Community-Based Learning Commons^™

Local Governance Of Immigrant Incorporation: How City-Based Organizational Fields Shape The Cases Of Undocumented Youth In New York City And Paris, Stephen P. Ruszczyk

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

City-based organizations and governments play an important role in incorporating undocumented immigrant youth. This article investigates how localities sociopolitically incorporate these immigrants by examining the governance constellations and institutional logics of the organizational field that manages undocumented youth. Comparing sets of municipal and civil society organizations in different national settings, I use the two cases of New York City and Paris to ask how the ‘city-based organizational field of immigrant incorporation’ shapes citizenship experiences of undocumented youth. Data come from multi-level longitudinal ethnography over 8 years with two dozen undocumented youth and with organizations in each city as well as …

Should Sociologists Stand Up For Science? Absolutely!, Janet M. Ruane

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Standing up for science is part of sociology's mission as a social science. Standing up is also consistent with our field's ethical obligation to identify and avoid research compromised by conflict of interests.

Race, The Condition Of Neo-Liberalism, Vikash Singh

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This article addresses the social and historical relation between Chicago School neo-liberalism and contemporary racism, and its connections with the formations of racism in classical liberalism and its colonial character. I show the pragmatic and discursive operations of neo-racism in the context of this shift to a neo-liberal discourse, drawing particularly on Michel Foucault’s seminars, Society Must be Defended, and Birth of Bio-politics. Insofar as “race” cannot be understood as a discrete category outside its social, economic, moral, and political embeddedness in liberalism, I argue that methodological individualism and expectations of high-specialization constrain the theorization of race in U.S. scholarship. …

Race, The Condition Of Neo-Liberalism, Vikash Singh

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This article addresses the social and historical relation between Chicago School neo-liberalism and contemporary racism, and its connections with the formations of racism in classical liberalism and its colonial character. I show the pragmatic and discursive operations of neo-racism in the context of this shift to a neo-liberal discourse, drawing particularly on Michel Foucault’s seminars, Society Must be Defended, and Birth of Bio-politics. Insofar as “race” cannot be understood as a discrete category outside its social, economic, moral, and political embeddedness in liberalism, I argue that methodological individualism and expectations of high-specialization constrain the theorization of race in U.S. scholarship. …

Religious Practice And The Phenomenology Of Everyday Violence In Contemporary India, Vikash Singh

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This article focuses on ‘dread’ in religious practice in contemporary India. It argues that the dread of everyday existence, which is as salient in a biographical temporality as it pervades the phenomenal environment, connects and transfers between religious practices and everyday life in India for the marginalized masses. For such dread, dominant liberal discourses, such as those of the nation, economy, or ego-centric performance, have neither the patience nor the forms to represent, perform, and abreact. Formulated in dialogue with critical theory, phenomenology, and psychoanalytic theory, this article conceives of religious practices in continuum with the economic, social, ethical, and …

Professional Deceit: Normal Lying In An Occupational Setting, Janet M. Ruane, Karen Cerulo

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Normal lies are those that social actors legitimate as appropriate means to desirable outcomes. Such lies have been acknowledged in the literature as tools for maintaining social order. Yet, little has been done to document the social structural sources of normal lying. This paper offers a first step in filling this research gap, examining aspects of occupational structure and their connection to the practice of normal lying. Specifically, we discuss four dimensions of occupational structure — occupational rewards and entry requirements, occupational loyalties, social control styles within an occupation, and an occupation's level of professionalization — and we explore the …

A Multicultural Grassroots Effort To Reduce Ethnic And Racial Social Distance Among Middle School Students, Christopher Donoghue, David Brandwein

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Raising tolerance for people of different ethnic and racial groups is the goal of the Multicultural Mosaic program, a grass-roots multicultural education effort initiated by a small group of middle school teachers in a private school in the northeast. After years of enjoying the comforts of a modern, but European-based, curriculum, these teachers took the initiative to pursue an ambitious transformation of their entire school's approach to pedagogy. Not only would the English teachers introduce new texts by foreign authors and the social studies teachers introduce new materials on the history of non-Western cultures, but also the teachers of mathematics …

Leadership Styles Of Nursing Home Administrators And Their Association With Staff Turnover, Christopher Donoghue, Nicholas G. Castle

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the associations between nursing home administrator (NHA) leadership style and staff turnover.

Design and Methods: We analyzed primary data from a survey of 2,900 NHAs conducted in 2005. The Online Survey Certification and Reporting database and the Area Resource File were utilized to extract organizational and local economic characteristics of the facilities. A general linear model (GLM) was used to estimate the effects of NHA leadership style, organizational characteristics, and local economic characteristics on nursing home staff turnover for registered nurses (RNs), licensed practical nurses (LPNs), and nurse’s aides (NAs).

Results: …

Marginalized By Race And Place: Occupational Sex Segregation In Post-Apartheid South Africa, Sangeeta Parashar

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Racial and gender disparities found in most other societies are particularly magnified in South Africa where the marginalized social group constitutes a numerical majority of the population. These factors, along with region, are dominant axes of inequality in the country. However, empirical knowledge of the interplay between these systems of social inequality in determining employment outcomes remains somewhat scant. This dissertation addresses that gap by studying occupational sex segregation across various racial groups using multilevel modeling techniques. Individual-level data from the 2001 Census and magisterial-level data from survey data aggregations and published sources are used. I first study the influence …

Marginalized By Race And Place: Occupational Sex Segregation In Post-Apartheid South Africa, Sangeeta Parashar

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Purpose: Given South Africa’s apartheid history, studies have primarily focused on racial discrimination in employment outcomes, with lesser attention paid to gender and context. This paper fills an important gap by examining the combined effect of macro-and micro-level factors on occupational sex segregation in post-apartheid South Africa. Intersections by race are also explored. Design/methodology/approach A multilevel multinomial logistic regression is used to examine the influence of various supply and demand variables on women’s placement in white- and blue-collar male-dominated occupations. Data from the 2001 Census and other published sources are used, with women nested in magisterial districts. Findings Demand-side results …

The Once And Future Information Society, James B. Rule, Yasemin Besen-Cassino

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

In the late twentieth century, many social scientists and other social commentators came to characterize the world as evolving into an “information society.” Central to these claims was the notion that new social uses of information, and particularly application of scientific knowledge, are transforming social life in fundamental ways. Among the supposed transformations are the rise of intellectuals in social importance, growing productivity and prosperity stemming from increasingly knowledge-based economic activity, and replacement of political conflict by authoritative, knowledge-based decision-making. We trace these ideas to their origins in the Enlightenment doctrines of Saint Simon and Comte, show that empirical support …

Voluntary And Involuntary Nursing Home Staff Turnover, Christopher Donoghue, Nicholas G. Castle

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The goal of this study was to identify nursing home characteristics that have differential associations to voluntary and involuntary turnover among formal caregivers (i.e., registered nurses, licensed practical nurses, and nurse aides). Primary data from 354 facilities from four states were merged with data from the 2004 Online Survey, Certification and Recording system. Multinomial logistic regression analyses were conducted to determine whether organizational characteristics were related to a greater probability of high or low levels of voluntary and involuntary turnover among formal caregivers. The analysis revealed that a higher ratio of nurses to beds, a smaller number of quality-of-care deficiencies, …