Tag: race

New Book: Bringing Law Home: Gender, Race, and Household Labor Rights by Katherine Eva Maich

On By Neha JangetiIn Announcements, new book, Newsletter Content, PublicationsLeave a comment

Maich, Katherine Eva. 2025. Bringing Law Home: Gender, Race, and Household Labor Rights. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Description: The personal nature of domestic labor, and its location in the privacy of the employer’s home, means that domestic workers have long struggled for equitable and consistent labor rights. The dominant discourse regards the home as separate from work, so envisioning what its legal regulation would look like is remarkably challenging. In Bringing Law Home, Katherine Eva Maich offers a uniquely comparative and historical study of labor struggles for domestic workers in New York City and Lima, Peru. She argues that if the home is to be a place of work then it must also be captured in the legal infrastructures that regulate work. Yet, even progressive labor laws for domestic workers in each city are stifled by historically entrenched patterns of gendered racialization and labor informality. Peruvian law extends to household workers only half of the labor protections afforded to other occupations. In New York City, the law grants negligible protections and deliberately eschews language around immigration. Maich finds that coloniality is deeply embedded in contemporary relations of service, revealing important distinctions in how we understand power, domination, and inequality in the home and the workplace.

Katherine Maich is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University. Her research and teaching interests include law, gender, labor informality, domestic work, ethnography, and the Global South. Her research examines dynamics of inequality in the workplace and the extent to which external factors such as law, regulation, and policy mitigate those dynamics, and with what consequences.

With funding from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the Inter-American Foundation, her book, Bringing Law Home: Gender, Race, and Household Labor Rights, draws from over 24 months of ethnography in Lima, Peru and New York City, 120 in-depth interviews, and analysis of legislative transcripts. Through a Global South/North comparison, it focuses on the home as a site of paid labor and as a microcosm of social and symbolic boundaries, bringing feminist theory, race, gender, and migration into conversation with law and labor legislation.

One of her current projects (with Hilary Wething of the Economic Policy Institute) explores the effects of paid family leave on maternal mental health and time use for new mothers, and the second project (in collaboration with Oxfam America and Rural Sociology colleagues at Penn State) examines the reproduction of gender and racial inequality for migrant poultry plant and meatpacking plant workers.

She previously worked as a consultant for the International Labour Organization and the International Domestic Worker Federation by conducting fieldwork in Uruguay, Hong Kong, and South Africa on the complexities of domestic worker organizing at the international level. Drawing connections from community-based, local, and global social movements in practice provides inspiration for my own research and writing.

New Publication: “Does Wanting Diversity Mean Racial Diversity? How Race and Gender Influence Support for Corporate DEI Policies.” by Adia Harvey Wingfield & Antonia Roach

On By Neha JangetiIn Announcements, PublicationsLeave a comment

Wingfield, Adia Harvey and Antonia Roach. (2025.) “Does Wanting Diversity Mean Racial Diversity? How Race and Gender Influence Support for Corporate DEI Policies.”Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. Online first.

Abstract

In the wake of recent social movements, cultural changes, and emerging organizational norms, decisive majorities of White workers now agree with the premise that companies should strive for workplace diversity. That support rarely translates into an interest in race-conscious programming, yielding what sociologists describe as a “principle/policy gap.” Yet most of the research identifying principle/policy gaps relies on predominantly White samples. In this article, we draw from a sample of 85 Black, White, Asian American, and Latinx workers in the financial sector to examine whether the principle/policy gap is present among both White workers and those of color. Our interviews reveal mixed evidence of principle/policy gaps when it comes to race-based diversity programming. We also find that respondents’ preferences (or lack thereof) for race-conscious diversity are informed by intersections of race and gender, rendering race-based programming more attractive for some groups and gender-based initiatives more appealing for others.

Call for Papers: ESS Mini-Conference on Race, Organizations and the Organizing Process

On By Sarah MosseriIn Calls for PapersLeave a comment

When researchers analyze race and organizations they primarily do so at the individual level. Sociological studies confirm that organizations produce inequality or systematic disparities between racial groups. In particular, all else being equal, Whites have far better experiences and outcomes with the organizations – firms, schools, hospitals, etc. – that we have come to depend upon for our livelihood than racial minorities.

Though necessary, focusing on the individual level has its limitations.By confining race to an individual level property, we highlight the reality that people have a race and this influences their organizational experiences. Yet, this is just one of the many ways that race intersects with organizations. If we situate race as a property that operates at other, higher levels of analyses we can develop an even deeper understanding of how race affects organizations.

There have been few efforts to conceive of race as a characteristic that organizations also possess or at the very least a characteristic that exists at the institutional level with which organizations must contend. In the United States especially, this belies our history. Homer Plessy and Rosa Parks both chose organizations – the East Louisiana Railroad and the Montgomery Bus Line respectively – as sites to challenge racial practices. In both instances, defying an organizational rule reshaped the discourse and laws pertaining to race, regionally first, then nationally.

A ruling against Homer Plessy’s constitutional right to sit in the “Whites Only” car had far reaching consequences, most of which were enacted through organizations. This ruling racially marked organizations and organizational practices as “Black” or “White”, essentially “racing” organizations. Despite the undoing of legally sanctioned racial segregation, we continue to use such demarcations to classify organizations – Black colleges (e.g., Howard University, Hampton University) or Black media companies (e.g., Ebony, The Root).

Sociology is ill equipped to explain how a person’s quest to sit wherever they choose could have such far-reaching consequences in part because there has been little effort to build bridges between those studying the problems of race and those studying the problems of organizing. Consequently, we cannot adequately speak to how race affects organizations, markets, or institutions with the same confidence that we can for people.

The mini-conference would bring together scholars to interrogate the relationship between race and the organizing process for the founding of organizations, the organizational pursuit of human, financial, or political resources, organizational choices regarding strategic orientation and structural configurations, and the role of institutional logics that saturate organizations, industries, and markets with racialized ideologies, among other topics.

Continue reading “Call for Papers: ESS Mini-Conference on Race, Organizations and the Organizing Process” →

Job Posting: TT Assistant Professor position at USC

On By Sarah MosseriIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

The Department of Sociology (http://dornsife.usc.edu/soci/) in the Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern California (Los Angeles, CA) invites applications for a tenure track Assistant Professor position, with an anticipated start date of Fall 2017. We seek applicants in the area of Social Movements with a specialization in race and/or immigration. The position will offer opportunities to affiliate with campus research centers engaged in social analysis. The Ph.D. is required by time of appointment.  In order to be considered for this position, applicants are required to submit an electronic USC application; follow this job link or paste in a browser:  http://jobs.usc.edu/postings/71499 . The applicant should upload a letter of interest that addresses research and teaching, a CV, representative scholarly papers or chapters, and the names of three referees who can be contacted by USC for a letter of reference.

Screening of applicants will began October 1, 2016 and is continuing. Inquiries may be sent to socisearch@dornsife.usc.edu.

Call for Abstracts: Mini-Conference on Race, Organizations and the Organizing Process

On By Sarah MosseriIn ConferencesLeave a comment

Mini-Conference: Race, Organizations, and the Organizing Process
2017 ESS Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA, February 23-26

When researchers analyze race and organizations they primarily do so at the individual level. A person’s racial categorization influences their organizational experiences, such as by affecting their chances of accessing and receiving adequate employment, education, and healthcare. A body of sociological evidence confirms that organizations produce inequality or systematic disparities between racial groups. In particular, all else being equal, Whites have far better experiences and outcomes with the organizations – firms, schools, hospitals, etc. – that we have come to depend upon for our livelihood than racial minorities.

Though important, this individual-level focus limits our ability to understand the intersection of race and organizations to its fullest extent. This mini-conference represents an attempt to understand race as a property that also operates at the organizational level.

Continue reading “Call for Abstracts: Mini-Conference on Race, Organizations and the Organizing Process” →

New Book: Berrey on the Language and Limits of Diversity

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The Enigma of Diversity: The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice by Ellen Berrey.  University of Chicago Press (May 2015)

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Diversity today is a widely honored American value. But does this public commitment to diversity constitute a civil rights victory? Drawing on six years of fieldwork and historical sources dating back to the 1950s, Ellen Berrey examines three case studies from widely varying arenas: affirmative action in the University of Michigan’s admissions program, housing redevelopment in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood, and a human resources department at a Fortune 500 company. The book explores the complicated meanings, uses, and effects of diversity as it is invoked by different organizational actors for different, often symbolic ends. In each case, diversity affirms inclusiveness, especially in the most coveted jobs and colleges, yet it resists fundamental change in practices and cultures that are the foundation of social inequality. The Enigma of Diversity identifies the true cost of the popular embrace of diversity: the taming of demands for racial justice.

Learn more: ellenberrey.com