under the broad topic of the future of work. (Session Organizer): Angèle Christin, Stanford University; (Session Organizer) Steve Vallas, Northeastern University
6 – Informal and Unregulated Economies We invite paper submissions under the topic of informal and unregulated economies, including studies that examine migrant and transnational dynamics. (Session Organizer) Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Princeton University; (Session Organizer) Patricia Ward, Bielefeld University
7 – AI in the Workplace (joint with Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology section) We invite paper submissions under the topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the workplace. (NB: Thanks to a special relationship between the Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology (CITAMS) section and the journal Information, Communication & Society (ICS), all papers with a theme of information, communication, or media that are presented at the 2025 meetings of the ASA are eligible for submission to a special issue of ICS edited by the CITAMS chair each fall.) (Session Organizer) Barbara Kiviat, Stanford University; (Session Organizer) Simone Zhang, New York University.
8 – Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work Refereed Roundtables (Session Organizer) Michel Anteby, Boston University; (Session Organizer) Sigrid Luhr, University of Illinois, Chicago
As part of our March newsletter, Benjamin Snyder comments on how ethnographers of work are responding to changes in the character of labor and employment. Snyder is the author of The Disrupted Workplace (Oxford University Press, 2016) and a Lecturer in Sociology & Social Policy at Victoria University of Wellington. He will join the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Williams College in Fall 2018.
In 2001, Stephen Barley and Gideon Kunda called upon organizational and work sociologists to revisit the field’s core concepts. Time, place, schedule, wage, job, career, employment, management, ownership, head versus hand, work versus leisure, and a host of other taken for granted ways of describing economic life under bureaucratic organizing, they argued, are increasingly obscured by new post-industrial forms. They prescribed a return to an older tradition of detailed ethnographic studies of work and workplaces to adapt to the changing times. Sit with working people. Watch what they do. Listen to what work means to them. Build new concepts. For ethnographically inclined sociologists of my generation, for whom this call was part of our introduction to the field in graduate school, this message felt like a warm welcome. Many of us took up the invitation. When I look out on the field now, almost two decades later, I get the sense that the seed Barley and Kunda planted has begun to bear fruit. Work-oriented ethnographers are deeply engaged in this much needed conceptual reconstruction.
Organizations, Occupations and Work 