COR Paper Development Workshop

Friday, May 6, 2022

12:00-1:30pm

SBSG 1517

“Reporting Wrongdoing”

By Patrick Bergemann (Assistant Professor, Paul Merage School of Business)

Discussants:

Irene Vega (Assistant Professor, Sociology, Social Sciences)

Val Jenness (Distinguished Professor, Criminology, Law and Society, Social Ecology)

Lunch will be provided.

Please RSVP to cor@uci.edu for lunch order and to receive the paper to read before the workshop.

Abstract

In many settings, witnesses of wrongdoing can report to internal authorities such as managers within an organization, or to external authorities such as the police. Yet why they report to one versus the other is not well established. In this paper, we introduce the concept of alignment to demonstrate that witnesses’ categorization of perpetrators as in-group or out-group members and prevailing categorizations within the social environment matter for reporting behavior. When wrongdoers are viewed as in-group members by witnesses and other group members, individuals tend to report to internal authorities. When wrongdoers are viewed as out-group members by witnesses and other group members, individuals tend to report to external authorities. When views are misaligned, reporting is less likely to occur. We evaluate this theory using the extreme case of villagers’ reporting of illegal Taliban activity in Afghanistan in 2017 and 2018, where observers of crimes could report to external authorities such as the National Police, to internal authorities such as village elders, or to no one at all. Situating individuals within their social context shows how responses to wrongdoing arise from the interaction between self and others, as wrongdoing becomes defined as either a local or a more general problem.

You are invited to attend…

SPEAKER: Laura Adler, PhD Candidate in Sociology, Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University

TITLE: “From the Job’s Worth to the Person’s Price: The Transformation of Organizational Pay Practices since 1950”

DATE AND TIME: Friday, April 15, 2022 at 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM PDT

LOCATION: SB1 2321(Judy Rosener Flexible Classroom); Zoom link:
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://uci.zoom.us/j/94617716622__;!!CzAuKJ42GuquVTTmVmPViYEvSg!Ks4qqRo_irPHFyqNrtgZDF67R5KSw0XVd4DZ_Yf3ZhBMjBZdkFM9pKaVDKwJLFP_lYslN_5nrPt6ca0lzQ$  [1]

TALK ABSTRACT: This article examines a major historical change in employers’ pay-setting practices. In the postwar decades, most U.S. employers used bureaucratic tools to measure the worth of each job. Starting in the 1980s, employers abandoned these practices and relied instead on external market data to assess the price of a candidate. In doing so, organizations tied employee pay more tightly to the external labor market. This presents a puzzle for organizational theories, which propose that organizations aim to buffer internal functions from the environment. To describe this shift, I use a new database of 1,059 publications from the Society of Human Resources Management and 83 interviews with compensation professionals. These data highlight the role of law. When the U.S. courts rejected comparable worth lawsuits in the 1980s, their decisions created an opportunity for employers to reduce liability for discrimination by relying on external, market data. Those legal decisions encouraged employers to abandon bureaucratic methods. The analysis identifies market coupling–using the market to distance organizations from discriminatory outcomes–as a response to the law and highlights how the comparable worth movement backfired by facilitating a change in organizational practices that entrenched inequalities.

SPEAKER BIO: Laura Adler is a PhD candidate in Sociology (expected 2022). Her dissertation examines how organizations set pay for new employees, identifying organizational practices and moral narratives that produce and legitimize gender pay inequality. Past research examines the preference for precarious work among aspiring artists. Laura has built on a background in urban planning in her research and teaching, with papers on the role of physical space on the formation of social ties (with Mario Small) and city efforts to regulate the platform economy. Prior to beginning her PhD, Laura received a Masters in City Planning from the University of California, Berkeley, and worked for the New York City’s Department of Information Technology.

Links:
——
[1]
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://uci.zoom.us/j/94617716622__;!!CzAuKJ42GuquVTTmVmPViYEvSg!OVwIZgRiYGQsQpmN__r65eDXDsp-VjBpYucDiuKFHHFI5aj_rV6Zmdp1VymDVKTnRXV0xdiekXHOjsyo8g$

You are invited to a talk of interest to the COR community…

Today! Friday, April 8

12:00-1:15pm

Location: SSPB 4250 (in person)

Via Zoom: Meeting ID: 976 9640 1763

https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://uci.zoom.us/j/97696401763__;!!CzAuKJ42GuquVTTmVmPViYEvSg!PTbsESS9mslnV6NooStjf5vSoHVnKMW-7znDx95vHdPSOc4NdH2omiPyuJuWuATyw0n6HWN5wU0$  [1]

The Problem of Class Abstraction: Culture and Class Formation in Social Theory

– Michael A. McCarthy

ABSTRACT: With renewed critical interest in capitalism, class analysis has returned to the intellectual agenda of social theory. Yet the enlivened debate about the significance of class has brought a familiar criticism, that of “class reductionism.” In this paper we argue that class reductionism is best broken down into two analytically distinct components, what we term the structural and political primacy of class. Structural primacy concerns the role of class structure in social explanation. Political primacy concerns the role played by class subjectivities in radical social transformation. This distinction allows us to identify four intellectual traditions with respect to the significance of class in social theory: relativism, constructivism, abstractionism and dynamism. The aim of this paper is not to defend Marxism against its detractors within this conceptual space. Instead, it is to differentiate class abstractionism and class dynamism as analytically coherent alternatives within Marxism, broadly construed. Through an engagement with recent theoretical contributions about class structure and class formation, we argue that class abstractionism
reproduces weaknesses inherited from “orthodox” Marxism and offers an impoverished account of collective action. Such a view rests on an argument for the structural primacy of class that is unduly abstract and thereby assumes its political primacy in subjective terms. We instead sketch the contours of an alternative that is dynamic, conjunctural and explicitly attentive to the role played by non-class structures and subjectivities in processes of class formation.

BIO: Michael A. McCarthy (Berggruen Fellow, University of Southern California and Associate Professor of Sociology at Marquette University) works on power, finance and economic democracy. He is the author of_Dismantling Solidarity: Capitalist Politics and American Pensions since the New Deal_ (Cornell University Press, 2017) and has written for journals such as the _Annual Review of Sociology_, _Critical Historical Studies_, _Labor Studies Journal_, _Mobilization_, _Politics & Society_
and _Socio-Economic Review_. He is currently undertaking several projects on economic justice, including two books. One is on
democratizing finance, tentatively titled _The Master’s Tools: Using Finance Against Capitalism_, and the other on the social theory of the late sociologist, Erik Olin Wright.

Links:
——
[1]
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/uci.zoom.us/j/97696401763__;!!CzAuKJ42GuquVTTmVmPViYEvSg!PHm1Eb0GSHEUdhDKZoGiVdHEulfNH-duHf_Hu4rV9h0Uci8tenzX_csnOZ-BYWEjR12tIj1CUY0PhzA$