Author Archives: matt vidal

“Gender Deviance” Revisited: An Interview with Daniel Schneider, Winner of the 2012 OOW Award for Best Paper by a Grad Student

October 29, 2012

Daniel Schneider received his PhD in Sociology and Social Policy from Princeton University in 2012. He is currently a Robert Wood Johnson Postdoctoral Scholar in Health Policy Research at UC-Berkeley/UCSF. Daniel’s paper, “Gender Deviance and Household Work: The Role of Occupation,” won the 2012 James D. Thompson Award from the Organizations, Occupations, and Work section of the American Sociological Association and was recently published in the American Journal of Sociology. The following is the text of an interview recently conducted with Daniel by Kate Kellogg, an Associate Professor of Organization Studies at MIT.

Kate Kellogg: What are your general research interests, and what led you to explore the specific question of gender deviance?

Daniel Schneider: My research is at the intersection of family and inequality. My work looks at how inequality structures the formation of families and how gender inequalities then play out within those families. So, for instance, some of my work has looked at how differentials in wealth by race and education shape differential entry into marriage. But, other research looks at how families then perpetuate inequality and serve as sites for unequal practices.

This work taps into that second vein, looking at how economic resources and engagement in the market economy matters differently for men and women in the household. More specifically, this project engages with an existing literature on how men’s and women’s relative economic resources shape housework time.

Kate Kellogg: Can you say a little bit about the behind-the-scenes’ trials and tribulations of your research process?

America’s Newspaper of Record Continues to Ignore Sociologists on Jobs, Inequality

By matt vidal

October 25, 2012

Commentary

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In the lede article in Tuesday’s New York Times, David Leonhardt pointed out that a critical topic has been glaringly absent from the presidential debate: the standard of living of Americans.

Hats off to Leonhardt and the Times for bringing this issue to the front page. Unfortunately, as is typical of the Times and other media outlets, the article was based exclusive on interviews with mainstream economists.

A particularly sharp juxtaposition between economic and sociological analyses of living standards and inequality was posed today with the publication of a symposium of sociologists in the journal Work and Occupations on Arne Kalleberg’s recent book, Good Jobs, Bad Jobs.

Based on his interviews with economists, Leonhard lists the top two causes of “a decade of income stagnation” as automation and globalization. No one to blame here, just impersonal forces we can’t control!

Among a “second group” of forces, he notes rising health care costs and “shrinking” unions.

In contrast, neither Kalleberg nor any of his commenters highlight technology as playing an independent role in wage stagnation and growing inequality, unmediated by the decisions of managers and policymakers. Instead, Kalleberg focuses on the rise of low-wage work, driven by a shifting balance of power between employers and workers as employers, aided by policymakers, engaged in corporate restructuring to achieve flexibility.

Globalization is a key force here, indeed. But rather than viewing it as an impersonal force to which corporations respond, sociologists emphasize how globalization is actively created by American corporations through global outsourcing.

Welcome to a new regular contributor — Jeremy Reynolds

By matt vidal

October 18, 2012

Announcements

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The OOW team is delighted to welcome a new regular contributor, Jeremy Reynolds, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Georgia.

Jeremy has published leading research on work-family conflict, differences between actual and preferred work hours, flexible staffing arrangements and high performance work practices. For more on Jeremy and his research, check out his website.

In his first post, soon to be up, Jeremy uses the context of the election season as an opportunity to take a reflective look at how the deluge of news and information we face every day can be quite overwhelming for those trying to sort good information from bad, even for social scientists.

A Luddite, An Economist and a Marxist Walk Into a Modern Factory …

By matt vidal

October 8, 2012

Commentary

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The Luddite sees industrial robots everywhere and, fearing negative effects on employment, begins to rage against the machines.

Seeing the same robots, the (liberal) economist exclaims, “What marvelous labor-saving technology. This will maximize productivity, and jobs that are lost in this factory will be replaced with high-tech jobs elsewhere in the economy!”

The Marxist sighs, and responds, “Is this some sort of joke? In the US today, seventeen percent of the American workforce – 27 million individual workers – is unemployed or underemployed.”

I imagined this scenario as I read the most recent entry in the New York Times’ consistently excellent series on the iEconomy, which focused on a new generation of robots being deployed in manufacturing.

Welcome to a new regular contributor — Chris Warhurst

By matt vidal

August 3, 2012

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The OOW team is delighted to welcome a new regular contributor, Chris Warhurst, Professor of Work and Organizational Studies at the University of Sydney in Australia.

Chris is going to write a monthly column, focused mostly on the issue of “aesthetic labor,” which refers to how employers attempt to mobilize, develop and commodify the looks, dress and style of workers. For more on this concept, see Chris’s overview here and an empirical study of his here.

But also keep an eye tuned here for Chris’s posts, which are sure to be insightful! His first post, soon to be up, discusses sociological evidence showing a beauty premium and a beauty penalty in employment – better looking people get paid more (and have more opportunities), while average or worse looking people fare worse in the labor market.

Creative Workers or Servants? Apple’s American Workforce and the Service Economy

By matt vidal

June 29, 2012

Commentary, News Analysis

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The New York Times recently published an in-depth article on “Apple’s Retail Army, Long on Loyalty but Short on Pay,” as part of its excellent series on “The iEconomy.” The new article notes that the majority of Apple’s US workforce (30,000 of its 43,000 domestic employees) are not engineers – part of the hailed “creative class” typically associated with the likes of Apple – but hourly retail sales employees.

Last year, the article reports, “each Apple store employee — that includes non-sales staff like technicians and people stocking shelves — brought in $473,000.” Yet, many of these employees are paid just $25,000 per year.

The most common definition of low-wage work used in international comparative research is two thirds of the median income. In the US, the median income in 2011 was $34,460. This puts the typical Apple store employee at 73% of the median, making employment in an Apple store effectively a low-wage job.

Apple economics: Maximize profit, minimize employment

By matt vidal

May 3, 2012

Commentary, News Analysis

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Apple Inc. is the largest technology company in the world, in terms of both revenue and profit. Yet, the California-based company has just 47,000 workers on its payroll in the United States. Apple recently released a report in which it claimed responsibility for “indirectly” creating an additional 257,000 American jobs in industries that are part of its supply chain, a claim that was “disreputable,” in the words of MIT labor economist David Autor – as if Apple’s suppliers did not have any other customers. Or, as Wharton labor economist Peter Cappelli noted, as if the consumers spending their money on an iPad would not have purchased another product in its absence (see a New York Times article on debates over the report here, including comments from Autor and Cappelli).

While Apple’s claim to have created jobs for UPS and FedEx employees is questionable, however, there is some truth to the argument that Apple is responsible for the employment – and working conditions – at its key suppliers, particularly manufacturers for which Apple is the main customer. This may be the case for some Corning employees in the US (supplying glass for iPhones) and is very likely the case for, tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of employees at Foxconn in China, which presumably has entire lines or buildings dedicated to Apple.

A recent report by political economist and accountant Karel Williams and his research team at the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change at the University of Manchester looked at the Apple Business Model and its employment effects. They cite a study which found that Chinese workers add $6.50 in value to each iPhone 3, just 3.6% of the phone’s shipping price.

Markets, monopolies and innovation

By matt vidal

February 28, 2012

Commentary

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I recently wrote a blog post on The Mythology of Steve Jobs, in which I noted what I take to be a fairly standard understanding among sociologists: that technical innovation is generally the outcome of collective labor and that major innovations are generally produced by well-funded teams of researchers working in places protected from market forces.

The upshot is exactly the opposite of the standard story on innovation we get from mainstream economics. According to the latter, innovations are the result of individual entrepreneurs and are best fostered by intense market competition. But this simply does not fit the history of major innovations. This is shown very clearly in a recent article in the New York Times Magazine by Jon Gertner on the history of Bell Labs.

The article is a bit long, but very insightful and well worth a read. Let me just note a few highlights. Gertner explains that the researchers at Bell Labs were given “years to pursue what they felt was essential. One might see this as impossible in today’s faster, more competitive world.”

Rich Reporting and Thin Analysis in Adam Davidson’s Pop Economics

By matt vidal

February 20, 2012

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Adam Davidson is a co-founder of NPR’s Planet Money, a team of economics reporters that produces podcasts and segments for various NPR shows and the extraordinary weekly public radio show, This American Life. Davidson and his Planet Money team have produced some of the most penetrating and informative reporting on contemporary finance. Indeed, their reporting on finance is unrivalled, serving to demystify the murky world of derivatives, mortgage backed securities, credit default swaps and the like for a broad public audience – in the process playing a critical role for democratic debate.

And Davidson can really tell a good story. So good that he has recently been given a new platform for a news analysis, his It’s the Economy column for The New York Times Magazine. Unfortunately, since Davidson has turned from reporting on finance to news analysis focusing on the wider economy, he has increasingly traded the rich journalism that made his name – carefully and clearly explaining the esoteric workings of the financial world through first-rate investigative reporting – for commentaries on the broader economy that present embarrassingly thin analyses based on the oversimplified fantasy world of textbook economics and recycled tropes of American exceptionalism.

Davidson’s fascination with mainstream Economics got the better of him again in last weekend’s Magazine column, in which he praises the entrepreneurial efficiency of an alleged craft revival. Based on a couple of interviews with “successful entrepreneurs” making hand-crafted beef jerky or precision manufactured components, Davidson argues that a new breed is following “what seems like an ancient business model: making things by hand,” rejecting “the high-volume, low-margin commodity business.”

But, we learn, “the craft approach is actually something new — a happy refinement of the excesses of our industrial era plus a return to the vision laid out by capitalism’s godfather, Adam Smith.” The craft revival is a further realization of the Smithean division of labor, a new round of efficiency improvements based on “hyperspecialization.” Indeed, so efficient is the American economy that “the average American leads a shockingly good life by any historical or international standard” and “Huge numbers of middle-class people are now able to make a living specializing in something they enjoy, including creating niche products for other middle-class people who have enough money to indulge in buying things like high-end beef jerky.”

2012 for the OOW blog

By matt vidal

January 9, 2012

Commentary, Uncategorized

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Happy new year from the OOW blog team. We took a little break over the holidays, but now we are back. We’ve got two posts coming up this week – one from Carolina Bank Muñoz on warehouse work and another from Julie Kmec on employment for veterans – and much more to follow in the coming weeks and months.

To briefly recap 2011 for the blog: Our first posts were on October 12, 2011. In our first three months, we managed 32 posts, which received over 7,200 views. We are quite happy with that. This year we hope to get even more analysis and commentary from a wider range of sociologists and, of course, we hope that there will be many more readers beyond the academy who find the blog useful.

If you are a general reader, then please feel free to contact us about issues you would like to us to cover. If you are a sociologist, please contact us if you have any ideas for topics to write on.

Here’s to a new year, which will hopefully bring more sociological analysis to mainstream discourse.

Best,

Matt, Steve, Chris and Adia