A weekly link round-up of sociological work – work by sociologists, referencing sociologists, or just of interest to sociologists. This scatterplot feature is co-produced with Mike Bader.
Economic Sociology
- High wage firms are high wage in part because they outsource all the low wage jobs, Kodak 1987 vs. Apple 2017.
- “we believe that wealthy people seek visibility because those we see are, by definition, visible. In contrast, the people I spoke with expressed a deep ambivalence about identifying as affluent.” Rachel Sherman in the NYT.
- “even more than it is in the advertising business, Facebook is in the surveillance business.” John Lanchester in the LRB
Education and Inequality
- How poorly regulated charter schools ruined public education in Michigan.
- Senior citizens are now struggling with student loans.
- Elite universities are not safe spaces for unions.
- Sexual harassment is a pervasive problem in academia and we are not dealing with it well, University of Rochester cognitive science edition. And we all have to do something about it (especially men and senior scholars), but what?
- “I applaud Alice Wu’s research but I didn’t need machine learning or EJMR to tell me that economics has a problem with diversity.” Claudia Sahm’s reflections on how sexism in economics is bad for the discipline.
Race, Class, and Gender
- Dolly Parton’s “Dixie Stampede” dinner show.
- Ta-Nehisi Coates on Trump as the first white president, and “the myth of the virtuous white working class.”
- On global colorism, with a focus on the cosmetics industry in India.
- “America’s working class is largely female and disproportionately black and brown.”
- I really hope Betsy Rader wins her congressional race, because this essay against “Hillbilly Elegy” is great.
- On the history and politics of the term “Nazi” and why it might make sense to use the term to describe contemporary American white supremacists.
Political Sociology
- On think tanks and the absence of a well-articulated progressive foreign policy.
- Silicon Valley is culturally liberal, (vaguely) pro-welfare state, but seriously anti-union and anti-regulation.
- Never before have national elections been so competitive, while most states are so uncompetitive. And a follow-up on the “doom loop” of contemporary American politics.
scatterplot 