Research Findings

The six month period before she lost her job had been painful for Doris Richards (all names are pseudonyms). A lawyer who worked at a family-run firm, Doris was convinced that the owners were trying to elbow her out of their firm by making her working life miserable. When they finally did, Doris felt a sense of relief. She says, “One of the things I felt was, ‘Oh good, I can go to [events my kids are involved in]…I have more time now. I don’t feel pulled. I don’t feel as though I’m being tortured at work anymore. And I felt I could give more to my kids.”

This may seem like an unusual response to unemployment, especially given that Doris earned considerably more than her husband who is in the public sector.

In my recent article, I show how unemployment – whether they were fired, made redundant, or laid off – was a different experience for college-educated, professional, married heterosexual mothers than what prior theories of unemployment, often drawing largely from men’s experiences, would indicate.

At the beginning of October, Melinda Gates announced she would commit $1 billion in the fight for gender equality in the United States, and that one of her key priorities is to “mobilize shareholders” to put pressure on companies to improve diversity practices.

But do shareholders really value gender diversity? Research on the relationship between firm value and the appointment of women CEOs or directors has yielded mixed findings. At best, efforts to increase female representation have no impact on the firm’s market performance.

In some cases, however, shareholders will actually penalize firms for appointing women to senior leadership positions.

This seems counter-intuitive, given how much attention there has been in the press on stakeholders insisting that companies diversify their boards. Surely shareholders should be rewarding the companies that meet the challenge, not punishing them?

When we think about the power of business in our society, we tend to think about corporations. With rising income inequality in America and with record breaking levels of campaign contributions in each election cycle, it’s no surprise that large majorities of Americans feel corporations have too much power.

Strange as it may sound, corporate power is less concentrated in America than in the past: the number of corporations has actually fallen in the United States since the 1980s and they are no longer as large and integrated as they were in the Mad Men era (think of General Motors in its heyday).

In a recent paper, we highlight how the business elite are increasingly tied to non-corporate organizations like limited liability companies (LLCs) and limited partnerships (LPs). We find that families in the top 1% of the income distribution – especially white families and men in this elite stratum – disproportionately benefit from these organizations.

In many – if not most – communities across the United States, large health systems have increasingly become centers of job growth and economic development. Many cities and towns have watched manufacturers leave their communities, often taking with them “good jobs” that used to be available to their working-class residents.

Health systems have now replaced manufacturers as leading employers in town, but what kinds of jobs does the health sector provide for the working-class? We know that the health sector provides high quality jobs for workers with advanced degrees, such as physicians, pharmacists, and administrators. But does the health care sector provide “good jobs” for men and women without a college degree?

Flexible work arrangements, which enable people to voluntarily change when and where they work, are stigmatized in American workplaces due to a belief that flexible work patterns reflect an insufficient commitment to work. Yet, I find that the use of these arrangements is associated with heightened, not diminished, levels of work devotion among working mothers.

This finding contradicts the commonly held view that to effectively manage job and family responsibilities, one must make sacrifices or trade-offs between ambitions at work and at home. As “trade-offs,” strategies are portrayed within the context of a zero-sum relationship between work and family—a view which upholds the “sperate spheres ideology” that has long legitimized traditional breadwinning men and homemaking women arrangements.

In a recently published article, I suggest that work-family strategies exist as a “buffet” of options, characterized not just by the institution (work or family) that is adjusted when adopted but also by their associated moral weight. Said differently, strategies are embedded within symbolic landscapes that render certain options more accessible, appropriate or desirable than others.

Work organizations are often seen as the engines of inequality: they sort people into jobs with different opportunities, they pay people differently, and they reserve power for a select few.  But we know far less about how organizations foster equality in the workplace by allowing occupational mobility, reducing wage disparities, and distributing power among many.

In a recent article, I examine one workplace that adopted such equality-producing practices. Over nearly a decade, I conducted research on worker-recuperated businesses in Argentina, which are companies that have converted from privately-owned enterprises into worker-controlled cooperatives. Today, there are nearly 400 worker-recuperated businesses operating in Argentina. And most of these are organized as worker cooperatives that are owned and operated by their members.

Contemporary professionals face increased precarity in all aspects of their work. They have less control over their schedules, less autonomy from clients and organizations, and weaker professional identities than in the past. Sociologists refer to these broad changes as deprofessionalization.

Deprofessionalization is particularly pronounced in the field of journalism. In recent decades, corporate consolidation, the internet, and the rise of powerful technology platform companies have profoundly altered the journalism landscape and the journalism labor market.

Suppliers to global value chains face formidable efficiency demands to produce ever more cheaply and rapidly. Suppliers in the Global South often compete on labor costs and operate with very low margins, and multinational companies’ (MNCs) demanding sourcing practices magnify these efficiency pressures. This can lead to a “race to the bottom” in labor practices, resulting in sweatshop conditions.

Suppliers to global value chains face formidable efficiency demands to produce ever more cheaply and rapidly. Suppliers in the Global South often compete on labor costs and operate with very low margins, and multinational companies’ (MNCs) demanding sourcing practices magnify these efficiency pressures. This can lead to a “race to the bottom” in labor practices, resulting in sweatshop conditions.

Today, employers’ discrimination against black men applying for jobs is notoriously prevalent in the United States. It is commonly accepted that employers’ racial bias explains disparities in how often black versus white men receive job offers. Seeing a black name on a résumé, for example, could activate a range of stereotypes that depict young black men as aggressive, criminal, and violent, which are widely-known in society and deeply rooted in our collective consciousness.

Not only can names on a résumé activate stereotypes – but events that transpire in a neighborhood can also influence people’s reliance on stereotypes, especially right after they happen. For example, after a police officer is shot by a black suspect, other police officers increase their use of force in routine stops with black people.

There has been sizable growth in the population of mixed-race couples and their multiracial children in recent decades. Research indicates that these families tend to prefer living in racially and ethnically diverse neighborhoods that are relatively affluent. The neighborhood preferences of mixed-race couples with children appear to be largely driven by a desire for their children to live in an area that accepts their children’s multiracial identity while providing them safety and amenities.

However, there is a problem that these families face in finding diverse, higher income neighborhoods –there are not many of them. Indeed, scholars highlight that diverse neighborhoods tend to be lower income. This implies that some mixed-race couples with children encounter trade-offs between diversity and affluence when they are searching for a home in a new neighborhood.

Where these diverse families ultimately choose to live has a number of important consequences. If mixed-race couples with children lean more toward moving to diverse neighborhoods, they can bolster already increasing levels of neighborhood diversity.