Prelims

Half Title

Professional Work

Series Page

Research in the Sociology of Work

Series Editor: Steven P. Vallas

Recent Volumes:

Title Page

Research in the Sociology of Work  Volume 34

Professional Work: Knowledge, Power and Social Inequalities

Edited by

Elizabeth H. Gorman

University of Virginia, USA

and

Steven P. Vallas

Northeastern University, USA

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

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Emerald Publishing Limited

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First edition 2020

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-80043-211-6 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-80043-210-9 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-80043-212-3 (Epub)

ISSN: 0277-2833 (Series)

Contents

About the Authors

Koji Chavez is currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indiana University. In general, he is interested in processes of inequality within work organizations. Specifically, he focuses on how applicant gender, race, ethnicity, and “foreignness” influence screening, evaluation, and justification at the hiring interface.

Martha Crowley is a Professor of Sociology at North Carolina State University and Co-Editor of Social Currents (SAGE). She focuses on change in the organization of work and implications for well-being among workers, firms and communities. Her recent projects have investigated how worker control, managerial behavior and job insecurity influence workplace experiences, relationships, and behavior, and how industrial restructuring and economic concentration shape community well-being. Her work has appeared in outlets such as Annual Review of Sociology, Social Forces, Social Problems, Social Science Research, Organization Studies, Research in the Sociology of Work, Work and Occupations and Rural Sociology.

Elizabeth H. Gorman is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, where she teaches courses on work, inequality, organizations, and sociology of law. Her research interests focus on gender- and race-based workplace inequality and on professional and expert work. One current project examines the trend toward increased state involvement in professional regulation, with a focus on accountants and lawyers in the United States and the United Kingdom. A second project, in collaboration with Fiona Kay, explores the retention and advancement of women and racial minorities in corporate U.S. law firms. Her research has appeared in the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, Work and Occupations, and a number of other journals.

Fiona M. Kay is a Professor of Sociology at Queen’s University, Canada. She is presently engaged in a longitudinal study examining career pathways of lawyers in civil and common law jurisdictions of Canada. A second project, in collaboration with Elizabeth Gorman, focuses on retention and advancement of women and racial minorities in corporate US law firms. She has authored numerous articles on gender and race in the legal profession, mentorship, professional development, job satisfaction, career mobility, earnings attainment, and attrition from professions. Her articles have appeared in American Sociological Review, Law & Society Review, Social Problems, and a number of other journals.

Earl Kennedy is interested in social stratification, workplace processes and worker well-being. His research has appeared in Economic and Industrial Democracy. He received a Master’s degree in Sociology from North Carolina State University, and now resides in Minnesota, where he works in disability services.

Elizabeth Klainot-Hess is a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University. She studies work, inequality, labor movements, and higher education. Her research examines how new forms of work, particularly precarious and contingent work, create and reproduce inequality, and how workers respond to these new forms of work, both individually and collectively. Her dissertation explores divisions among contingent faculty, and she is currently writing a book based on this research. Her research has been published in Sociological Focus.

Sida Liu is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Law at the University of Toronto and Faculty Fellow at the American Bar Foundation. He has conducted extensive empirical research on China’s legal reform and legal profession. He also writes on sociolegal theory and general social theory, particularly theories of law, professions, and social spaces. He is the author of three books in Chinese and English, most recently, Criminal Defense in China: The Politics of Lawyers at Work (with Terence C. Halliday, Cambridge University Press, 2016). He has also published many articles in leading law and social science journals. Professor Liu received his LLB degree from Peking University Law School and his PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago.

Elisa Martínez is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research centers on knowledge, power and politics in the international development industry, in which she served in senior program roles before taking up her doctoral studies. She has co-authored chapters on impact research in development in the Sage Handbook of Action Research (2017) and the 2016 edited volume Women’s Empowerment and Global Health: A Twenty-First-Century Agenda.

Julianne C. Payne is a sociologist dedicated to studying and improving worker well-being. Her scholarly interests relate to the organization of work, worker health and safety, and workforce development. She is currently employed by RTI International, an independent, nonprofit research institute. Her research appears in Work and Occupations, the American Journal of Health Promotion, and the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine and in technical reports for clients such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Previously, at Social and Scientific Systems, she studied the health of clean-up workers who responded to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. She completed her PhD in 2013 at North Carolina State University.

Sabina Pultz is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the Department of Humans and Technology at Roskilde University, Denmark. She received her PhD from the University of Copenhagen. Her work focuses on how people are governed and how they govern themselves and includes jobseekers, precarious workers, and knowledge workers.

Jussara dos Santos Raxlen is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the New School for Social Research. Her research focuses on the multiple actors, semiotic practices, institutional logics, and spaces involved in the social organization of the paid labor of care for the elderly in the home. In times of shifting economic, social welfare, labor, migration and gender regimes, her study explores and uncovers the contested terrain on which US current home care system rests. Her research and teaching interests include the sociology of work, gender, and sexuality; politics of work; medical sociology and humanities; the body and the life course; culture; social and political theory; and the sociology of knowledge.

Timothy Sacco is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His research focuses on organizations, work, and inequality, with a specific focus on science and knowledge work. He is currently finishing his dissertation, Shaping Future Scientists: Student Labor and Training in the Knowledge Economy. His most recent publication, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Dynamics of Success and Failure in Research Collaboration,” was published in the June 2020 issue of Sociological Forum.

Ofer Sharone is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the author of the award-winning book Flawed System/Flawed Self: Job Searching and Unemployment Experiences (University of Chicago Press). His work on unemployment has received wide attention from policymakers and national media. He received his PhD in sociology from the University of California Berkeley, and a JD from Harvard Law School.

Rachel Sherman is a Professor of Sociology at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College. She conducts research and teaches in the areas of social class, social inequalities, work, culture, consumption, social movements, and qualitative methods. She is the author of Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels (California, 2007) and Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence (Princeton, 2017).

Laurel Smith-Doerr is a Professor of Sociology at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She investigates how scientific collaboration, gender, and organizations connect and where equity and innovation are fostered. With her co-­editors of the 2017 Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (MIT Press), she won the STS Infrastructure Award from the Society for Social Studies of Science. Her 2019 article with colleagues in the American Journal of Sociology provides a new theory of the gender pay gap, explaining how it rests on different mechanisms across organizations. As a Fulbright Scholar, she is developing a project comparing AI knowledge production, equity, and tech workforce recruitment in the United States and Germany. Currently, she serves as the Chair of the Science, Knowledge and Technology section of the American Sociological Association.

Steven P. Vallas is a Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University in Boston. Most of his research is concerned with the transformation of work, struggles over new technologies, and responses to the demands of the new economy. His books and articles have appeared in all the usual places. He is currently at work on an NSF-funded study of the algorithmic workplace, focusing on ride hailing, home maintenance, courier and caregiving platforms. He teaches courses on contemporary sociological theory.

Jane S. VanHeuvelen is a Contract Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. Her current research agenda involves a focus on the experience of contemporary healthcare workers and professionals, including studies of the well-being, daily work practices, social status and interactions of healthcare workers across occupational groups. Her work has appeared in Social Science & Medicine, Sociology of Health & Illness, Sociology of Development, Society and Mental Health, and Advances in Medical Sociology.