Michael Sauder

Logics in Action Managing Institutional Complexity in a Drug Court

Drawing on a 15-month ethnographic study of a drug court, we investigate how actors from different institutional and professional backgrounds employ logical frameworks in their micro-level interactions and thus how logics affect day-to-day organizational activity. While institutional theory presumes that professionals closely adhere to the logics of their professional groups, we find that actors exercise a great deal of agency in their everyday use of logics, both in terms of which logics they adopt and for what purpose. Available logics closely resemble tools that can be creatively employed by actors to achieve individual and organizational goals. A close analysis of court negotiations allowed us to identify the logics that are available to these actors, show how they are employed, and demonstrate how their use affects the severity of the court’s decisions. We examine the ways in which professionals with four distinct logical orientations—the logics of criminal punishment, rehabilitation, community accountability, and efficiency—use logics to negotiate decisions in a drug court. We provide evidence of the discretionary use of these logics, specifying the procedural, definitional, and dispositional constraints that limit actors’ discretion and propose an explanation for why professionals stray from their “home” logics and “hijack” the logics of other court actors. Examining these micro-level processes improves our understanding of how local actors use logics to manage institutional complexity, reach consensus, and get the work of the court done.

Interlopers and Field Change: The Entry of U.S. News into the Field of Legal Education

This article analyzes a process by which established organizational fields change through the incorporation of new field-level actors. Drawing on 137 in-depth interviews with U.S. law school administrators and faculty, the paper demonstrates how the U.S. News & World Report rankings of law schools gained a foothold in the field of legal education, how the dynamics of the field helped entrench the field position of USN and its rankings despite spirited opposition from key actors, and how these same dynamics explain how a seemingly minor change—the addition of a single actor to the roster of existing field actors—transformed many aspects of this field. A close examination of this new model of field change enhances field theory by underscoring how field characteristics, such as the interconnections among actors and the web of mutual influence that these imply, themselves can facilitate change. Substantively, this research provides insight into the way that those who measure, credential, or certify key field actors and activities can achieve pervasive influence over the fields they evaluate.

SYMBOLS AND CONTEXTS: An Interactionist Approach to the Study of Social Status

This article proposes an interactionist framework for the study of status stratification. This framework returns the focus of status research to how status works, especially emphasizing the symbolic and contextual aspects integral to the concept. By closely examining how status is indicated, how it is employed, and how it is maintained or changed over time, an interactionist approach provides an explanation on how status affects both individual and organizational behavior—an explanation that is currently lacking in status research. In addition, the development of this framework provides an argument against critics of interactionism who question whether this perspective can contribute to the study of social stratification. This article makes evident that status stratification, with its intimate ties to the symbols and contexts, proves to be an area of study ideally suited to the interactionist perspective.

Football as a Status System in U.S. Higher Education

Sociologists have focused almost exclusively on academic aspects of status in higher education, despite the prominence of nonacademic activities, specifically athletics, in U.S. colleges and universities. We use the case of football to investigate whether intercollegiate sports influence the distribution of status in U.S. higher education. Analyzing data on conference affiliations and other organizational characteristics of 287 schools over time, we find evidence of an athletic status system. Our work expands understanding of status in U.S. higher education, enriches prior explanations for the prominence of football, and generates tractable insights about the ongoing evolution of the intercollegiate conference system.

Styles of causal thought: an empirical investigation

While most work on causation in ethnography addresses the normative question of what ethnographers should do, this article addresses the empirical question of what ethnographers actually do. Specifically, it investigates whether ethnographic articles make causal arguments and how these arguments are made. The authors draw on a content analysis of 48 ethnographic articles sampled from four groups of sociological journals: contemporary generalist journals, contemporary specialist journals, mid-20th-century generalist journals—all in the United States—and contemporary generalist journals in Mexico. They find that ethnographies in U.S. contemporary generalist journals are most likely to advance strong and central causal claims and to use logical and rhetorical devices comparable to those used in quantitative articles. They also find that most Mexican ethnographic articles undertake a different kind of project, which they call “shedding light” on social phenomena. In addition to offering one methodological and one substantive suggestion to account for these findings, the authors highlight their implications for the sociology of social science.

Producing Textbook Sociology

The conservative role of the textbook in reproducing the dominant ideas of a disciplinary field is well known. The factors driving that content have remained almost entirely unexamined. Reviewing the universe of textbooks aimed at the American market between 1998 and 2004, we explore the persistence of the identification in American sociology textbooks of a paradigm in which structural functionalism, conflict theory, and symbolic interactionism are used to frame the theoretical core of the discipline. We examine how over time the textbook market produces both supply and demand pressures to reproduce content that is at odds with the mainstream of the profession. We draw upon in-depth interviews with recent textbook authors and their editors.

Systems of Evaluation and the Matthew Effect

Existing research on the Matthew Effect establishes that this dynamic can alter information flow and the distribution of rewards in ways that lead to cumulating advantages for high status actors. We know little, however, about how systems of evaluation, and especially variations in systems of evaluations, influence the expression and strength of these outcomes. Drawing on analyses of the effects of rankings on organizations, I consider how different evaluation contexts can change both audience perceptions about which organizations are award worthy and the definition of merit on which reward distributions are based.

Evaluation of Barriers to Audit-and-Feedback Programs That Used Direct Observation of Hand Hygiene Compliance: A Qualitative Study

Key Points Question How have audit-and-feedback programs based on direct observations of hand hygiene compliance been implemented in real-world settings? Findings In this qualitative study of 108 hospital staff members in 10 acute care hospitals, the use of audit and feedback to improve hand hygiene compliance was problematic. Auditing by direct observation was perceived to collect inaccurate data and created tension with frontline staff, and the feedback process did not appear to encourage positive change. Meaning Strategies are needed to collect more reliable hand hygiene data and facilitate multidisciplinary collaboration toward improved hand hygiene compliance.

A qualitative assessment of the smoking policies and cessation activities at smaller workplaces

BackgroundTo reduce the negative consequences of smoking, workplaces have adopted and implemented anti-smoking initiatives. Compared to large workplaces, less research exists about these initiatives at smaller workplaces, which are more likely to hire low-wage workers with higher rates of smoking. The purpose of this study was to describe and compare the smoking policies and smoking cessation activities at small (20–99 employees) and very small (< 20 employees) workplaces.MethodsThirty-two key informants coming from small and very small workplaces in Iowa completed qualitative telephone interviews. Data collection occurred between October 2016 and February 2017. Participants gave descriptions of the anti-smoking initiatives at their workplace. Additional interview topics included questions on enforcement, reasons for adoption, and barriers and facilitators to adoption and implementation. The data were analyzed using counts and content and thematic analysis.ResultsWorkplace smoking policies were nearly universal (n = 31, 97%), and most workplaces (n = 21, 66%) offered activities to help employees quit smoking. Reasons for adoption included the Iowa Smokefree Air Act, to improve employee health, and organizational benefits (e.g., reduced insurance costs). Few challenges existed to adoption and implementation. Commonly cited facilitators included the Iowa Smokefree Air Act, no issues with compliance, and support from others. Compared to small workplaces, very small workplaces offered cessation activities less often and had fewer tobacco policy restrictions.ConclusionsThis study showed well-established tobacco control efforts in small workplaces, but very small workplaces lagged behind. To reduce potential health disparities in smoking, future research and intervention efforts in tobacco control should focus on very small workplaces.

The Modern Research University

In the early 1990s, there were few institutions more criticized by the typical sociologist than the World Bank. The World Bank (henceforth ‘‘Bank’’), along with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the U.S. government, and other international organizations had pushed structural adjustment programs onto developing countries in the 1980s. Developing countries were coerced into budget cuts and austerity, retrenchments of social programs, strict monetary policies, and a host of other neoliberal plans. This bold policy experiment occurred because of the leverage these organizations had on developing countries, which were faced with balance of payments crises, massive debt, and stagnant economies. In what was a rather dramatic set of failures, however, these prescriptions were rarely effective. Most of Latin America did not grow at all in the 1980s, Africa experienced a notable decline, and the East Asian success stories often succeeded by foregoing the involvement and advice of organizations like the Bank. Countries like Argentina that did follow the neoliberal game plan carefully, hardly saw the success that was promised. In short, after the 1980s, many viewed the Bank with a great deal of skepticism. In the years that followed, the Bank seemed to diverge from the IMF and other members of the Washington Consensus. While working at the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz vocally criticized the IMF for its poor management of the Asian financial crisis, and the Bank seemed to reprioritize on poverty reduction. By the late 1990s, talk of institutions, infrastructure, equity, capability, the state, and sustainable development began to emerge from the Bank. In the early 2000s, after recently completing his term as Chief Economist and Senior Vice President at the Bank, Nicholas Stern even told an audience at Duke University that the structural adjustment reforms in the 1980s were probably a mistake. The Bank seemed to reach out to a broader set of perspectives, and even (gasp) hired sociologists. By now, the Bank seems to be genuinely engaged with a more diverse set of scholarly traditions than simply neoclassical economics and seems to encourage and cultivate debate on what historically have been sociological topics. Indeed, it might not be unreasonable to suggest the Bank is occasionally setting the agenda for academics. These two volumes are part of the Bank’s apparent effort to broaden debates about development and poverty reduction. Specifically, these are two of the three published volumes in the Bank’s series on ‘‘New Frontiers of Social Policy,’’ which the series preface says is ‘‘putting the ‘social’ back in public policy.’’ The series grew out of conferences and development initiatives of social policy advisors and administrators in the Bank, other international organizations and many governments. The series is linked to Institutional Pathways to Equity: Addressing Inequality Traps, edited by Anthony J. Bebbington, Anis A. Dani, Arjan de Haan, and Michael Walton. Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2008. 255pp.