Josh Seim and Benjamin Shestakofsky are the 2017-2018 OOW Council Student Representatives.  Learn more about their research and ties to the subfield below.

1) Where did your interests in organizations, occupations, and work originate? How have you found concepts and theories from this scholarship useful in your work?

Josh Seim: I’m broadly interested in how the poor are processed, regulated, or “governed” across a number of institutions. My first research project brought me into a penitentiary in Oregon where I was set on explicating the aspirations and actions of soon-to-be-released prisoners. There, I quickly realized that I would need to account for the internal organization of the facility if I hoped to make sense of what previous scholars described as a “perplexing optimism” among prisoners approaching the gate. I drew on the Gresham Sykes’ Society of Captives, Donald Clemmer’s The Prison Community, and other texts to examine my interview transcripts and field notes. While these books are not usually claimed by organizational sociology, they motivated me to consider how penal domination, a basic organizational feature of the prison, shaped inmate subjectivity.

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