China was once the most technologically advanced civilization in the world. Ancient Chinese achievements in technology are simply staggering. China led Europe in metallurgy, ship construction, navigation techniques, and many other fields, often by several centuries. Chinese also invented gunpowder, paper, water clock, moveable printing press, and other consequential technologies way ahead of the West. For example, Chinese invented seismograph 1,700 years before the French.
Kinship Interlocks: Mapping Family Ties Between Economic, Political, and Social Elites
The sociology of elites tends to focus on analytically distinct categories of people defined by singular resource types. But given a particular time and place, these analytically distinct elites are variously interwoven through family ties. Taking a Zelizerian perspective on inequality, and using the case of Dallas, Texas in its first century, I systematically examine the distribution of economic,...
Monsters of Our Own Creation: AI, Occupational Cannibalization, and the Future of Work
While ethnographically studying a startup developing an artificial intelligence (AI) technology, I puzzled over the phenomenon of “occupational cannibalization”: the fact that occupational members who ran the startup – namely, music composers – ended up developing an AI intended to carve away at their community’s work of music composition. Initially, those at the startup developed the AI to keep this work within the hands of members of the occupation, against its...
Resource Rechanneling and Management Upgrading in Owner-driven Reorganization: Private Equity Buyouts and Worker Earnings
Amid waves of buyouts, activist investors have battered the separation of ownership and control. How does management by financial markets and firms affect worker earnings? I theorize a strategic axis from resource rechanneling, in which organizations shunt resources toward owners at the expense of workers, to managerial upgrading, in which organizations improve operations in a way that magnifies the earnings of...
The Experimenter’s Dilemma: Online Survey Experiments and Organizational Processes
Online panels and crowdsourcing platforms have gained widespread use in social science research due to their cost-effectiveness, simplicity, and speed. However, their validity depends on the assumption that online responses reflect real-world decision-making behavior. To test this assumption, we rerun seven prominent field experiments on various forms of discrimination using online survey experiments. Four field experiments...
The End of Inequality? Earnings Effects of Work Reorganization
High-paying factory jobs in the 1940s were an engine of egalitarian economic growth for a generation. Are there alternate forms of work organization that deliver similar benefits for frontline workers? Work organization varies by types of complexity and their degree of employer control. Technical and tacit knowledge tasks receive higher pay for signaling or developing human capital. Higher autonomy tasks elicit efficiency wages. To test these ideas, we match administrative earnings to...
Gray Areas: How the Way We Work Perpetuates Racism and What We Can Do to Fix It.
Labor and race have shared a complex, interconnected history in America. For decades, key aspects of work—from getting a job to workplace norms to advancement and mobility—ignored and failed Black people. While explicit racial discrimination is now illegal, and organizations make internal and public pledges to honor and achieve “diversity,” racial disparities persist as Black workers remain less likely to be hired, stall out at midlevel positions, and rarely advance to the top...
