Sociology PhDs on the Market
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Dissertation title: A Social History of Business Ethics
Areas of Interest:
Economic Sociology; Comparative and Historical Sociology; Theory; Sociology of Science/Knowledge; Sociology of Morality
Recent Publications:
Abend, Gabriel (In Press). "Two Main Problems in the Sociology of Morality". Theory and Society.
Abend, Gabriel (In Press). "The Meaning of 'Theory'". Sociological Theory.
Abend, Gabriel (March, 2006). "Styles of Sociological Thought: Sociologies,
Epistemologies, and the Mexican and U.S. Quests for Truth". Sociological Theory 24(1): 1-41.
Ellen Berrey
eberrey@northwestern.edu
cv (pdf)
Dissertation title: The Ideology of Diversity and the Politics of Inclusion in the Post-Civil Rights Era
Dissertation summary:
My dissertation examines the logic and political uses of diversity ideology. My comparative analysis investigates a public university, a Fortune 500 company, and a city neighborhood, documented through six years of ethnographic, interview, and archival data. The findings cover four dimensions of diversity ideology: its logic and language; its implementation through organizational rhetoric and initiatives; its role in organizational resource distribution; and its implications for political activism. Administrators, executives, politicians, and civic leaders in these sites promote a similar diversity ideology, presenting inclusion and difference as both morally good and institutionally beneficial. Decision-makers have relied on such ideas to encourage some institutional integration of disadvantaged groups, to accommodate privileged groups, and to minimize the threat of integration to their organizational interests. Building on theories of how culture shapes social inequalities, the findings demonstrate how organizational ideology and practices around diversity broaden the terms of institutional inclusion beyond race and problems of inequality, refashioning inclusion for various organizational imperatives in the neoliberal, post-civil rights era.
Areas of Interest:
Inequality, Race/Ethnicity, Culture, Cities, Law & Society, Qualitative Methods
Recent Publications:
Berrey & Nielsen, Reintegrating Identity, Law & Social Inquiry 2007
Berrey, Divided over Diversity, City & Community 2005
Berrey, The Drive for Diversity, Contexts 2004
Alan Czaplicki
a-czaplicki@northwestern.edu
cv (pdf)
Dissertation Title: The Risk of Treatment: Tuberculosis, Public Health Practice and the State
Dissertation Summary: This research examines the expansion of state control over populations in the 20th century through analyzing the development of tuberculosis control programs in Canada and the United States. These programs actively constructed systems of surveillance, treatment and risk assessment predicated on culturally-informed ideas about the appropriate limits of state and individual responsibility, the role of public health activities as a collective social good, and the risk of hidden reservoirs of “germs” and “diseased individuals.” I find that such ideas differed across the two countries, however, depending on political relationships between medical doctors and public health officials, opportunities for local governmental autonomy within federalism, and the construction of medical knowledge about tuberculosis. In this sense, the study adds to sociological understandings of how culture contributes to organizational practices and institutional change, and links medical sociology’s concerns with medicalization and the social construction of disease to social scientific analyses of the welfare state and state-formation.
The dissertation specifically focuses on the development of tuberculosis control in the cities of Vancouver and Chicago, using these cities as a lens through which to understand broader changes in state control across the two countries. Data include archival analyses of tuberculosis control and health department records from the Chicago Historical Society, the Vancouver Archives, the British Columbian archives, the Chicago Lung Association and local universities. Historical materials from the British Columbian Medical Association, the Canadian Tuberculosis Association, and the National Tuberculosis Association have also been used, in addition to twenty-five interviews (and observations) with current local and state/provincial tuberculosis control officials.
Areas of Interest: Historical-Comparative Sociology, Medical Sociology, Sociology of Risk, Welfare States, Complex Organizations
Amin Ghaziani
a-ghaziani@northwestern.edu
cv (pdf)
Dissertation Title: The Paradox of Infighting: Conflict and Culture in Lesbian and Gay Marches on Washington.
Dissertation Summary: This research compares the prevalence, role, and pattern of internal dissent or "infighting" across 4 lesbian and gay Marches on Washington staged over 20 years. The data comprise 1191 newspaper articles, 44 interviews, and hundreds of archival documents. Qualitative and quantitative analyses challenge that infighting is symptomatic of the death and decline of political organizing. The paradox of infighting is its capacity to motivate, rather than undermine, organizing efforts by assisting activists in articulating contested ideologies of group strategy and identity. The mechanism by which this occurs is the coupling of infighting with six recurring organizing tasks: whether to march, when to march, how to organize it, what to title the march, what to include in the platform, and who to invite as speakers. The coupling of infighting with these six tasks transforms them into symbols that enable activists to engage in another, abstract conversation that transcends the specifics of the tasks. Analyses also reveal that infighting is patterned across the four marches. Currents in the sociopolitical context and features within the movement inflect "structurally similar debates" (over the same six tasks) with "culturally varying scripts" (radically different, albeit patterned meanings). Study contributions are two-fold. First, I suggest that conflict is a central category for sociological analysis that may have unexpectedly positive repercussions. Second, I offer a novel framework for how culture works that liberates it from its long status of an "amorphous mist that swirls around society members."
Areas of Interest: Cultural Sociology, Political Sociology / Social Movements, Sexualities, Research Methods
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Dissertation Title:“True school: Situational Authenticity in Chicago's Hip-Hop Underground,”
Dissertation Summary: How do outsiders create and maintain authentic identities when they are deemed inauthentic by a group of insiders? To explore this question, I examine the underground (noncommercial) hip hop scene in Chicago. The insiders are young, urban, black, male rappers from the city’s urban core. The outsiders are white, female, and/or suburban rappers who want to enjoy full participation in hip hop culture, but are deemed inauthentic by the insiders. Set in one of hip hop’s cradles, Chicago offers a unique perspective that is not found in previous studies of local rap-music scenes. Blending traditional qualitative methods with visual-sociological techniques, I follow 80 rappers of various backgrounds, investigating key issues for outsiders, and the dynamic interplay between culture and authenticity. In doing so, I demonstrate how notions of “realness” and “fakeness” are generated via a rhetoric of authenticity. Exploring how this rhetoric is utilized to create, maintain, and occasionally traverse race, class, and gender-based cultural boundaries, I underscore the flexible nature of the authentic, a phenomenon I label situational authenticity. I conclude by proposing a Situational Model of Authenticity that explains how these socially constructed processes operate.
Areas of Interest: Sociology of Culture, Visual Sociology, Qualitative Methods, Race & Ethnicity, Urban Sociology
Recent Publications:
Warren C.A.B.; Barnes-Brus T.; Burgess H.; Wiebold-Lippisch L.; Hackney J.; Harkness G.; Kennedy V.; Dingwall R.; Rosenblatt P.C.; Ryen A.; Shuy R. “After the interview.” Qualitative Sociology, Vol. 26, Number 1, Spring 2003.
Steve Hoffman
s-hoffman1@northwestern.edu
cv(pdf)
Dissertation Title: The Social Organization of Simulation
Dissertation Summary: This project deepens the dialogue between interpretive social psychology, organizational theory, and science and technology studies by theorizing an organizational form that has received little systematic attention: simulation. Simulations are dynamic approximations of an indexed reality or goal state, and break down into physical and virtual modalities. The study explores both with two ethnographic cases: physical simulation in amateur boxing training and virtual/algorithmic simulation in the production of Artificial Intelligence technologies. I argue that physical simulation operates as an organizational mechanism for managing unpredictability and risk by bracketing some realism out of the frame of action. In contrast, AI scientists create cultural objects that are pre-defined as not real, and thus seek to legitimate their profession by bringing realism into the frame, or by exceeding it.
Areas of Interest: Social Psychology; Organizations; Theory; Science and Technology; Sport; Qualitative Methodology
Recent Publications:
Hoffman & Fine - Scholar's Body, Qualitative Sociology 2005.pdf
Hoffman - An Inductive Theory of Simulation, Sociological Theory June 2006.pdf
Hoffman, Steve G.-“Simulation as a Social Process in Organizations.”Sociology Compass.
(Winner, ASA Section on Social Psychology Graduate Student Paper Award)
Prasad, M., A. Perrin, K. Bezila, S. Hoffman, K. Kindleberger, K. Manturuk, A. Payton and A. Powers. Forthcoming. “The Undeserving Rich: Moral Values and the White Working Class.” Sociological Forum.
Hoffman, Steve G. Forthcoming. “The Internet.” in The Encyclopedia of the Culture Wars.
Edited by Roger Chapman. Culture Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe Inc.
Hoffman, Steve G. Forthcoming. “Operation Rescue.” in The Encyclopedia of the
Culture Wars.Edited by Roger Chapman. Armonk, NY: M.E.
Sharpe Inc.
cv(pdf)
Dissertation Title: AIDS Streetscapes: A Social Iconography of HIV/AIDS Campaigns in Chicago and Accra
Dissertation Summary : My research creates a social iconography of AIDS campaigns in Chicago and Accra – a study of the social practices, interactions, and contexts around visual symbols – to explain why some campaigns, and specifically why certain visual strategies, resonate more than others. Despite tremendous effort, campaigns often to not persuade people to change their sexual behavior or encourage tolerance towards people living with AIDS (PLWA). For instance, in Chicago vandals spray-painted over the "Kissing Doesn't Kill" campaign which depicted three couples kissing: one gay, one lesbian, and one straight and multiethnic. Ironically, the media's attention to the defaced advertisements provoked Illinois state legislators to draft a bill banning images of homosexuality from the CTA. Last year in Ghana, a national anti-stigma campaign pictured those who stigmatize against PLWA as "ridiculous" by portraying an HIV-negative man serving his HIV-positive sibling a meal on an extra-long shovel. According to Ghanaian advisors, without the "tool" of irony in the local interpretive repertoire, the Ghanaian advisors felt that the ad would encourage stigmatization against PLWA. To understand how these campaigns resonated in ways contrary to their intentions I rely on a variety of methods: participant observation of AIDS campaign design, interviews within public health organizations and with local civic and religious leaders, group interviews within the local community, ethnography and photographic documentation of campaigns amidst the urban streetscape. Examining the links between visual culture and the social pathology of AIDS, with a focus on meaning and interpretation, contributes to fields as diverse as public health, media studies, cultural sociology, and the sociology of knowledge.
Areas of Interest: Cultural Sociology, Media Studies, Gender and Sexuality, Urban Studies, Social Movements, Health/HIV and AIDS, Qualitative Methods
Recent Publications:
Fine, Gary Alan, and Terence McDonnell. 2007. "Erasing the Brown Scare: Referential Afterlife and the Power of Memory Templates." Social Problems. 54: 170-187.
Griswold, Wendy, Erin Metz McDonnell, and Terence E. McDonnell. 2007. "Glamour and Honor: Going Online and Reading in West African Culture." Information Technology and International Development. 3: 37-52.
Griswold, Wendy, Terry McDonnell, and Nathan Wright. 2005. "Readers and Reading
in the Twenty-First Century." Annual Review of Sociology. 31: 127-41.
Amit Nigam
a-nigam@kellogg.northwestern.edu
cv (pdf)
Dissertation Title: The transformation of professional control: changing approaches to healthcare quality in the shift to managed care
Areas of Interest: Organizational Sociology, Sociology of Professions, Economic Sociology
Pavel Osinsky
p-osinsky@northwestern.edu
cv (pdf)
Dissertation Title: A State Under Siege: Military Origins of Command Economies
Dissertation Summary :
This dissertation develops a war-centered theory of collectivist regimes. I argue that in a large-scale industrial war of coalition alliances, exterior states restrict interior states in their access to international markets. In such conditions, even most radical measures of economic mobilization undertaken by interior states cannot compensate losses of imports. Deprived of free access to global markets, interior states experience shortages of goods, social unrest, military setbacks, and, due to the combined effect of these aggravating conditions, state breakdown. A total collapse of state authority unleashes coercive redistributive action of the lower classes directed against the better-off classes and culminates in seizure of power by a radical political coalition, which institutionalizes popular redistribution through nationalization of economic assets by the state. My comparative analysis of five European states (Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Great Britain, and Russia) during World War One (1914-1918) supports the war-centered argument. The exterior nations that maintained access to the world economy (France and Great Britain) survived total war. The interior states (Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia) experienced breakdown. In Russia, where the old system of authority had become completely paralyzed, the state collapse resulted in massive redistribution of economic assets and institutionalization of the collectivist form of social organization.
Areas of Interest:
Global Development, Comparative Historical Sociology, Political Sociology, Social Theory
Recent Publications:
Osinsky, Pavel. Forthcoming. “War, State Collapse, Redistribution: Russian and German Revolutions Revisited.” Political Power and Social Theory 18.
Halliday, Terence C. and Pavel Osinsky. 2006. "Globalization of Law." The Annual Review of Sociology 32: 447-470.
Osinsky, Pavel and Charles W. Mueller. 2004. “Professional Commitment of Russian Provincial Specialists.”
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Dissertation Title: Consciousness in the Environmental Movement
Dissertation Summary: Using interviews with environmental activists, I examine how activists understand social change. In particular, I identify schemas of social change that activists employ to make sense of cultural objects relevant to their activism, such as environmentalism and law. The interviews reveal variations of consciousness in which different schemas are used or blended together to place objects such as environmentalism and law into coherent frameworks. These frameworks form the basis for their strategies for social change.
Areas of Interest: Sociology of Law, Environmental Sociology, Sociology of Religion, Multi-method Research, Social Psychology of Collective Behavior/Social Movements (Consciousness Studies).
Recent Publications:
Joanna Reed
j-reed2@northwestern.edu
cv (pdf)
Dissertation Title: A Closer Look at Unmarried Parenthood: Relationships, Meanings, Trajectories and Gender
Dissertation Summary: My dissertation is a qualitative study of unmarried parents. I use four years of interview data from 48 couples to explore their relationship trajectories and stability, what marriage, cohabitation and parenthood mean to them, and how gender shapes their practices and relationships. While new national studies have revealed much about unmarried parenthood, there are still many knowledge gaps. I fill some of these by showing how how unmarried parents’ relationships fare and change over time, what keeps them together and pushes them apart and what their relationships mean to them. I discuss the implications of unmarried parenthood for society and the adults and children who experience their family this way. Several factors have combined to make unmarried parenthood in the U.S. a complicated and politically charged topic. Although about one third of all U.S. births now occur to unmarried couples, this change has affected Americans unequally. Those advantaged by income, education and race tend to still be married when they give birth, while having children outside of marriage is strongly related to lower educational attainment. This, along with consistent research findings that marriage confers advantages on children, has led many researchers and policy makers to view unmarried parenthood as a social problem. I try to cast a wider net by engaging with the ambivalence and flux in the data and situating unmarried families in their historical and institutional contexts. I also incorporate theory from gender, culture, and modernity in my analyses.
Areas of Interest: Families, Inequality, Gender, Culture, Qualitative Methods, Immigration,Theory
Recent Publications:
Reed, J. 2007. “Anatomy of the Break-Up: How and Why do Unmarried Parents Break-up?” Unmarried Couples with Children, edited by Paula
England and Kathryn Edin. Russell Sage Foundation, New York. (forthcoming)
Edin, K., England, P, Schafer, E & Reed, J. 2007.“Planned, Accidental or Somewhere
in Between: Pregnancy Intentionality among Unmarried Couples.” Unmarried Couples with Children, edited by Paula England and Kathryn Edin. Russell Sage Foundation, New York. (forthcoming)
Reed, J. 2006. “Not Crossing the Extra Line: How Cohabitors with Children View their
Unions.” Journal of Marriage and Family, 68(5) 1117-1131
Reed, J., Pashup, J., and Snell, E. 2005. “Voucher Use, Labor Force
Participation and Life Priorities: Findings from the Gautreaux Two Housing
Mobility Study”. Cityscape, Vol. 8, no. 2, pp.219-239
Edin, K., & Reed, J. 2005. “Why Don’t They Just Get Married? Barriers
to Marriage Among the Disadvantaged.” The Future of Children, Vol. 15, no.2, pp. 117-137
Edin, K., Kefalas, M., & Reed, J. 2004. “A Peek Inside the Black Box:
What Marriage Means for Poor Unmarried Parents.” Journal of Marriage and Family, 67: 1007-14
