Labor unions have been on the decline for sixty years in the U.S., though they raise wages, decrease inequality, and give voice to workers. Can they rise again?
We propose a synthesis of two lines of sociological research on boundary spanning in cultural production and consumption. One, research on cultural omnivorousness, analyzes choice by heterogeneous audiences facing an array of crisp cultural offerings. The other, research on categories in markets, analyzes reactions by homogeneous audiences to objects that vary in the degree to which they conform to categorical codes. We develop a model of heterogeneous audiences evaluating objects that vary in typicality.
Conventional research in organizational theory highlights the role of board interlocks in facilitating business collective action. In this article, I propose that business collective action affects the evolutionary path of interlock networks. In particular, large market players’ response after a collective action to the classic problem of the "exploitation" of the great by the small provides a mechanism for interlocks to evolve.
Community reactions against organizations can be driven by negative information spread through a diffusion process that is distinct from the diffusion of organizational practices. Bank panics offer a classic example of selective diffusion of negative information. Bank panics involve widespread bank runs, although a low proportion of banks experience a run. We develop theory on how organizational similarity, community similarity, and network proximity create selective diffusion paths for resistance against organizations.
American Indians experience forms of domination and resist them through a wide range of decolonizing processes that are commonly overlooked, misidentified, or minimally analyzed by American sociology. This inattention reflects the naturalizing use of minoritizing frameworks regarding tribal members and ethnic rather than political conceptions of American Indian nationhood, membership, and identity.
I critique Glenn’s article on settler colonialism and Bonilla-Silva’s article on critical race analysis from Indigenous perspectives, including racial genocide and world-systems analysis, to cover five centuries of global systemic racism during the conquest of the Americas, by Spanish and English colonizers and United States imperialism. I also propose macro-structural, comparative-historical analysis of racism including the destruction, resistance, and revitalization of Native Nations and American Indians.
ASA speaks with sociologist Doug Hartmann at the 2016 ASA Annual Meeting on August, 2016, in Seattle, WA. Hartmann talks about what it means to “do sociology,” how he uses sociology in his work, highlights of his work in the field, the relevance of sociological work to society, and his advice to students interested in entering the field.
A recurring theme in sociological research is the tradeoff between fitting in and standing out. Prior work examining this tension tends to take either a structural or a cultural perspective. We fuse these two traditions to develop a theory of how structural and cultural embeddedness jointly relate to individual attainment within organizations. Given that organizational culture is hard to observe, we develop a novel approach to assessing individuals’ cultural fit with their colleagues based on the language expressed in internal e-mail communications.
