NOTE: I was on my way to Megan Tobias Neely’s dissertation proposal defense when I received Matt’s invitation to respond to this blog post. In a case of pure serendipity, Megan’s dissertation is an ethnographic study of hedge fund managers. I sent Megan the blog post and we recently sat down to discuss it.

CLW: Why did you decide to write your dissertation on hedge fund managers?

MTN: I was taking a course on the financial crisis in the public policy school. A lot of that research focuses on how deregulation and various political interests led to the financial crises. I realized that we can’t understand the crisis unless we understand how the workplace structures the way people make investments, and how, through their daily decisions at work, financial managers shape public policy.

Why everyone does better when employees have a say in the workplace

By Guest Contributor

June 3, 2014

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Credit: Chrysler Group (Creative Commons BY NC ND)

by William Lazonick and Tony Huzzard

In manufacturing plants all over the world, both managers and workers have discovered that when employees are involved in workplace decision-making, productivity rises. So in the United States, it made national news when in February workers at the Volkswagen auto plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee rejected representation by the United Automobile Workers (UAW) by a vote 712 to 626. Unfortunately, the Chattanooga workers said no to just the type of employee involvement in productivity improvement that will be necessary to sustain their jobs going forward. To compete on the world stage, a strong employee voice in the workplace matters.

No More Invisible Man: Race and Gender in Men’s Work

By Adia Harvey Wingfield

May 29, 2014

Book Announcements

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If you watch American popular culture and media, it is easy to come away with a rather depressing story about the lives and experiences of black men. News media tend to overrepresent black men as criminal, and movies like Paid in Full, State Property, and Get Rich or Die Trying do their part to portray black men as victims and/or survivors of an urban ghetto defined by violence, poverty, neglect, and drug use. At the other end of the spectrum, extremely visible, successful black men like Bill Cosby and Barack Obama suggest hard work, staying in school, and good behavior are surefire routes to success.

Both accounts offer a very two-dimensional picture of black men’s lives in the U.S. today. They give the impression that nearly all black men are facing the dire threats of un- or underemployment, failing schools, urban neglect, and jail time. Those who do not fit this categorization may seem to be on another end of a continuum—part of an extremely well off, highly visible minority who point to their own accomplishments as proof that properly channeled ambition leads to success. The story media and current research tell is usually that black men’s lives generally exist only on these two ends of a spectrum.

In my book No More Invisible Man: Race and Gender in Men’s Work, I try to draw attention to black men who do not fit either of these categorizations—everyday professional, middle class black men who work in white-collar jobs.

The Post-Racial President and the Push for Apprenticeships

By David Luke

May 27, 2014

Book Announcements, Commentary, News Analysis

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In his January 2014 State of the Union Address and thereafter, President Barack Obama has repeatedly mentioned apprenticeships and vocational education when discussing the jobs crisis. One might be critical as to why the nation’s first black president would advocate for a policy that has been historically exclusive and harmful to African Americans. In his autobiography, Malcolm X notes, when telling his middle school English teacher of his aspirations to be a lawyer, the teacher advised him to instead become a carpenter. To Malcolm, this was in stark contrast to the overwhelmingly affirming advice he gave to less-promising white students. Malcolm X’s case was not an aberration, but reflected a general trend of structural and systemic discrimination that operated through vocational education programs (where African Americans were tracked into lower-paying jobs) and apprenticeships. This history involved reifying and reinforcing class divisions along racial lines. Apprenticeships can be problematic in that often they are awarded to relatives or friends who share the same racial background as the master technician. As many have noted, white social networks often function to exclude African Americans from potential jobs.

White Collar Crime & Corporate Fraud—with a Touch of Pink

By Julie Kmec

May 22, 2014

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I recently talked with my colleague, Associate Professor of Sociology at Washington State University, Dr. Jennifer Schwartz about her April 2013 American Sociological Review collaboration with Darrell Steffensmeier and Michael Roche entitled “Gender and Twenty-First-Century Corporate Crime: Female Involvement and the Gender Gap in Enron-Era Corporate Frauds.”

The article is of particular interest to readers of this blog for its application of theories of work (e.g., homosocial reproduction, network theory, and theories of power at work) to explain the connection between gender and corporate malfeasance. This piece also tells us about gender differences in work styles and locations: women engage in less “big time” corporate fraud than do men, a fact that is NOT fully explained by their lower level corporate positions. The authors suggest male-dominated networks at the top of work organizations and informal barriers to women’s upward mobility may explain why men outpace women in corporate fraud.

Sociology and the G.M. Scandal

By Martha Crowley

May 20, 2014

Commentary, News Analysis

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In recent months, General Motors has received scathing critique for its handling of a design flaw affecting multiple Chevrolet, Pontiac and Saturn models produced over several years. At issue is a faulty ignition switch that, if jostled, cuts power to the engine, deactivating airbags and other features of affected vehicles. The problem was brought to light by Florida engineer Mark Hood, who discovered that newer ignitions with the same part number differed from the original design and required significantly more force to turn.

Subsequent investigation has determined that G.M. approved a new ignition switch design in 2006 and quietly implemented it without recalling vehicles subject to ignition failure. Inquiries by a federal agency, Congress and the media have revealed that G.M. has been aware of problems with the switch design for more than a decade but hid them from outsiders. The company now admits it has known about the problem since 2001, has acknowledged at least thirteen deaths related to the flaw, and has recalled millions of vehicles.

Weber, Tolstoj and the Usefulness of Universities

By Doris Ruth Eikhof

May 16, 2014

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by Doris Ruth Eikhof

In the past two years UK universities have frantically prepared their submissions to the sector-wide assessment of their research prowess and output, the Research Excellence Framework, or REF. They have evaluated research outputs, written about their research environment and strategy and poached star researchers from other in institutions to make themselves look good on paper. The REF submissions are being evaluated as I type and the next two years are likely to be spent dealing with the fall-out once results are announced. In the current pause between those two bouts of frantic REF-related activity, I stumbled across a voice from the past that, as so infuriatingly often, succinctly and authoritatively dealt with a key issue this round of REF posed for the first time: that of the relationship between academia and its non-academic context – let’s call it society. Read More

The Year of the Intern

By Alexandre Frenette

May 14, 2014

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Internships, often unpaid, have become a prevalent rite of passage for youth entering the workforce. The rise of internships, especially as part of higher education, is notable: according to estimates, 63% of students graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 2013 reported having completed an internship, up from only 17% in 1992.

Both The Daily Beast, a media outlet, and ProPublica, an investigative journalism organization, called 2013 “the year of the [unpaid] intern.” Although 2013 was a landmark year for those who support intern labor rights, commentators might soon call 2014 the year of the intern. The rapidly changing landscape of the intern economy, especially the recent challenge of unpaid internships, has been propelled by two interrelated (and persistent) developments: intern lawsuits and labor rights activism.

As I argued in a recent article in the sociological journal Work and Occupations, to be an intern is a challenging, highly ambiguous role. Unpaid interns can be seen as a source of cheap labor, an opportunity for valuable training, or both. The ambiguous legal status of interns (as both students and workers) has helped bring this problematic issue to the forefront.

The Talkin’ New Economy Blues: How Mainstream Discourse on the New Economy Diminishes Workers

By Guest Contributor

May 12, 2014

Commentary

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by Mike Rose

If that venerable debunker of inflated language, George Orwell, were alive today, he would gleefully be ripping into the lingo of the “new economy,” particularly taking aim at the gaseous hyperbole associated with digital technology.

To be sure, the last half-century has been a time of significant changes in the organization and technologies of work, and these changes have had huge consequences for workers. But the typical depictions of those changes misrepresent the complex nature of work and the workers who do it. The standard story line—found in political speech, opinion pages, and countless popular books on the new economy—is familiar to the readers of this blog.

Research shows that minor sex trafficking narratives do not reflect the experience of many domestic sex workers

By Guest Contributor

May 6, 2014

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Credit: kPluto (Creative Commons: BY-NC-SA 2.0)

by Anthony Marcus, Christopher Thomas and Amber Horning

Many recent public policy discussions about prostitution, especially underage prostitution, invoke disturbing narratives of hyper-violent, predatory pimps luring and coercing young girls into sex slavery. However, three recent studies of underage sex workers and pimps/market facilitators in New York and New Jersey call into question these assumptions. First, these public narratives overestimate the role of pimps in street sex markets; second, they overemphasize the impact of the initial recruitment stage on subsequent practices; and third, they mask or simplify the difficult and complex choices and contingencies faced by minors who sell sex. The studies find that there is in fact no prototypical pimp and relationships are more flexible, dynamic, and particular to the individuals involved than has been previously imagined.