Susan S. Silbey

Narrating Social Structure: Stories of Resistance to Legal Authority1

Using stories of citizens’ resistance to legalized authority, the authors propose that the act of storytelling extends temporally and socially what might otherwise be an individual, discrete, and ephemeral transaction. Adopting a concept of power as a contingent outcome in a social transaction, they emphasize that not only dominant, institutionalized power but also resistance to institutionalized authority draws from a common pool of sociocultural resources, including symbolic, linguistic, organizational, and material phenomena. Although such acts of resistance may not cumulate to produce institutional change, they may nonetheless have consequences beyond the specific social transaction: the authors propose that a chief means for extending the social consequences of resistance is to transform an act of resistance into a story about resistance. Based upon an appreciation of the structural conditions of power and authority, stories of resistance can become instructions about both the sources and the limitations of power. Because such stories are told in interaction with other stories, they become part of a stream of sociocultural knowledge about how social structures work to distribute power and disadvantage.

Professional Role Confidence and Gendered Persistence in Engineering

Social psychological research on gendered persistence in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professions is dominated by two explanations: women leave because they perceive their family plans to be at odds with demands of STEM careers, and women leave due to low self-assessment of their skills in STEM’s intellectual tasks, net of their performance. This study uses original panel data to examine behavioral and intentional persistence among students who enter an engineering major in college. Surprisingly, family plans do not contribute to women’s attrition during college but are negatively associated with men’s intentions to pursue an engineering career. Additionally, math self-assessment does not predict behavioral or intentional persistence once students enroll in a STEM major. This study introduces professional role confidence—individuals’ confidence in their ability to successfully fulfill the roles, competencies, and identity features of a profession—and argues that women’s lack of this confidence, compared to men, reduces their likelihood of remaining in engineering majors and careers. We find that professional role confidence predicts behavioral and intentional persistence, and that women’s relative lack of this confidence contributes to their attrition.

1996 Presidential Address: "Let Them Eat Cake": Globalization, Postmodern Colonialism, and the Possibilities of Justice

This essay presents three accounts or narratives of globalization. Each narrative describes the triumph of a central character or institution (science, markets, law) against its challenges or enemies (ignorance, regulated or planned economies, human caprice and unreason). The stories convey moral tales about what justice might look like and how social relations might be justly organized and governed. The author argues that under the dominant accounts of globalization, the dynamics of power are obscured so that social relations seem to be produced by invisible or natural forces. When the operation of power is masked, he argues,justice, and efforts to confine and regulate power, is made less probable. Law and society scholarship can contribute to a critique of globalization by continuing to identify the ways in which law and power are mutually implicated and embedded in social relations. Rather than describe current forms of international social exchange as globalization, a seemingly neutral terms, the essay urges scholars to identify the role of power by naming global social exchanges as postmodern colonialism

Case Processing: Consumer Protection in an Attorney General's Office

This paper examines complaint processing in an attorney generals office of consumer protection. It describes how, in the implementation and routinization of a new statute, considerations external to the law or the individual case arise, transform, and begin to characterize law enforcement. The paper describes how the staff attempts to confine the offices work by creating statistical records of work done. These records are creations because the activities of the agencyinvestigation and resolution of consumer complaints-do not generate unambiguous criteria of completion. The office operates within practical criteria for determining when a case is finished. As the statistical records help to routinize the task of consumer protection, they become a source of bias, direction, and legitimation for law enforcement.

The dialectic between expert knowledge and professional discretion: accreditation, social control and the limits of instrumental logic

Cycles of reform have been a constant feature of engineering education. This study suggests that these cycles are endemic because engineering begins with a particularly instrumental conception of responsible preparation. The instrumental logic of engineering repeatedly undermines educational reforms seeking to cultivate the capacities for discretionary interpretation and judgment at the root of professional practice. Using interviews with faculty at two new engineering colleges in the United States, we show how this instrumental logic once again leads to retreat from educational reform. Beginning with criticisms of engineerings failure to produce innovative and socially responsible engineers, new engineering schools attempted to address directly the limitations of instrumental rationality by creating curricula that would immerse students from the very outset of their engineering education in the ambiguous work of client-defined problem-solving. Rather than begin with the expertise grounded in mathematics and science and then teach how to apply that knowledge through known techniques, both programs asked students to become inquirers seeking knowledge, rather than implementers applying knowledge. As the programs sought legitimacy for their innovations through professional accreditation, however, the open-ended, exploratory processes of serendipitous learning were instrumentalized into a set of measurable procedures for acquiring standard, scientific expertise as the essential credential of the responsible engineer.

Persistence Is Cultural: Professional Socialization and the Reproduction of Sex Segregation

Why does sex segregation in professional occupations persist? Arguing that the cultures and practices of professional socialization serve to perpetuate this segregation, the authors examine the case of engineering. Using interview and diary entry data following students from college entry to graduation, the authors show how socialization leads women to develop less confidence that they will “fit” into the culture of engineering. The authors identify three processes that produce these cultural mismatches: orientation to engineering at college entry, initiation rituals in coursework and team projects, and anticipatory socialization during internships and summer jobs. Informal interactions with peers and everyday sexism in teams and internships are particularly salient building blocks of segregation.

Governing Inside the Organization: Interpreting Regulation and Compliance

Looking inside organizations at the different positions, expertise, and autonomy of the actors, the authors use multisite ethnographic data on safety practices to develop a typology of how the regulator, as the focal actor in the regulatory process, is interpreted within organizations. The findings show that organizational actors express constructions of the regulator as an ally, threat, and obstacle that vary with organizational expertise, authority, and continuity of relationship between the organizational member and the regulator. The article makes three contributions to the current understandings of organizational governance and regulatory compliance, thereby extending both institutional and ecological accounts of organizations’ behavior with respect to their environments. First, the authors document not only variation across organizations but variable compliance within an organization. Second, the variations described do not derive from alternative institutional logics, but from variations in positions, autonomy, and expertise within each organization. From their grounded theory, the authors hypothesize that these constructions carry differential normative interpretations of regulation and probabilities for compliance, and thus the third contribution, the typology, when correlated with organizational hierarchy provides the link between microlevel action and discourse and organizational performance.

Law in the sociological enterprise : a reconstruction

Part 1 Law in the sociological enterprise: introduction a sociological conception of law law and social relationships persons and nonpersons the civil domain and nonpersons the civil domain in society social and legal expectations the constitutive effects of law. Part 2 Law and society: introduction the civil contract and family life in the United States the civil contract and working life in the United States final words - law in the sociological enterprise cases cited a brief guide to case citations.

Constructing Consequences for Noncompliance The Case of Academic Laboratories

We examine academic research laboratories as examples of intractable governance sites. These spaces often elude regulatory warnings and rules because of the professional status of faculty members, the opacity of scientific work to outsiders, and loose coupling of policy and practice in organizations. We describe one university’s efforts to create a system for managing laboratory health, safety, and environmental hazards, thereby constraining conventional faculty habit to ignore administrative and legal procedures. We demonstrate the specific struggles safety managers face in creating system responsiveness, that is, feedback to re-channel noncompliant laboratory practices. We show how faculty members are buffered from the consequences of their activities, thus impeding the goals of responsibility and accountability. We conclude by asking where such pockets of intractability reside in other organizations and whether the surrounding buffer, if there is one, may nonetheless paradoxically create an effective margin of safety.

The Pragmatic Politics of Regulatory Enforcement

This paper describes regulatory enforcement as an intrinsically political endeavor. We argue that through daily enforcement transactions, regulators and the regulated reshape their interests and the environment in which they operate, reconstructing their perceptions of and preferences for compliance. We call this phenomenon the “sub-politics of regulatory enforcement”. After reviewing the trajectory of the field of regulatory enforcement as well as recent research on inspectors and street-level regulatory agents, we argue for a conception of politics that differs from the idea that predominates in the regulatory enforcement literature. Contrary to those who see enforcement styles and strategies as independent variables determining compliance, we posit that enforcement agencies and regulated entities engage in an indeterminate exploration of their institutional surroundings to create legal, technological, and managerial artifacts to address practical problems of doing business and complying with law. These agents move beyond imposing fines, issuing warnings, or educating their subjects. Rather, the daily routine of front-line enforcers around the world is best described as a political terrain, in which they are constantly building and revising agreements (with the regulated) that realign interests, reshape conflicts and reapportion risks, costs and benefits among various agents so as to make compliance tolerable, sometimes even advantageous to all involved.