Suchergebnisse

Financial advisors, poker players, hedge fund traders, fund-raisers, sports agents, credit counsellors and commissioned salespeople all deal with one central concern in their jobs: money. In Money At Work, Kevin Delaney explores how we think about money and, particularly, how our jobs influence that thinking. By spotlighting people for whom money is the focus of their work, Delaney illuminates how the daily practices experienced in different jobs create distinct ways of thinking and talking about money and how occupations and their work cultures carry important symbolic, material, and practica.

AbstractThis article discusses the challenges and opportunities encountered in interviewing organizational elites. Drawing on a wide range of experiences in elite interviewing, I offer suggestions for gaining access to elites, controlling the interview, obtaining the highest‐quality interview data, and writing effectively about those data. I also discuss the 'dilemma of seduction' that can occur in elite interviewing and suggests ways to both present and critique the worldview of elites when writing about qualitative interviews.

This article explores the connection between bankruptcy and organizational failure, arguing that the two have grown increasingly distinct in the world of large corporate bankruptcy. In some bankruptcy cases, the filing of a Chapter 11 petition has very little to do with organizational failure in the strictest sense but instead signals a change in organizational strategy by corporate management or institutional creditors. This article suggests viewing bankruptcy as a specialized organizational field that offers significant advantages to corporations facing complex dilemmas. As a highly structured organizational field, bankruptcy favors repeat players, privileges financial epistemologies over other forms of knowledge, transforms threatening stakeholder interests into more familiar creditor claims, and channels larger political disputes into narrower financial disputing frameworks.

Chapter 11 bankruptcy provides an opportunity for addressing issues of power and control during corporate crisis. A broad notion of power is essential in understanding the complex events that led to the Chapter 11 filing of the Manville Corporation, formerly the nation's leading asbestos manufacturer. The theory of finance hegemony places this case in an entirely new light by taking into account the power of the financial community. The Manville bankruptcy illuminates several mechanisms by which this hegemony operates. From this perspective, Chapter 11 bankruptcy is viewed as a choice made from a set of options severely constrained by other powerful institutions, rather than a result of managerial incompetence or market failure.

This article analyzes the role of economic and sociological studies in the debate over using public subsidies to build new professional sports stadiums. We show how academic studies have been neutralized by supporters of stadium subsidies, thereby making them less effective in policy debates. We illustrate how pro-stadium elites have ignored the studies, criticized them without competing evidence, commissioned contradictory studies, or shifted the debate to non-measurable endpoints. We speculate on some of the reasons why pro-stadiums advocates — in particular politicians and corporate elites — have chosen to support subsidies despite academic findings that suggest little economic payoff from subsidies. This article is drawn from primary research in nine American cities involved in new sports stadium construction.

Sociological research has long been interested in inequalities generated by and within educational institutions. Although relatively rich as a literature, less analytic focus has centered on educational mobility and inequality experiences within graduate training specifically. In this article, we draw on a combination of survey and open-ended qualitative data from approximately 450 graduate students in the discipline of sociology to analyze graduate school pipeline divergences for first-generation and working-class students and the implications for inequalities in tangible resources, advising and support, and a sense of isolation. Our results point to an important connection between private undergraduate institutional enrollment and higher-status graduate program attendance—a pattern that undercuts social-class mobility in graduate training and creates notable precarities in debt, advising, and sense of belonging for first-generation and working-class graduate students. We conclude by discussing the unequal pathways revealed and their implications for merit and mobility, graduate training, and opportunity within our and other disciplines.

Social science research has long recognized the relevance of socioeconomic background for mobility and inequality. In this article we interrogate how and why working-class and first-generation backgrounds are especially meaningful and take as our case in point the professoriate and the discipline of sociology, – i.e., a field that intellectually prioritizes attention to group inequality and that arguably offers a conservative empirical test compared to other academic fields. Our analyses, which draw on unique survey items and open-ended qualitative materials from nearly 1,000 academic sociologists, reveal significant background divergences in academic job attainment, tied partly to educational background. Moreover, and especially unique and important, findings demonstrate significant consequences across several dimensions of inequality including compensation and economic precarity, professional visibility, and isolation at departmental, college or university, and professional levels. We conclude by highlighting how our discussion and results contribute in important ways to broader sociological concerns surrounding mobility, group disadvantage, and social closure.