Can We Scale Up Goffman? From Vegas to the World Stage

It is an all-too-common lament among sociologists that Erving Goffman, though his writings remain widely read and respected today, failed to spawn an ongoing and cohesive research tradition. His idiosyncratic methods of data collection, the uniqueness of his biographical trajectory, and even his prickly personality have all been invoked to explain the lack of a distinctly Goffmanian school of research (Gamson 1985; Scheff, Phillips, and Kincaid 2006; Smith 2006; Shalin 2014). It is also the case that micro-oriented sociologies, such as symbolic interactionism and especially ethnomethodology, have been pushed to the margins of sociology as a consequence of the ascendency of quantitative methods. This paper is, on one level, an argument for continuing to read Goffman as a seminal figure in the sociology of everyday life. But it is more than this. It is an argument that we should be ambitious about using Goffman to generate and develop theories about other levels of social reality, including the most macro of them all: the global level. I make this argument through recounting my own experience attempting to replicate Goffman’s famed ethnographic research as a casino dealer in Las Vegas

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.University of Arizona Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Institute [13RPF0188]This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]

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

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

International audiencePower 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.<br/

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

International audiencePower 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.<br/