ASA President Arne Kalleberg Prepares for “Worlds of Work”

In early 1971, at the age of 22, Arne Kalleberg was mismatched. About to graduate from Brooklyn College, the first member of his immigrant family to earn a college degree, he experienced some difficulty entering the labor market for his “first real job.” In a clerical position at an insurance agency, his primary responsibilities were to retrieve claim files, many of which had not been consulted in years. The job demanded little of his education. Indeed, since Arne’s supervisors had long since lost track of where the old files were and could not gauge the amount of time tasks required, the job made very few performance demands. He recalls that the primary job challenges were to constantly “look busy” and to find out-of-the way places to solve crossword puzzles in an effort to counter the mind-numbing boredom.

By all measures, the 2007 American Sociological Association Annual Meeting was a huge triumph. In the city that never sleeps the sessions never stopped and neither did attendance. With registration for the ASA Annual Meeting in New York at an all-time high, the numbers speak for themselves. When registration closed on August 14, attendee numbers were at 6,025, setting a new record and breaking the 6,000 mark for the first time in the Association’s 102-year history. The second largest meeting was the 2004 Annual Meeting in San Francisco where the attendance was about 5,600. With guests and exhibitors added in, on-site attendance at the meeting soared to more than 7,000.

Of course, as researchers know, numbers alone do not tell the whole story. The theme, “Is Another World Possible?,” was both exciting and relevant, which contributed to the large attendance.