Faculty Books
Wendy Espeland
Professor
1808 Chicago Avenue
Room 207
Phone: (847) 467-1252
wne741@northwestern.edu
Office Hours: By Appointment Only
Areas of Interest
Cultural Sociology
Organizations-formal/complex
Qualitative Methodology
Relevant Link
Biography
Professor Wendy Espeland works in the areas of organizations, culture, and law. Her book, The Struggle for Water: Politics, Rationality and Identity in the American Southwest was awarded the Best Book Prize by the Culture Section of the American Sociological Association, the Rachel Carson Award from the Society for the Social Studies of Science, and the Louis Brownlow Book Award from the National Academy of Public Administration.
Espeland is currently writing a book about the effects of commensuration, the process of translating qualities into quantities. In it she investigates how media rankings have influenced higher education, how efforts to measure homosexuality have shaped gay and lesbian politics, and the commensurative practices necessary in order to transform air pollution into a commodity that is traded on futures markets.
Courses Taught
SOCIOL 101: Freshman Seminar: Chicago Landscapes
SOCIOL 306: Sociological Theory Syllabus Syllabus
SOCIOL 376: The Politics of Scarcity
SOCIOL 376: Numbers, Identity, and Modernity
Syllabus
SOCIOL 406-2: Modern Theory in Sociological Analysis Syllabus
Books
Fear of Falling: How Media Rankings Changed Legal Education in America (with Michael Sauder). Forthcoming, Russell Sage Foundation.
The Struggle for Water: Politics, Rationality, and Identity in the American Southwest
University Chicago Press, 1998
Publications
How Rankings Affect Diversity, Southern California Review of Law and Social Justice, 2009
Rating the Rankings (with Michael Sauder), Contexts, 2009
A Sociology of Quantification (with Mitchell Stevens), European Journal of Sociology, 2009
The Discipline of Rankings: Tight Coupling and Organizational Change (with Michael Sauder), American Sociological Review, 2009
Rankings and Reactivity: How Public Measures Recreate Social Worlds
(with Michael Sauder); American Journal of Sociology, 2007
Accountability, Quantification and Law (with Berit Vannebo), Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 2007
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Upcoming Events
Colloquium: Kate Kellogg, Sloan School of Business, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
May 23, 2013 • 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM
Colloquium: Vilma Ortiz, University of California, Los Angeles
May 30, 2013 • 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM
