Managing the Socially Marginalized: Attitudes Towards Welfare, Punishment and Race

Welfare and incarceration policies have converged to form a system of governance over socially marginalized groups, particularly racial minorities. In both of these policy areas, rehabilitative and social support objectives have been replaced with a more punitive and restrictive system. The authors examine the convergence in individual-level attitudes concerning welfare and criminal punishment, using national survey data. The authors\u27 analysis indicates a statistically significant relationship between punitive attitudes toward welfare and punishment. Furthermore, accounting for the respondents\u27 racial attitudes explains the bivariate relationship between welfare and punishment. Thus, racial attitudes seemingly link support for punitive approaches to opposition to welfare expenditures. The authors discuss the implications of this study for welfare and crime control policies by way of the conclusion

Socioeconomic mobility and talent utilization of workers from poorer backgrounds: The overlooked importance of within-organization dynamics

Socioeconomic mobility, or the ability of individuals to improve their socioeconomic standing through merit-based contributions, is a fundamental ideal of modern societies. The key focus of societal efforts to ensure socioeconomic mobility has been on the provision of educational opportunities. We review evidence that even with the same education and job opportunities, being born into a poorer family undermines socioeconomic mobility due to processes occurring within organizations. The burden of poorer background might, ceteris paribus, be economically comparable to the gender gap. We argue that in the societal and scientific effort to promote socioeconomic mobility, the key context in which mobility is supposed to happen—organizations—as well as the key part of the life of people striving toward socioeconomic advancement—that as working adults—have been overlooked. We integrate the organizational literature pointing to key within-organizational processes impacting objective (socioeconomic) success with research, some emergent in organizational sciences and some disciplinary, on when, why, and how people from poorer backgrounds behave or are treated by others in the relevant situations. Integrating these literatures generates a novel and useful framework for identifying issues people born into poorer families face as employees, systematizes extant evidence and makes it more accessible to organizational scientists, and allows us to lay the agenda for future organizational scholarshi

The Ties That Bind: The Internal Structures Of Law Firms And The Dynamics Of Law Firm Dissolution

Research on law firms as organizations has largely grown up in literatures that rarely, if it all, speak to one another in sustained ways. Whether drawing from economic, ecological, network, or neo-institutional frameworks, organizational scholars often use law firms as sites for research without necessarily considering the unique qualities of a professional firm (for example, their ethical responsibilities or the type of legal work they perform). Legal scholars, meanwhile, largely focus on the legal characteristics of law firms without examining how their organizational structures or broader environments influence their behavior. Dialogue between these approaches can add significant theoretical grist to the organizations literature by identifying how the rules of different fields influence organizational behavior, while at the same time deepening legal scholarship by situating study of the law firm in broader theoretical discourses.In this dissertation, I will review the theoretical treatment of law firms, discuss the internal structures and external environments of law firms, test whether network theories of organization explain the observed network of a professional firm, and examine the longitudinal trajectory of law firm growth and survival. To do so, I will develop novel hypotheses that integrate professional and organizational theories

Movin’ on Up? How Perceptions of Social Mobility Affect Our Willingness to Defend the System

People’s motivation to rationalize and defend the status quo is a major barrier to societal change. Three studies tested whether perceived social mobility – beliefs about the likelihood to move up and down the socioeconomic ladder – can condition people’s tendency to engage in system justification. Compared to information suggesting moderate social mobility, exposure to low social-mobility frames consistently reduced defense of the overarching societal system. Two studies examined how this effect occurs. Compared to moderate or baseline conditions, a low social-mobility frame reduced people’s endorsement of (typically strong) meritocratic and justworld beliefs, which in turn explained lower system defense. These effects occurred for political liberals, moderates, and conservatives, and could not be explained by other system-legitimizing ideologies or people’s beliefs about their own social mobility. Implications for societal change programs are discussed