Jeffrey J. Sallaz

Pathways to meaning: a new approach to studying emotions at work.

Research on the emotional consequences of interactive service work remains inconclusive in large part because scholars have not analyzed the mechanisms that lead frontline employees to adopt the meanings disseminated by their employers. The authors argue that the theoretical framework best suited for remedying this situation is the negotiated order perspective. It suggests that whether employees adopt a corporate‐sanctioned meaning, and with what emotional effect, depends on the conjunction of several social conditions. The authors also propose a novel analytical strategy that can identify these conditional pathways and formalize the combinatorial logic of the negotiated order perspective: fuzzy‐set techniques. To illustrate the utility of this approach, the article examines a university hospital that has tried to create a more meaningful and emotionally rewarding work environment for its nursing staff. Consistent with expectations, findings show that employees can embrace the same corporate‐sanctioned meaning under different sets of conditions and with different emotional consequences.

Permanent Pedagogy: How Post-Fordist Firms Generate Effort but Not Consent

We lack a compelling account of the post-Fordist labor process. When firms can no longer provide secure jobs at good pay, how do they motivate workers? Rather than a return to despotism, this ethnography of call center work documents a novel system of indirect control. New employees are rushed onto the production floor, where their lack of preparation discomfits them and motivates them to play an autonomous learning game. Although initially generative of effort, the game is difficult to master and offers few rewards for sustained participation. Intense effort and high attrition coexist, a management system that the author labels permanent pedagogy.

Service Labor and Symbolic Power On Putting Bourdieu to Work

The subfield that is the sociology of service labor continues to generate vibrant internal dialogue. It was the author’s original intent to push forward the frontier of theory within this field, by performing an ethnography of service work in a non-American context (that of post-apartheid South Africa). Once in the field, however, he found himself moving backward as he was forced to problematize basic assumptions concerning the very category of service. In brief, the author discovered that managers in a competitive tourism industry refused to label their employees’ interactive labor as “service,” whereas workers themselves actively advocated for such a designation. To document the interplay between material and symbolic politics of production, the author turned to the work of Pierre Bourdieu—especially his theory of political representation and the accompanying concept of nomination struggles.

Politics of Organizational Adornment Lessons from Las Vegas and Beyond

Practices of design, although integral to contemporary capitalism, are too often overlooked by economic sociologists. To remedy this, I study a novel technology of organizational adornment: theming. Case data drawn from the global casino industry reveal that theming has diffused worldwide as standard business practice. Close examination, however, reveals divergence across jurisdictions in terms of the meanings that themes convey. These patterns derive from neither successful marketing (i.e., customizing design for consumers) nor symbolic isomorphism (i.e., signaling deference to global norms). In line with the markets-as-politics paradigm, I analyze design as a field-specific conception of control. In this view, themes signal to particular constituencies that one is a certain kind of organization (and not another). The makeup of these signals and audiences—that is, what counts as socially legitimate action—will depend on the political field in which a firm is embedded. Results demonstrate the explanatory power of markets-as-politics and also extend this theory by elucidating the performative mechanisms that bridge economic and political domains.

Rethinking Power in Organizations, Institutions, and Markets: Classical Perspectives, Current Research, and the Future Agenda

Power and domination once occupied center stage in organizational sociology. But as the field developed, the concept of power was marginalized and its overall significance for the drama of organization life neglected. Normative critiques of domination were recast as puzzles of obedience to authority, while scholars wishing to study the concrete workings of power regimes found themselves groping in the shadows. In this introduction, we advocate putting power and domination back on the agenda. Following the lead of classical theorists of power, we argue that organizations should be seen as scenes of struggles and as political projects to be constantly achieved and reconstructed. We critique structural and abstract perspectives that neglect the constant engagement of people in the negotiation of rules, meanings, and destinies. And we survey novel ideas that can help us to see power not as an abstract entity but as a pattern of interactions and social relationships that is instantiated in specific projects of domination and resistance. It is through this lens that power studies can be reinvigorated.

Work: Four Worlds and Ways of Seeing

Organizations are spaces and places of work. In this introductory essay to the Special Issue of Organization Studies dedicated to ‘Worlds of Work’, we lay out our vision for placing the study of work and workers back at the centre of organization studies. We advance four inter-related work-world metaphors or ways of seeing organizations: as physical worlds, as worlds of hierarchy, as spaces of innovation, and as fields of actors. Research that puts work at the centre of organizational analysis, and places organization within its context of economy, politics and society, will provide important new insights into the experience of work and nature of contemporary organization. Such an agenda will be founded on both a recognition of the socially constructed nature of these phenomena and their dialectics, tracing how these tensions play out in new and hybrid forms.

Faith's wager: How religion deters gambling

The relationship between religion and gambling has only rarely been investigated in sociology and related fields. Prior studies have found that religion, broadly defined, deters gambling, with different religious traditions exhibiting varying degrees of deterrence. Our study, a quantitative analysis of a recent representative sample of U.S. adults, theorizes and tests how three different dimensions of religion affect three distinct forms of gambling. Religious tradition and religious service attendance are found to reduce the likelihood of casino gambling and lottery play; while religious salience is the only dimension that constrains online gambling. We argue that these findings reflect variation in the social visibility, time intensity, and broader legitimacy associated with gambling forms, and that this variation is crucial for understanding the deterring effects of faith.

Exit Tales: How Precarious Workers Navigate Bad Jobs

Why do some workers quit undignified “bad jobs,” while others persist in them? We know a great deal about how people find employment, along with what they do at work. But we have few studies documenting the lived experience of quitting a bad job. Recent structural transformations, such as the demise of Fordism and the curtailment of welfare, have surely recalibrated the strategies by which precarious individuals navigate the labor market. This article, an ethnography that follows a single cohort of call center employees over nine months, documents four main pathways through which such workers leave versus stay in their jobs. It argues that the emergent class of precarious workers is not homogenous. Gender, race, and age intersect with class to shape how one experiences a given bad job.

From the Margins to the Mainstream The Curious Convergence of Pierre Bourdieu and US Sociology

xThe late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is a prominent figure in the field of sociology in the United States today. Practically all of his major empirical monographs have been translated into English. His writings are regularly cited in articles appearing in the discipline’s main journals. Several books about his life and work have been published by major American university presses. And, perhaps most tellingly, many of his major concepts have entered the general sociological lexicon in the United States. One need not be a specialist in culture or education to understand the significance of “cultural capital” for reproducing inequality across generations. No longer a philosophical or social psychological oddity, the idea of the “habitus” informs research across a variety of subfields. And few are the sociologists in the US today who are not familiar with Bourdieu’s use of the “field” concept to describe various meso-social orders. The extent to which the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu have been integrated into and become integral to the practice of sociology in the US today can be considering surprising for a number of reasons. His work is highly theoretical and integrates ideas from a variety of fields; while US sociology has long been characterized as an empirical and relatively insular discipline [Ross 1991; Gulbenkian Commission 1996]. Indeed, US sociology has proved relatively impermeable to several other Francophonic traditions (the early canonization of Emile Durkheim notwithstanding), for the most

Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call CentresWorking the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centres, by WoodcockJamie. London: Pluto Press, 2017. 200 pp.

to purchase vast tracts of land. Finally, he traces the uneven adoption of agricultural biotechnology, which is common in maize but rare in wheat and rice, to the relatively uncompetitive character of global feed grain markets. As noted above, Grains does not aspire to report on new research but to provide a concise introduction to the global political economy of several keystone agricultural commodities. It accomplishes this task and provides a useful framework for understanding the challenging issues of food security and sovereignty in the contemporary world. Given the complexity of the topic and the brevity of the book, it is inevitable that some readers will finish the book wishing for a deeper exploration in certain areas. For example, Winders might have extended his discussion through a more extensive consideration of how political and market forces have shaped the biological characteristics of commodity wheat, rice, and maize. The book’s discussion of genetic engineering moves in this direction, but Winders does not consider the lengthy history of seed breeding and selection that also reduced the diversity of these grain crops to just a few varieties. Close readers will also note that the book suffers from problems of copyediting, although the responsibility here lies with the press rather than the author. In all, Grains will be a helpful text for use in courses about the political economy of agriculture and may provide a useful introduction for researchers who are beginning to work in this area.