Sociology Graduate Students Research Articles

“I Don’t Even Talk About It”: Applying Ray’s Theory of Racialized Organizations to Class Stratification in Academia

ABSTRACT In this paper, we develop a working theory examining how the organizational apparatuses of colleges and universities, as well as larger trends in higher education, contribute to unequal outcomes for faculty from working-class backgrounds and their upper- and middle-class counterparts. Based on 30 interviews with a nationwide sample of academic faculty and graduate students in sociology, we adapt an analytical approach introduced by Victor Ray, a theory of racialized organizations, to identify several common mechanisms in higher education that hinder working-class faculty members’ ability to form professional relationships and gain prestige at post-secondary institutions, disrupt efforts to diversify faculty bodies socioeconomically, and preserve class-based inequalities by masking the saliency of social class in faculty settings. Adapting Ray’s analysis, we divide these organizational features of higher education into three categories—superstructure (collective ideologies), structure (policies and norms), and substructure (individual schemas)—illustrating how these features uphold and reinforce one another.

“Value-Conditioned Interest”: Secularity, Institutional Support, and the Sociology of Religion in Graduate Departments

ABSTRACT Although religion once played a central role in sociological inquiry, today it has fallen from prominence and now occupies a marginal space in the field. Sociologists of religion suggest that this neglect can be explained by the unusual irreligiosity of academia. However, some are hopeful that changes to graduate training and other institutional interventions can overcome this propensity and encourage more sociological engagement with religion, one of the most influential forces in contemporary society. Drawing on a new dataset of 473 sociology graduate students in the top 25 departments in the United States, we assess how personal secularity and departmental support for religious inquiry predict sociological engagement with religion. Personal secularity is a strong predictor of the decision to study religion and of the overall perception of the relevance of religion in contemporary society. Coming from a department where religion is discussed and faculty pursue research on religion predicts the perception of religion’s relevance for the secular majority. Our findings contribute to the understanding of sociological knowledge creation and how individual and institutional proclivities – together – shape what we deem important enough to study.

Review of “Qualitative Literacy: A Guide to Evaluating Ethnographic and Interview Research”

Qualitative Literacy: A Guide to Evaluating Ethnographic and Interview Research is a wonderful book that should be required reading for all graduate students in Sociology; indeed, it is a useful guide for any social science discipline that incorporates both quantitative and qualitative training. The book’s exceptionalism lies in the combination of its accessible prose, its clear-eyed discussion of why we need shared standards, its practicality, and its elegant construction of guiding principles for evaluating qualitative research. The principles presented are clear and cogent yet not rigid, providing insightful ideas about what to expect of the best qualitative research while allowing for a sizable variation in how researchers might achieve their goals. The book’s authors, Mario Luis Small and Jessica McCrory Calarco, are the perfect pair to write this book; each has authored celebrated work that rely on both interviewing and ethnography, and both have devoted considerable thought to matters of qualitative research (Calarco 2011, 2014, 2018a, 2018b; Small 2004, 2009, 2015, 2017).

The epidemiological profile of donors and non-donors of blood in Morocco

Introduction: In Morocco, blood donation is voluntary, anonymous, and voluntary. The promotion of blood donation has evolved favorably thanks to strategies based on the creation of a multi-sector promotion system. The transformation of family donors into voluntary donors and the retention of voluntary donors is the major challenge of the national blood transfusion center.
 Materials and methods: This is an analytical quantitative cross-sectional study on a target population made up of 1000 participants. The collection tool was a self-administered, anonymous questionnaire made up of closed questions concerning the socio-demographic profile of the participants, and their knowledge and attitudes about the blood donation operation as well as their motivation and limitations of the donation. The responses were collected and entered by a team of graduate students in sociology. Data were analyzed by SPSS 20 software.
 Results: Among the 953 participants, their mean age (Standard Deviation) is 32.56 (12.993) years, with 63.4% of the participants under the age of 34 (n = 429). For data relating to blood donation, 69.3% of the participants thought they did not know the blood group (n = 660), more than 70% thought of the existence of the illegal sale of blood in Morocco (n = 668). 69.3% of the participants think they do not know the blood type (n = 660), more than 70%, though of the existence of the illegal sale of blood in Morocco (n = 668), 70.8% do not know someone who has had or require an organ or tissue transplant (n = 479).
 Conclusion: The need for blood is sharply increasing. an enormous shortage hence the need for epidemiological study to highlight the various difficulties that hamper the promotion of blood donation.
 Keywords: Blood, transfusion, Blood donation, Promoting blood donation, Faithful donor, Morocco

Corporate Law and the Theory of the Firm: Reconstructing Corporations, Directors, Owners, and Investors

Dozens of judicial opinions have held that shareholders own corporations, that directors are agents of shareholders, and even that directors are trustees of shareholders’ property. Yet, until now, it has never been proven. These doctrines rest on unsubstantiated assumptions. In this book the author performs a rigorous, systematic analysis of common law, contract law, property law, agency law, partnership law, trust law, and corporate statutory law using judicial rulings that proves shareholders do not own corporations, that there is no separation of ownership and control, directors are not agents of shareholders, and shareholders are not investors in corporations. Furthermore, the author proves the theory of the firm, which is founded on the separation of ownership and control and directors as agents of shareholders, promotes an agenda that wilfully ignores fundamental property law and agency law. However, since shareholders do not own the corporation, and directors are not agents of shareholders, the theory of the firm collapses. The book corrects decades of confusion and misguided research in corporate law and the economic theory of the firm and will allow readers to understand how property law, agency law, and economics contradict each other when applied to corporate law. It will appeal to researchers and upper level and graduate students in economics, finance, accounting, law, and sociology, as well as attorneys and, accountants.

Learning the language of craft: a publishing workshop for graduate students

ABSTRACT This article outlines a workshop orienting sociology graduate students to overcoming challenges in publishing. Although graduate students are increasingly told to publish, little guidance exists on how to best prepare them for this venture; mentorship scholarship typically assumes the professor–student relationship is the best or most appropriate site of knowledge transmission about publishing. Our workshop is a collective learning experience that can be led either by experienced graduate students or faculty, aimed at developing craft knowledge (techne) about the publishing process. Participants in our workshops reported (1) that they were a site of affect normalization, helping them to understand they were not alone in fearing anonymous peer review and receiving harsh critiques of their work from peer reviews; and (2) appreciated concrete case studies of navigating the peer review process. We encourage other departments to use or modify this workshop to normalize the publishing process for graduate students.

Reading and reputation: sense, sensibility, and status in graduate education

One of the skills of graduate education that is most central to the evaluation of students is their ability to read and report on complex disciplinary texts. The display of comprehension is central to the judgment of competence, creating a status hierarchy. Demonstrating reading prowess is taken as a transparent indication of intelligence. Based on thirty-six ethnographic interviews with graduate students in sociology, history, and economics, we examine how informants think about the establishment of their scholarly reputations through self-presentational skills in discussing reading in seminars, articles, and eventually in the dissertation itself. The ability to read disciplinary texts and to situate those texts within disciplinary contexts is crucial for a validated selfhood.

Urban and Industrial Everyday Life under Socialism and Post-Socialism

The above quotations from two of the books under review here took me back to the early 1970s and my first weeks in Hungary. As a graduate student in sociology, struggling to get to grips with my surroundings, I distinctly remember thinking that what was needed was an anthropology for large-scale industrial society to explain their foreignness and remoteness. Everything in the metropolis of Budapest followed a different logic, and in the academic division of labour, anthropologists are those with the skills to interpret the meanings of societies which operate according to a logic different to that of industrialised West. But in those days anthropologists still tended to focus on pre-industrial societies outside Europe. I had not yet readThe Good Soldier Švejk, but a Hungarian sociologist told me was that I would never understand communist Eastern Europe without readingŠvejk. I did, and he was right.

The Active Skim: Efficient Reading as a Moral Challenge in Postgraduate Education

Faculty and students recognize that to succeed in graduate school, the ability to read efficiently and with comprehension is crucial. Students must be able to process information newly presented to them, even when that information seems overwhelming. Comprehending, discussing, and utilizing relevant texts are central to the production of scholars. But what constitutes appropriate techniques of reading, when does one employ various strategies, and for what purposes? In a world in which more is assigned than can reasonably be processed, what constitutes a legitimate practice? In this conversation essay, we discuss the role of skimming, building upon an interview study of 36 social science graduate students in history, economics, and sociology. We ask what students believe about the necessity and appropriateness of skimming, how they honed their skills, and what constitutes normative standards. We treat skimming as a form of “legitimate deviance,” necessary for occupational survival but a strategy that is potentially a challenge to an academic self-image. Students learn techniques that allow them to read rapidly and recall information for later use, but the appropriate use of these techniques is rarely discussed openly in graduate training.

Use Your Science to Make America a Better Place

Use Your Science to Make America a Better Place

Empty labor: idleness and workplace resistance

While most people work ever-longer hours, international statistics suggest that the average time spent on non-work activities per employee is around two hours a day. How is this possible, and what are the reasons behind employees withdrawing from work? In this thought-provoking book, Roland Paulsen examines organizational misbehavior, specifically the phenomenon of 'empty labor', defined as the time during which employees engage in private activities during the working day. This study explores a variety of explanations, from under-employment to workplace resistance. Building on a rich selection of interview material and extensive empirical research, it uses both qualitative and quantitative data to present a concrete analysis of the different ways empty labor unfolds in the modern workplace. This book offers new perspectives on subjectivity, rationality and work simulation and will be of particular interest to academic researchers and graduate students in organizational sociology, organization studies, and human resource management.

高校野球における監督のコンピテンシーに関する研究

This study was conducted to examine the competency of Kokoyakyu (Japanese high-school baseball) managers by developing and then applying a suitable measurement scale. First, we interviewed 6 Kokoyakyu managers, identifying 245 competency items. To categorize these items, one professor and 4 graduate students in sport sociology conducted a panel discussion. This yielded 48 competency items that were divided into 10 categories. Second, to appraise the reliability and validity of the resulting scale, we sent questionnaires to 1,000 managers, and received 421 replies. Item-total correlation analysis, exploratory factor analysis, and confirmatory factor analysis revealed 6 factors comprising 24 competency items: (1) trust relationship (6 items), (2) powers of observation (4 items), (3) educational guidance (3 items), (4) autonomy support (4 items), (5) relationship of supporters (3 items), and (6) skill and tactics instruction (4 items). The indices of model data fit were χ2/df=1.72, GFI=.87, CFI=.90, and RMSEA=.058. Assessment of construct validity comprised 3 components: convergent validity (Cronbach's alpha, average variance extracted, and construct reliability), discriminant validity, and content validity. The scale was observed to be reliable and valid. Comparison of the scale based on managers' profiles indicated significant differences based on team results, experience in developing players on the path to professional baseball, and years of experience.

Unequal Partners: RCCs, Law Enforcement, and Medical Response to Rape

Rose Corrigan does an excellent job in explaining the strengths and limits of rape law reform in the United States in her book Up Against a Wall: Rape Reform and the Failure of Success (2013). Corrigan challenges the success story of rape law reform in the United States. In her research she documents the continued widespread resistance of the U.S. Criminal Justice System and the medical establishment to taking rape seriously. Corrigan engages in an in depth examination of rape crisis centers in the United States, and explains their marginalized and politically sensitive position. Because Corrigan’s work takes place in the United States, all comments in this review will also focus on the U.S., unless otherwise noted. This is a unique piece of research due to its breadth and qualitative research methods. This book is a necessary read for any scholar of social movements, law & society, gender and the law, and/or those interested in issues surrounding violence against women. It is appropriate for graduate and undergraduate students in Sociology, Criminology, Social Movements, Law & Society, Criminal Justice, Political Science and History. Corrigan argues that rape care work in the United States is misunderstood in much of the academic literature and works to set the record straight. This study starts to fill the void of research on rape care work in the literature on law and social movements. Corrigan highlights the limits of legal mobilization. She argues that rape law reform ultimately has failed victims, in that there are nowmore laws on the books, but enforcement of and adherence to these laws is lacking. The insightful analysis here highlights the pitfalls and shortcomings of feminist attempts to use the law for social change. Corrigan outlines the struggle between feminist activists and the state over defining sexual violence. This book asks critical questions about the impact of legal reform to better understand how legal reforms intersect with existing institutional norms, practices and values, and with the internal politics of the anti-rape movement. Corrigan asks:

What Friendship Entails: An Empirical Analysis of Graduate Students’ Social Networks

This article uses network analysis to explore interpersonal relationships among three cohorts of sociology graduate students. We examine the content of graduate student relationships to consider questions of friendship formation among adults in a naturally bounded university setting. Drawing on existing research on friendship formation, we also analyze the extent to which tendencies toward race and gender homophily persist among graduate students. We find that graduate students’ friendships tend to be at low levels of intimacy and gender and race homophilous. We discuss these findings in the context of recent research showing that American adults have fewer intimate relationships, and discuss the implications of race and gender based exclusionary friendship networks for the discipline of sociology as well as within broader organizational contexts.

The Forgotten Kin: Aunts and Uncles - by Robert M. Milardo

The Forgotten Kin: Aunts and Uncles. Robert M. Milardo. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2009. 246 pp. ISBN 0521516761. $85.00 cloth. During the World War II era, Parsons (1943) published a seminal paper portraying a constrained view of family, limited to marital couples raising children. Family science took hold of the perspective and has found it difficult to move beyond it. Indeed, more than 80% of studies published in family science journals in the late 1990s focused on romantic ties and/or young children and parents (Fingerman & Hay, 2002). Yet the lay public widely recognizes the role of other kin in their lives. Indeed, people list aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews as among their most important social partners (Fingerman, Hay, & Birditt, 2004). Robert Milardo has begun to fill this gaping hole in family science with his intriguing volume, 7Ae Forgotten Kin: Aunts and Uncles. The book provides an in-depth analysis of relationships between aunts and uncles and their nieces and nephews. Milardo conducted extensive interviews with 104 volunteers from Maine and New Zealand. Although his sample spans two continents, Milardo did not make cross-cultural comparisons; rather, his objective was to recruit a wide array of examples of ties. The aunts and uncles reported on nieces and nephews across die life course and provided a rich and heterogeneous examination of kinship ties. For the sake of simplifying the design to allow for an in-depth analysis, the book focused specifically on gender-similar dyads, aunts and nieces as well as uncles and nephews. Notably, English has no gender-neutral terms for kinship ties involving a sibling's children. Milardo did not explicitly make this point in the book, but his selection of dyads responds to these linguistic contingencies. The book includes nine chapters covering functions that aunts and uncles serve. The first chapter situates the importance of aunts and uncles in the family science literature; this is not an easy task when a topic has been all but ignored. Milardo accomplishes his goal by taking theories addressing other family relationships and contexts - such as solidarity theory and generativity - and applying them to aunts and uncles. Chapters 2 and 3 introduce the study. Chapter 2 includes tables describing the participants who varied in age, marital status, parental status, and sexual orientation. Chapter 3 provides more details regarding the nature of the relationships, contact, and parameters of the relationships. Despite the purported mobility of American adults, most adults live within 50 miles of where they grew up and have sisters or brothers who do the same (Lin & Rogerson, 1995). This trend is even more apparent in New Zealand. Thus, Milardo is able to report on nearly two thirds of his sample who have frequent contact with their aunt, uncle, niece, or nephew. The remaining six chapters present a comprehensive analysis that more accurately conveys the full terrain of family relationships than me constrained views of spouses, parents, and children pervasive in family science. In these chapters, Milardo presents compelling stories to illustrate key themes that arose in the interviews. Chapter 4 explores the roles of aunts and uncles in substituting or supplementing the role of parents. The vivid examples include instances in which an adult is childless or has lost a parent as a result of divorce or absence. These situations call to mind the flexibility of the individual in forging ties that meet basic needs for emotional connection in the family, both in crises and in everyday life. We can see examples of making otherwise invisible family ties visible in our own lives. For example, a graduate student in sociology at Purdue University uses a photograph of her nieces and nephews as a screen saver. When she is not actively engaged in scholarly work, they pop up and remind her of kin who are otherwise forgotten, according to Milardo. …

Trends in Funding for Dissertation Field Research: Why Do Political Science and Sociology Students Win So Few Awards?

AbstractDespite the size and growth of political science and sociology relative to other disciplines, political science and sociology graduate students have received a declining share of funding for dissertation field research in recent years. Specifically, political science and sociology students are losing out to competitive applicants from humanities-oriented fields that provide strong training in area studies and language. These trends are explained by multiple factors. On the funding demand side, changes in graduate training within political science and sociology are undermining students' ability to conduct contextual work, thus leading to lower quality applications. On the funding supply side, the structure of selection committees may be privileging certain disciplines and approaches. We offer suggestions on how to begin reversing these worrisome trends in dissertation funding. Doing so is crucial to ensuring the continued participation of political scientists and sociologists in international comparative research.

Notes on Contributors

Nana Akua Anyidoho is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER), University of Ghana, Legon. anyidoho{at}ug.edu.gh Kofi Takyi Asante is a graduate student in Sociology at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA. kkofiasante{at}yahoo.com

Not lost in translation: the influence of Clifford Geertz's work and life on anthropology in Morocco

A May 2000 conference in Sefrou publicly recognised the impact of Clifford Geertz's work and professional life on doing sociology and anthropology in Morocco. Yet recognition of his work in how sociology and anthropology were taught in Morocco grew only incrementally from the late 1960s to the present. One obstacle was language. Geertz's Islam Observed (1968a) was translated into French only in 1992; a translation into Arabic is virtually unobtainable in Morocco; and his book-length essay, ‘Suq’ (Geertz 1979), appeared in French only in 2003. In the late 1960s, Morocco's educational system was also in the midst of Arabisation. Part of this essay seeks to capture the audience for anthropology in the late 1960s and early 1970s, describing the context in which the writings of Geertz and Gellner were initially received in Morocco. Then, drawing on my experience in leading a faculty seminar in Arabic for faculty in history and sociology and especially a parallel one for graduate students in sociology in 1992, I indicate how Geertz's ideas and others began to enter the Arabic-language curriculum. Finally, relying on a recent book by sociologist Abdelrhani Moundib (2006), a student in the 1992 student seminar who currently teaches at Rabat's Université Mohammed V–Agdal, I analyse how Geertz's ideas are transmitted in a primarily Arabic university curriculum.

The perception of scatterplots

Four experiments investigated the perception of correlations from scatterplots. All graphic properties, other than error variance, that have been shown to affect subjective but not objective correlation (r) were held constant. Participants in Experiment 1 ranked 21 scatterplots according to the magnitude of r. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants made yes/no judgments to indicate whether a scatterplot was high (signal) or low (noise). Values of r for signal and noise scatterplots varied across participants. Differences between correlations for signal and for noise scatterplots were constant in r in Experiment 2, and constant in r2 in Experiment 3. Standard deviations of the ranks in Experiment 1 and d' values in Experiments 2 and 3 showed that discriminability increased with the magnitude of r. In Experiment 4, faculty and graduate students in psychology and sociology made point estimates of r for single scatterplots. Estimates were negatively accelerated functions of objective correlation.

Rural Life: Portraits of the Prairie Town, 1946 (review)

Reviewed by: Rural Life: Portraits of the Prairie Town, 1946 Royden Loewen (bio) James P. Giffen. Rural Life: Portraits of the Prairie Town, 1946. Edited with an afterword by Gerald Friesen University of Manitoba Press 2004. 283. $19.95 The main text of this book, written sixty years ago, is an analysis of Manitoba's rural culture in the context of an emerging postwar economy. The author, James Giffen, a University of Toronto graduate student in sociology, had answered the bidding of a blue-ribbon Royal Commission set up by Manitoba's Liberal-Progressive premier Stuart Garson. His task was to be the Commission's field researcher and study four rural Manitoba [End Page 548] districts, identifying the strength of their institutions, social networks, and cultural values, all with an eye to developing a rural adult education program. The ultimate aim of Giffen's report, thus, was to secure nothing less than the 'enhancement of cultural literacy for residents of typical rural communities.' Four distinctive communities – mostly British Canadian, Ukrainian, and French with varying pools of smaller ethnic groups – were initially chosen. Giffen's task to lay bare the state of culture and social structure of these communities proved too controversial. The priest in St Pierre, for example, forbade his parishioners to co-operate and the community dropped from sight; in the end, the study was too much even for the government, and the finely detailed report was placed out of public view, in the Manitoba Provincial Archives. What made the report controversial in 1946 is exactly the reason readers of today will find it intriguing. The book is nothing short of a rich ethnography of mid-century rural life on the prairies at a critical juncture in North American rural history. The moment, 1946, lies just before technology, science, government intervention, and a vast demographic shift transformed it after the Second World War. The communities are isolated to varying degrees (thanks to a rudimentary road system and nascent electronic communications network) from a broader, urbanizing Canadian society. Their social cohesion rests in the local culture of church, club, and co-op and their tensions are driven by locally shaped ethnic, racial, religious, class, and gender lines. Perhaps the features in this account are distinctly local and Manitoban – curling clubs, Pool elevators, the general store, the mix of 'ethnic' churches – but they illuminate a wider story. The communities represent the 'limited identities,' the fragmented cultures, the dialectic of aliberal and liberal values, and the 'intensely local' culture of mid-century rural Canada. Giffen details a dynamic, conflict-ridden, rural society. Each of these communities has the powerful and the weak: in Elgin, for example, British-Canadian men of the 'old families' organize informal groups that ban the unfit, while the women struggle in surprisingly formal social networks, and ministers and teachers of all political stripes languish without much influence in low-paid jobs. Each place is shaped by informal codes of conduct: in Carmen social behaviour is scrutinized by inveterate gossip and intricate knowledge of family history, ensuring that conspicuous consumption and youthful promiscuity receive equal condemnation. Each setting produces a locally hegemonic, interethnic culture, marked equally by co-operation and conflict: in Rossburn, British Canadians harbour an openly racist-laden antipathy to the increasingly majoritarian, upwardly mobile, English-speaking, impeccably organized, and selectively self-sequestered Ukrainians. The observant eye and courageous pen of Giffen produce an exquisite exposé of rurality. [End Page 549] A thoughtful afterword by Gerald Friesen situates the Giffen report in its historical context. It provides the personal history of Giffen, considers Premier Garson's pragmatic and non-populist 'Manitoba' politics, analyses the commissioners' worldviews, and emphasizes Harold Innis's leadership on the Commission. In the process the collision of rural and urban cultures, cultural impact of electronic media, and government's role in shaping a particular kind of cultural citizenship are illuminated and their meanings pondered. Readers will choose their own response to Giffen's work. For some it will mark an ethnography of mid-twentieth-century rurality, rich enough perhaps to help reinvigorate Canada's languishing rural historiography. Others will see a philosophically charged, timely treatise on the nature of cultural citizenship. Most will...