by Claire Maiers

The advancement of predictive data analytics into areas such as medicine, policing, or education has been greeted with both enthusiasm and concern. Where advocates stress a hopeful narrative in which data analytics will allow scientists to solve some of the society’s most difficult problems, critics worry about the potentially narrow and reductive depiction of the world generated by data analytics and about negative outcomes of allowing analytics and algorithms (rather than seasoned experts) to direct decisions.

In a recent article, I explored this tension between experiential and data-driven knowledge by examining the use of predictive analytics in a neonatal intensive care unit, or NICU. I argue that data analytics filter into decision-making through an interpretive process. Although highly dependent upon institutional context, this process may buttress, rather than simply replace, experiential knowledge.

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by Adam Cobb and Ken-Hou Lin

Historically, large firms in the United States paid their employees higher wages than did smaller enterprises. For example, economists Walter Oi and Todd Idson showed that firms with 500 or more workers paid wages that are 30 to 50% higher than those of firms with fewer than 25 workers.

By offering a “firm-size wage premium”, scholars argue that large firms are able to recruit better workers, reduce monitoring costs, and stay competitive. However, the firm-size wage premium has experienced a sharp decline in the past three decades. Who have been most affected by this trend? How has it contributed to the rising wage inequality?

Our recent study explores the changing firm-size wage premium and its inequality consequences between 1989 and 2014.

We argue that, by paying a greater premium to low-skilled workers, large firms have been a prominent labor-market institution that constrains inequality. Yet, broader changes to employment relations and organizational practices have undermined large firms’ role as an equalizing institution and led to higher levels of inequality in recent years.

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by Andrew Deener

Millions of people live in geographic pockets without access to supermarkets, what many now call food deserts.  These locations lack affordable fresh fruits and vegetables.  Supermarkets incorporating high volumes and high varieties of products have become so central to U.S. food consumption that their very absence has turned into a unique social problem.  It is now nearly impossible for those living in the U.S. to think about food shopping without also thinking about packed aisles and seemingly endless supplies.

The taken for granted characteristics of the supermarket system are central to the process of infrastructural exclusion.

My recent article on the origins of the food desert in Philadelphia points to a process that dates back to the 1930s, developing out of changing relationships between urban development, population settlements, and distribution systems.  The urban grocery decline that became visible as a policy concern by the end of the 1970s was not intentionally produced.  It was neither the direct outcome of strategic political-economic projects nor ideological regimes.  It was the result of gradually changing infrastructural interdependencies that altered market conventions, constrained profitability, generated financial mistakes, and led to repercussions for many urban consumers.

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by Minsun Ji

A long-standing question facing labor movements and labor studies is whether the presence of class consciousness strengthens or weakens labor movements. In a recently published study, I examined the premise that the level of class consciousness plays an important role in shaping the nature of union-cooperative relations, and their transformational potential, in the United States and Korea.

I studied two cases of union-cooperatives using in-depth interviews and surveys: Denver’s immigrant taxi worker cooperatives (Union Taxi and Green Taxi) in the US, and a bus cooperative, Woojin, in South Korea. In both cases, worker cooperatives have been formed with significant support from a labor union.

My findings showed that union-cooperative partnership that has a stronger sense of class consciousness develops a strong sense of worker solidarity with other workers and engages in more radical forms of labor activism. By contrast, union-cooperative partnership with a weaker sense of class consciousness among members can be very limited in building an effective labor movement.

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by Richard Benton

Activist investors have become a prominent fixture in corporate America. Recent commentaries proclaim that activists have “captured the center ring and are directing the main event” and acknowledge that “shareholder activism has rapidly changed how corporate America thinks.” Activist investors are at the vanguard of the shareholder value movement, mounting high-profile campaigns against corporate management and strategy.

Given this flurry of activity, scholars and popular commentators have been pressed to explain activists’ increased effectiveness. In a recent study, I show that an important reason for activists’ success involves corporate leaders’ increased social dislocation and ineffectiveness. In recent years, corporate leaders are less socially interconnected with their peers, having seen their social network ties fracture. As a result, corporate leaders are less able to collaborate and coordinate with their peers, losing their collective ability to buttress their own interests.

For most of the last century, corporate leaders were interconnected through a web of social network ties of overlapping board appointments. When a director sits on the board of multiple companies, this forms a social network tie connecting firms and individuals. Considerable research demonstrates that this network was important for coordinating strategies, sharing information, and building consensus across corporate America. This “old boys’ network” was an important source of power and unity for corporate leaders in domains such as politics and corporate governance.

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by Fabrizio Bernardi

Many empirical sociologists misuse statistical significance testing in their research.

At a conference, it is common to hear colleagues presenting their results with sentences like: “the coefficient is highly significant”, suggesting in this way that they have found an important result, or “the coefficient is not statistically significant”, implying that the coefficient is equal to 0. This impression is reinforced if one browses any major sociological journal. Many sociologists thus still engage in a practice that has been characterised as the ritual of Null Hypothesis Significance Testing (NHST).

In a nutshell, this ritual consists of the following: A researcher estimates a coefficient that expresses the effect of a variable X on a variable Y and computes its statistical significance p (note that in what follows I use the term ‘effect’ with no causal implication); if p is smaller than a conventional threshold (usually 0.05, sometimes 0.10), the researcher concludes that the coefficient is statistically significant and that there is an effect; conversely, if p is above the given threshold, the coefficient is statistically insignificant and the researcher concludes that there is no effect.

In this ritual, the size and sociological meaning of the coefficient and the uncertainty associated with the estimate are both ignored. The NHST is then a “yes-no” criterion to establish whether there is or is not an effect.

There are three main flaws associated with the ritual of the NHST.

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by John Lever

We often see only what we want to see, and what we want to see is often conditioned by what we learn to see as members of society. What we don’t see in this sense is the high dependency of the food and meat-processing sector on migrant labour.

Indeed without migrants working in the sector it would be difficult for companies to meet fluctuating market demand and get food to supermarkets at an affordable (if increasingly unsustainable) price.

These were some of the findings from a recently published study I conducted with the geographer Paul Milbourne on migrant labour in the meat-processing sector in Wales in the UK. We found that migrants are an invisible part of the workforce.

Specifically, we found that the industry is characterized by employment practices and working conditions that set workers against each other in a competitive spiral of self-exploitation. This situation occurs in the tightly defined occupational spaces of the factory floor, where migrants are employed in positions (boning, freezing, preserving and packing meat) that are renowned for being dirty, dangerous and demanding.

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by Elad N. Sherf and Subra Tangirala 

A gender-balanced workforce is an economic and moral imperative for organizations. Advancing women’s equality is not only right from a social justice perspective but as a recent report by McKinsey Global Institute suggests it can add $12 trillion to global economic growth. Not surprisingly, many organizations have launched gender-parity initiatives or organized attempts to improve the balance of the gender make-up of their workforces.

Yet, such gender-parity initiatives frequently fail to meet their desired objectives. Although multiple reasons potentially contribute to such failures, one crucial reason may be men’s passivity or lack of enthusiastic involvement in those initiatives.

When men stay on the sidelines, a critical stakeholder is left out of conversations on how organizations can approach and implement gender-equitable policies and practices. That is, gender-parity initiatives run the risk of getting marginalized as “women’s issues” that fail to capture and mobilize the attention and resources of all members of the organization. As men are frequently in positions of power and authority, their lower involvement can thus especially contribute to gender-parity initiatives’ lack of success.

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by Jeremy R. Levine

In May of 2013, the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) hosted a public meeting in the low-income neighborhood of Upham’s Corner. The purpose was to solicit input about bike lanes, traffic congestion, and other transportation issues. The meeting resembled similar rituals of participatory democracy that have become increasingly common in poor neighborhoods across the United States: Residents came together with policymakers and collectively debated an issue of public importance.

In theory, participation enables democracy and empowers citizens by incorporating their unique knowledge into public decision-making. But in practice, participation can fall short of these lofty goals.

At the meeting in Upham’s Corner, a transportation consultant contracted by the BRA presented plans to consolidate two bus stops in the neighborhood. The state transportation authority had already committed to the consolidation; the consultant was just explaining the change as background context for her additional recommendations.

Residents at the meeting were both unaware of and upset at the news. Cedric, an African American resident in his forties, argued that the bus stops were important for “this community.”  The consultant responded that a “robust public participation process” had already occurred, and during that process, “people were invited to submit comments.” There were public meetings, she claimed, “and this was ultimately the decision that was made with the consensus of the community working with the City of Boston, and working with the [state transportation authority].”

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