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Rankings have grown in importance in the last decades. This is particularly evident in, but not limited to, academia. In this paper, we want to take up this development and propose a power analytical take on rankings as a transnational(izing) phenomenon. In doing so, we make three contributions: (1) In the first part of the paper, we develop a conceptual definition of rankings: Rankings are devices of symbolic valorization, operating through subjectivation, zero-sum comparisons, quantification, and publication. We illustrate these characteristics for the most prominent forms of academic rankings. (2) Building on this, we bring forward an explanation for the success of rankings in academia and beyond: The proliferation of rankings occurred with a marketization of the academic field, through which it opened up for a lay audience. This is the backdrop against which rankings can function as dispositifs that link up different fields. (3) Related with the proliferation of rankings is their role in advancing processes of transnationalization: Rankings facilitate new modes of governance for hubs of state institutions, private corporations, media corporations, and data providers. Concluding our paper, we argue that rankings make a difference beyond rank orders. They prefer -- and are pushed by -- specific academic milieus, paradigms, and agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper intends to explore the social structural causes and conditions of ethnic party formation in the Nepali context. The paper argues that the ethnic political parties (EPs), like other kinds of political parties, are one of the manifest products of the social, political and economic structure of the society and their social foundation of formation is different than non-ethnic parties. In Nepal, despite having a number of national political parties, the formation of ethnic parties in Nepal have been growing in number with democratic practices after 1990 and intensifying after the political transition of 2006. Therefore, the paper deals with a key question: why ethnic parties form? To answer the question, the paper argues that there are multiple factors like multiethnic society and non-inclusive state and party structure; democracy and indigenous social movement; failure of existing political parties to address the ethnic concern; rise of new issues such as identity, federalism and proportional representation; and legal-structural changes with international factors are responsible for the ethnic party formation. The paper concludes that the EPs, as a manifest product of democracy, are contributing to the process of democratization in Nepal. In that sense, the rise of ethnic parties is essentially a social phenomenon rooted in the multicultural society of Nepal. The analysis is based on qualitative and quantitative data collected through keen observations, in-depth interview with purposefully selected key informants and required secondary information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, nearly 50 million Americans receive emergency food assistance from communitybased organizations. In the fact there is evidence that nonprofit food assistance programs compose more than half of all 501(c)(3) public charities in the United States (Paynter and Berner, 2014). Despite the importance of local emergency food programs, relatively little is known about the organizational characteristics or spatial context of emergency food providers. Moreover, little is known about whether access to emergency food programs is related to receipt of food assistance. Using unique survey data of food pantries linked to a panel household survey in metropolitan Detroit conducted in the years following the Great Recession (Michigan Recession and Recovery Study, or MRRS), this paper examines questions about the provision and receipt of emergency food assistance. First, how do food pantries differ by structure and capacity? How are organizational characteristics associated with location and caseload characteristics? When controlling for household characteristics, how is the presence and availability of food pantries associated with receipt of emergency food assistance? Answers to these questions will help fill important gaps in the literature around urban inequality and poverty. Emergency food assistance programs serve as a key resource for many food insecure persons. The complexity of these programs, however, is not well studied. Despite the prevalence of food pantries, there is relatively little work that seeks to understand how these organizations operate. Our unique survey data of 263 local food pantries in metro Detroit gathered from 2012 to 2013 begins to explore the organizational and contextual setting of emergency food programs. Of significant importance for researchers, we find first that nearly half of all emergency food programs listed in community directories were either not operational at the time of the survey or did not provide emergency food assistance. Second, we find emergency food programs to be quite heterogeneous. For example, we find that ninety-one percent of agencies surveyed provide groceries while only 27.5% have meal programs. Also, 75.8% of agencies provide non-food related benefits such as help with housing or counseling services. Preliminary multivariate findings also suggest that geographic location is closely associated to capacity - with suburban food pantries lagging those in the City of Detroit in size and diversity of programming. Please note that this draft is very much a work in progress. We are currently in the process of analyzing a data file that links the survey data of food pantries to the MRRS. Although not reported here, we find that Detroit residents with income below the federal poverty line have nearly 50 percent greater access to food pantries than suburban residents and non-poor households. Despite differences in access, we do not find consistent evidence in our preliminary analyses that spatial proximity to food pantries alone is associated with household food pantry receipt. Overall, this paper provides insight into the current state of emergency food assistance providers and provides a better understanding of their organizational structure and service capacity. These findings will help fill important gaps in the sociological literature around food policy, urban inequality, and poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is predicated on scholar activism. Principally, it seeks to represent unaccompanied minors' (UAMs) narratives as a form of resistance. Working within a framework in which knowledge is understood as a vehicle for social action, and through the adoption of cocreation of an epistemological model, the paper challenges representations that portray unaccompanied minors as passive victims. The paper represents the lives, the views and experiences of UAMs as caught between international and humanitarian ideals and nativist populism. In its discussion of methodological approaches utilised in this study, the paper gives recognition to the sociology of childhood within a framework of scholar activism and child narratives. Based on data from in-depth qualitative interviews and focus groups with 50 UAMs from Burkina Faso, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Senegal, Tunisia, and Bangladesh, this paper helps plug an important gap in the literature in the context of child well-being as related to this group of children. This study is part of a 25-nation research network focused on children's subjectivities around child well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2014, China initiated its social credit system (SCS), which turns online and offline (deviant) behaviors into a social credit score, with a plan to expand the system nation-wide by 2020. Using twenty-two stories that were gathered by a story completion method, this paper analyzes the SCS as a big data surveillance tool that use techniques of everyday and technology surveillance. On the one hand, this study links state control of the SCS to concepts of self and police control, as well as that of everyday surveillance. On the other hand, this research shows that technology functions as both a facilitator and an inhibitor for technological surveillance. By looking from macro-level social control to micro-level selfcontrol, this research improves our understanding of how different components of surveillance and control mechanisms operate in China's social credit system. This paper outlines social and policy implications for surveillance and policing as they link the offline world to cyberspace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper expands the common definition of gentrification by adding the motivation for gentrification into the debate. It suggests that while scholarship regularly ascribes economic intentions for gentrification this is not always the case. Ideological agendas are similarly powerful force for gentrification and can lead to similar outcomes. The paper introduces this ideological model, focusing on its effect on the actors involved and their tactics. Using the East Jerusalem urban renewal as a case study the paper compares and contrast the economic with the ideological model, expanding the common definition of what gentrification is. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the local organisation of city park spaces in the context of the wider urban built environment. It seeks to realise their boundaries by considering their regular accomplishment through the routine practical action of those tasked with their maintenance and management. Tracing the quotidian work of the Urban Park Ranger Service in the Welsh capital city of Cardiff, it is argued that while the materiality of the fences that circumscribe urban park space do accountably impact upon public mobilities and territorialisation, the Urban Park Rangers' ground-level responsibility and practice does not strictly adhere to these spatial demarcations. The fence is a spatial marker, but the Rangers' everyday responsibilities go beyond it, saying something of the relational aspects of park space within the built environment. Following on from a discussion of the practice of 'locking up' partially-fenced city parks at night, the analysis 'gets over the fence' by illustrating the respatialisation of their practice through the empirical examples of: (1) the public's expectation of Rangers to deal with wild geese wandering out onto the adjacent roads; and (2) their pre-emptive litter picking strategies and the subsequent obligation to maintain peripheral urban areas. The data traces the Rangers' own re-negotiation of park boundaries, demonstrating what the configuration and territorialisation of park space looks like as an Jonathan Ablitt - Cardiff University - ASA 2019 - Space & Place (working paper) 2 accomplishment of everyday practical action. It concludes in appreciation of the materiality of park space insofar as it is practically accomplished and organised by the regular work and interactions of the Urban Park Rangers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The convergence of academic science and the market has had profound effects on academic knowledge production. Universities or industry funders routinely commercialize academic science. Faculty are rewarded for their commercial behavior. Freshly minted PhDs often pursue industry work. This paper investigates how the convergence of academic science and the market shapes scientific thought? Building from a four-year multi-sited ethnography loosely situated in polymer science and engineering disciplines, I theorize what I call the commercial imaginary, or the commercial assumptions with which and upon which academic scientists produce knowledge. Through the commercial imaginary, academic scientists conceptualize their research programs, develop professional relationships, and build careers. To begin developing this concept, I posed a question to my data: Do students training under a market-oriented PI think about their research differently than students working under a nonmarket-oriented PI? Are ties between PIs and their students responsible for the epistemological foundations of this commercial imaginary? I find the market orientation of the PI had little effect on how students think about their research. During interviews, faculty often described shielding graduate students from industry projects because they were often less beneficial for students' graduate careers. Regardless of their PIs market orientation, exhibited this commercial imaginary across many different contexts. In presentations, classrooms, and water cooler conversations, students discuss their work in market terms, highlighting the commercial application of their research. Students pursue relationships with industry, ties the U.S. government and universities work to facilitate. The ties between academic science and the market are vast and evolving, and they are fraught with power imbalances. Through investigating how these ties shape the commercial imaginaries of students training to be scientists, this paper sheds light on power imbalances in the scientific field and their effects on academic knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the nineteenth century American agrarian question by focusing on the transition from frontier farming to commercialized agriculture in the Midwest, 1840s-1880s. The Midwest--specifically Illinois and later Iowa--was the epicenter of the first agricultural revolution in the United States, supplying cheap nature in the form of food and labor to an expanding world-economy. I argue that (what became) the Corn Belt was in a unique position to solidify regional specialization based on household labor, ecology, and markets. Drawing on the work of agrarian Marxists and Marxist feminists, the paper provides a historical reconstruction of household and market to recenter the American agrarian question. By providing a historicallygrounded analysis of the transition from frontier production to petty commodity production in the Midwest, I specify its ecological, geographical, and household determinants and the economic contribution of regional specialization to nation building. The birth of the Corn Belt and industrial capitalism went hand-in-glove in constituting America's cheap nature regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entrances to occupational fields are sealed with procedures and protocols guarded by gatekeepers. The latter are responsible for evaluating whether new professional members of the field have the right symbolic markers, suitable personalities and perform the correct entrance rituals. One of the most obvious yet crucial type of gatekeeping encounter is therefore the job interview. Granting somebody access to an occupational position within a field, entailing financial benefits and status, rarely happens without well-orchestrated face-to-face encounters. This paper now focuses on the gatekeepers that guard these positions. It aims to flesh out how they select candidates, evaluate different cultural markers and morally justify their choices. This is done by interviewing 40 HR managers and recruiters, using video-elicitation method. Seeing the importance of field specific dynamics, this paper rests on a comparison of two separate fields, namely the field of cultural institutions (i.e. museums, concert halls, theaters) and the field of corporate enterprises (i.e. banks, insurance companies, multinationals). The interviews revealed that emotions, expressiveness and authenticity are crucial evaluative criteria for both field. Yet, there are clear differences in the way extracurricular activities are assessed and how respondents deal with moral unease. While cultural gatekeepers do not seem to struggle with rejection of candidates, corporate recruiters appear to be very aware of the moral paradoxes inherent to job interviewing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The overarching question of this paper is: Why and how do gender inequalities persist in organisations in China? As a response to this question, we draw on interview data to unpack the field of gender relations pertaining to Chinese organisations and instances of symbolic violence experienced by female managers. The paper shows how female managers respond to and participate in the reproduction of gender imbalances in management. Empirically, we contribute to the scholarship on gender and work by offering new insights into why gender inequalities in organisations remain durable. Theoretically, we explore and explain the inertia in gender unequal relations and outcomes at work through the use of Bourdieu's concepts of the field and symbolic violence, which allows us to bridge the agentic and structural dynamics of gender inequality. We offer a nuanced interpretation of symbolic violence that is enacted in two forms, which we term as reification and contradiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an ethnomethodological account of the online sense-making practices surrounding the San Bernardino shootings. It reports on the analysis of materials gathered from Twitter during and following the reporting of the incident, and draws from on membership categorisation analysis in describing members' categorisational work in handling the 'facts' of the shooting as they emerged. Returning to Sacks' discussion of the 'MIR device', the paper demonstrates how members' produced and handled key 'facts' as inference-rich materials for making sense of the act itself, for attributing 'motive' and 'intention', and for formulating procedural and political consequentialities and alignments using the 'facts at hand'. The paper thus recommends online materials as a means to recover members' applications and use of the MIR device-in-action and as a means of avoiding stipulative or static 'grid-like' formulations of meaning, sense-making, and categorisation practices. In keeping with the conference theme, the paper also aims to highlight the contribution of an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic sensibility for the examination of the (political) contours of contemporary forms of social discrimination and control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is nowadays a renewed interest in the scholarship of migration to identify the determinants of migration decision making. Albeit with different terms, most of the research theorizes migration as resulting from circumstances, opportunities and practices. This paper suggests shifting attention to how people "read" and navigate circumstances and opportunities, which may result in practices, from a microsociological and culture orientated perspective. Drawing on various strands of literature, i.e. cultures of migration, neoliberal subjectivity and conceptions of modernity, this paper explores the ways in which culture "enters" peoples' lives. The example of Polish migration to Germany, due to its long-standing tradition of migration and post-socialist transition to Western capitalism, is particularly telling for an examination of the ways in which cultural meanings of migration shape peoples' conceptions of subjectivity and life course considerations. Challenging reductionist conceptions of migrants' subjectivity, the analysis reveals that people do not mechanically respond to structures, nor is their migration solely determined by material aspects, even if people commonly refer to "economic" motifs as the driving reasons. Instead, as a legacy of the cultural history a particular frame of reference has emerged, through which migration is assessed in relation to expectations of a normal life, inasmuch as to becoming normal through migration. In doing so, this paper provides a more nuanced understanding of migrants' subjectivity by illustrating that people's rationality is shaped by socially accepted life-making options and their interrelations with hegemonic concepts of subjectivity, which reflect local and international trends related to migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical institutionalists are increasingly interested in the contested processes by which political alternatives become institutionalized and de-institutionalized. A prominent approach identifies political parties as generative of policy ideas. This paper investigates the scope conditions for this approach and develops an alternative for different conditions. The argument is made through a re-examination of the making of the child labor law of 1839, which is widely considered the beginning of social policy in Prussia and a corner stone of the Continental European, Weberian welfare state. Extant scholarship posits a party-political context and explains the law as the outcome of a struggle between conservatives and liberals. This paper identifies key empirical facts that challenge the existing account. It argues that the context was one of multiply embedded policy-makers, with coalitions of policy-makers crosscutting party-political lines. Investigated under this approach, the archival record discloses that the struggle was mainly about a proposal to implement child-labor regulation through local-participatory institutions encompassing factory workers. At stake was not whether liberals or conservatives would set up a Weberian welfare state but whether the Prussian welfare state would be Weberian at all. This substantive finding has novel implications for contemporary debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Israel's Equal Rights for People with Disabilities Act, and specifically its Accessibility Chapter, promotes a shift in the discourse on disability, from charity to human rights. Using the Municipality of Tel Aviv-Jaffa as a case study, this research examines how disability legislation is implemented in practice. Combining qualitative methodology and Critical Disability policy theory, this paper compares the municipality's actions before and after approval of the Accessibility Chapter. It examines how principles stemming from the social model of disability, formally integrated into the law itself, have been translated into municipal planning practices. The findings show that the municipality has undergone significant processes of professionalization and institutionalization. This facilitated comprehensive implementation of the Accessibility Chapter and its underpinning principle of inclusion. But these processes have also led to a shift of authority, from welfare professionals to accessibility advisors and planners; this has prevented citizens with disabilities from participating in decision-making processes on policies that affect their lives. This paper presents a critical organizational analysis of the field of accessibility for people with disabilities in an urban context. I argue that the professionalization of the field of accessibility affects the participation of people with disabilities, due to the institutionalization of professional practices, and the inherently technical and operational nature of the planning professions. Disability Studies scholars have proposed strategies to ensure the participation of people with disabilities alongside the drive to professionalization, notably in the field of medicine. I suggest that these strategies should similarly be adopted in the field of urban planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To reach a deeper understanding of the complex relationship between religion and the natural environment, it is important to move beyond essentializing any religious tradition as having a pro-environmental or anti-environmental ethic. Rather, prior work has shown that the canonical, scholarly, and popular literatures and discourse of a number of religious traditions can and have been socially and rhetorically constructed as supporting an array of positions, from preservation to profligacy, and much in between those two ideal types. In this paper, we develop Max Weber's idea of "elective affinities" and adapt it to the Anthropocene, to make the case that in a fragmented society, people and communities of convenience tend to choose the tropes and framing from the dominant culture to justify self-interested action. That often does take the form of religious discourse. In this paper, we test our theory with a close look at some of the key literature and discourse from Christianity. In the sense of finding a wide array of practical interpretations relative to environment, the theory is largely supported. We do find important nuances, however. It is instructive to look at how the language and legitimacy of one institution (e.g. religion) has been used to justify and legitimate that of another (e.g. the polity). While these processes, which we characterize as "institutional co-optation," can be effective in the short run, it may have corrosive longer-term effects. Key rhetorical, and in fact political, battles in the Third Millennium, will be how to adapt pre-industrial religion to late industrial and perhaps postindustrial times. In so doing, how central will the natural environment be in what people and communities hold sacred?. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his influential work on the growth of the infrastructural power of the state, Michael Mann (1984) described how states need to develop logistical techniques to aid their effective penetration of social life; one of these logistical techniques, he said, was the establishment of weights and measures allowing economic exchange under an ultimate guarantee of value. This paper deepens this idea by detailing why the establishment of standardized systems of measurement is crucial for the functioning of modern nation-states. It shows how states took special interest on implementing and enforcing on their respective populations a homogenous system of weights and measures (mainly the decimal metric system) as a means to establish a monopoly on the legitimate means of measurement. The paper argues that modern nation-states need metrological unification and that, correspondingly, metrological unification needs the states. States need standardized system of weights and measures because that gives them leverage to fulfill some of their essential functions: enhance the extraction of revenue; make the population and the economic resources "legible"; monopolize symbolic capital; undermine the influence of local authorities; consolidate internal markets; share scientific and commercial standards with other countries; and introduce homogenizing institutions that aid the creation of a common national experience. On the other hand, the global spread of standardized systems of measurement (particularly the metric system, which is the most widely used system of measurement in the word) has needed the states because only modern states have shown to be effective in helping and, if necessary, forcing populations to employ metric units of measurement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For half a century, college access programs in the U.S. have aimed to reduce inequality of educational opportunity by designing school-based interventions to increase postsecondary enrollment among underrepresented students. These programs have reimagined the role of schools in facilitating college transitions for students from diverse ethnic/racial and socioeconomic backgrounds, who face additional obstacles in navigating the college process. Existing studies, however, indicate that college access programs have mixed results. Scholars have hypothesized that unequal distribution of college services within schools may explain some of the observed differences in program outcomes, but we still know little about how program components and organizational features of the school interact to produce different results. Drawing from a mixed-methods randomized control trial study of a college access intervention, this paper examines organizational practices that influence the distribution of intervention resources at two case study sites. Using qualitative data, we show how the college access program bolsters the capacity of schools via direct services. Program resources are further expanded by three types of brokerage practices within case study schools: referrals, collaborative actions, and norm-setting practices, which serve as channels of information not just for students but also for school staff who expand social capital in the schools. Additionally, our findings demonstrate that having an organizational member who promotes college access is important, but the positionality of such an advocate for college access matters most for promoting brokerage practices. Ultimately, this paper reveals how organizational practices influence the reach of college access programs within schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for the existence of social democratic development - development that occurs as a direct result of the amelioration of the income of poor people. Social democratic development can occur through many causal mechanisms, such as land reform, or by providing education or microcredit to poor people. This paper emphasizes a different mechanism of social democratic development - increasing the multiplier effect in societies. The poor are more likely to consume than the rich. Increasing household income increases the multiplier effect producing growth. The size of multipliers is estimated using the population of Leontief input-output matrices that are available for 2010. Amazingly, even though hundreds of Leontief matrices have been calculated to estimate multiplier effects in the Global North and the Global South, the findings of those matrices have never been reported. The analysis finds that Leontief multipliers for households are at least as great as those of manufacture, the traditional focus of development plans. Government, education and health also have multipliers as large as manufacture. The analysis suggests that plans to shrink government and reduce expenditure in health and education can have immediate adverse short-term effects on economic growth by eliminating the substantial multiplier spending associated with each of these sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses migration and informal employment in the Russian Federation. It considers the characteristics of migration, the legal and regulatory situation of migrant workers with regards to informal employment. First, the paper reveals the current migration inflows into Russia with focus on the migrants' employability. This gives the ground for seeing informal employment from the supply side of migrant workers. Second, the paper reviews the migration legislation, employment laws as the push factors into informal employment. This part allows us to explain the informal work from the demand side (employers). Finally, the paper estimates the probability of working informally for the migrant workers. In the conclusion, we developed possible policy recommendations for decreasing irregular migration and informal employment for migrant workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the dynamics between globalization and local culture in analysing how higher education has expanded in the Arab Gulf, namely through internationalization. In analysing patterns of higher education expansion, the paper contends that higher education expands through internationalization in part because Gulf states utilize higher education institutions to legitimate themselves and gain prominence as internationally competitive modern societies in a globalized world. At the same time, however, the Gulf states face push back from their more conservative, traditional constituents who criticize the state for liberalizing and "Westernizing" education. Hence, Gulf states simultaneously pursue what appear to be anti-liberal practices in public higher education institutions to manage state-society relations, thereby enabling them to maintain both national and global legitimacy. This effort to balance what appears to be two competing interests create a "dual higher education system" in the Arab Gulf. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an increasingly tumultuous political climate, norms of activism in the United States have been uprooted. This paper examines the recent rise in proactive corporate political activism in support of a particular cause. In particular, it focuses on participation in letter campaigns related to legislative proposals regarding climate change, human rights, and immigration. The drive behind organizations' participation in cause-related letter campaigns is analyzed based on three areas of organizational theory. Each area addresses strategic concerns related to a different aspect of the organization: its (1) internal values, (2) reputation, and (3) institutional expectations. Results show mimetic isomorphism to be the strongest predictor of letter-campaign participation. This paper serves to demonstrate shifts in societal expectations and organizations' strategic approaches to address those changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In less than a decade, China built the world's largest high-speed rail network. In contrast, India has struggled to expand its railway network, which has become increasingly strained by rapidly growing social and economic demands. The railway sector in both countries is exclusively controlled by the state. Why does China exhibit such a high degree of state capacity for railway development compared with India? Differences in regime type and investment levels fail to fully explain this gap. Building on two years of in-depth fieldwork in China and India including interviews with state railway officials, this paper examines the institutional structures than underlie state capacity in these two countries. This paper argues that institutional structures characterized by "empowered accountability" where decision-making power and accountability are commensurate at the level of individual state actors yield higher levels of state capacity. In particular, "nodal" forms of institutional structure where authority and accountability are concentrated in key positions and state organizations exhibit greater "empowered accountability" and tend to result in relatively streamlined policy implementation. "Diffuse" forms, in contrast, tend to produce decision-making paralysis and a diffusion of responsibility. China's state railway institutions are better able to execute railway projects largely due to their nodal structure whereas the diffuse structure of India's railway institutions contributes to chronic project delays. A more detailed understanding of the relationship between institutional structure and state capacity has significant implications for improving for social well-being in developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fantasy Sports is a game that predates its current iteration as a digitally mediated, networked experience. In analog form, communities of users in leagues got together in-person and drafted teams in person, while establishing a number of fun and engaging rituals around play. Many of these fun features remain in the now largely digital versions of the game. Rituals, sports and play are linked in many ways and relate directly to how communities spend, mark and pass time. While many product teams explicitly aim to maximize the time spent by users within their product, large investments of time are not sustainable in the long term as people move through the life cycle. The trade off then might be short term investment that does not retain users in the long run. This paper considers the way that time is perceived and made meaningful across the Fantasy Sports communities. It highlights the ways that time as a concept is built into products and engineering processes, and explores how time and ritual are related. It also considers how minimizing time spent in any given session helps create more durable rituals and sustainable communities over time (i.e., year over year), driving loyal and persistent users throughout the life cycle. This mixed-methods paper draws on two related sets of data. First, the authors conducted a large-scale survey of Fantasy Sport users followed by 50 semi-structured interviews (40 with Fantasy Sports users and 10 with Fantasy Sports developers). It focuses on how a sense of time is built into a product, how members of a community internalize that sense of time which further drives a sense of connection and meaning, and finally offers design and product recommendations for alternative metrics for valuing users time that run counter to prevailing wisdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the interface between interactional conduct and sociopolitical change, and makes the case for social action design as an underutilized index of change. This approach is exemplified through the case of samesex marriage, whose social standing shifted from marginality to mainstream acceptance within a relatively short period. Using journalistic interview data and in particular questionresponse sequences addressed to U.S. politicians regarding their position on samesex marriage (e.g., Do you support legalizing samesex marriage nationwide?), the paper charts measurable shifts in the manner in which positioning questions were broached and pursued by journalists across more than two decades, and considers how such behavioral shifts both reflect and contribute to the mainstreaming of marriage equality in the U.S. Political positioning questions and their sequelae thus provide a novel window into perceptions of the evolving sociocultural landscape on controversial issues of public importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Popular press often portrays the millennial generation as evidencing increasing selfishness, or conversely as representing one of the most generous generations alive today. This paper investigates these contradictory claims by extending and challenging theories of individualism, collectivism, and voluntarism in explicating trends among a national, diverse, and longitudinal millennial cohort transitioning to adulthood. This analysis contributes two primary advancements to understanding youth and American culture. First, it examines the utility of traditional theories in explaining contemporary trends. Rising globalization raises questions as to the remaining relevance of classic theories in explaining contemporary trends. Second, this paper integrates a life course framework in cultural analysis. Combining these approaches, this paper investigates whether individual and collective orientations can be held in combination, and whether youth change their weighing of self and other orientations over time. Longitudinal findings indicate that the millennial cohort - who had high levels of individualism during adolescence - evidence greater collectivist and hybrid orientations as emerging adults, and promoting attention to cultural values undermines individualistic orientations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the post-1965 shifts in the American labor force, with respect to both occupational distribution and immigrant distributions within occupations, and the resultant patterns of within-occupation changes in income, for both native and foreign-born workers. Using the United States Decennial Census and American Community Survey (ACS) data, from 1970 - 2017, this paper demonstrates that while changes in the occupational distribution of the American labor force are not drastic, increases in the immigrant proportion of the American labor force are less evenly distributed. This paper finds that within-occupation changes in income are differentially associated with these labor market and demographic shifts, and concludes by generating possible explanatory hypothesis and directions for further study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European and American scholars in recent years have increased attention to far right movements, dealing particularly with contemporary mobilizations of white supremacy, xenophobia, and right-wing populism. However, the role of misogyny as a motivating ideology has not received the same attention, despite the growth of secular male supremacist movements. In the United States, the constellation of primarily online male supremacist mobilizations include the Men's Rights Movement (MRM), pickup artists (PUA), and The Red Pill, a community that strongly favored the election of President Donald Trump, who run a campaign distinguished by misogynist and racist rhetoric. These forums overlap with the umbrella movement of male supremacist, white supremacist, and anti-Semitic online communities called the "alt-right." Though organized online, these movements have tangible repercussions, including in terms of sexual and physical violence. This paper builds on existing literature with an analysis of the development of U.S. male supremacist ideology since the 1990s, "lone wolf" violence and its relationship to the organized movements, and the connections between and spread of misogynist ideology to Canada, Europe, and India. The paper offers an initial argument for reconsidering the theoretical lens and attention given to misogynist movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In most academic and popular accounts of urban development, conflicts over land acquisition are characterized as zero-sum struggles between the forces promoting development and those resisting it. Typically viewed from an instrumental Marxist perspective, pro-development forces, including financiers, developers, and state actors, work to acquire land and facilitate construction; while their efforts are opposed by antidevelopment groups, such as mobilized communities, environmentalists, and pro-poor activists. Although political economy frameworks or social movement models are sufficient to explain the character and outcomes of land contestations, at times, the interests of actors do not align so neatly, and development conflicts focus more on the terms of development than whether or not it should proceed. In these cases, development conflicts resemble coordination problems than zero sum contestations, and frameworks from economic sociology, or more specifically from the sociology of markets, may be better suited to explain the resolution of such conflicts. In this paper, we highlight one such case: the still-under construction Piramal Mahalaxmi development in South Mumbai, to help explain how development conflicts can be overcome through the use of formal institutions, informal norms, and innovative practices. With apartments starting at half a million dollars, on land that until recently housed a 20,000-person slum settlement called Dhobi Ghat Jhopadpatti, this case appears to be a prime example of prodevelopment forces prevailing over project. While Piramal Reality is certainly positioned to glean a hefty profit from the luxury towers being built on site, a majority of slum residents are not being dispossessed, but are being compensated for their land with new flats on the same site. The paper draws on fieldwork and interviews conducted between mid-2017 and late 2018, during which time the land at Dhobi Ghat was being cleared, and solutions to the development conflict were being negotiated by developers and residents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds on and refines James Scott's argument about legibility (1998) by providing an in-depth, comparative analysis of how Brazil and Mexico rendered poor individuals visible in order to implement poverty-alleviation programs. In the mid-1990s, these two states implemented the same policy (conditional cash transfer programs, or CCTs), facing very similar political, organizational, and information challenges; yet they adopted different solutions for governing their respective CCT programs. Specifically, Brazil and Mexico implemented their CCTs by means of distinct governance structures, and they developed distinct information systems to see and monitor poor individuals. Looking comparatively at projects intended to make poverty visible and governable, I argue that the differences and consequences of these legibility projects depended on the symbolic strategies of political legitimation of state action, but had the unanticipated effect of rendering the state itself visible and thus subject to intense scrutiny. My findings are based on the analysis of a rich set of empirical data, including official documents, academic papers, media articles, and 90 in-depth interviews with top government actors and poverty experts in Brazil and Mexico. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of community mechanisms in shaping memory, specifically cultural trauma, and identity in post-conflict settings. It extends research that endeavors to open the black box between interventions by formal institutions (like peace treaties, trials, or truth commissions) and cultural outcomes to the realm of community groups and practices. This study focuses on one specific cross-community initiative, the 2012 Transitional Justice Grassroots Toolkit, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Document analysis and interviews reveal a set of traits that facilitate cultural transformation through group interactions. These traits include the context of a peace agreement and prior, complementary peace making initiatives, as well as cohort effects and benefits of specific pedagogical tools. Our interest is in the development and transformation of social ties within post-conflict community settings and in the cultural consequences of such transformations. This paper shows how community processes can change collective memories and cultural trauma of the conflict, as well as identities, away from their polarized forms, and it explores implications for future peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the factors that encourage former gang members to commit to the role of violence "interrupter" for community-based violence prevention organizations? This paper draws on the social movements literature in sociology to enhance our understanding of individual commitment to the high-risk activism of neighborhood violence intervention. Utilizing a multiyear ethnography of street workers in a CeaseFire-type organization, this paper develops a typology of street worker commitment based on three central categories: 1) Exiters, 2) Straddlers, and 3) Loyalists. We then identify an array of organizational and social psychological factors that lead street workers to either sustain participation in, or disengage, from street intervention work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies regard elites as the foundation for collective actions, believing that elite mobilization results in the success of self-organization. This paper corrects the view of such. Using qualitative data collected in Pingnan County, Fujian Province in 2014-2016 and 2018, the paper analyzes the process of elite actions and the difference in effects. The paper finds that local elites channels external resources and integrate internal ones to operate self-organization. Although selforganization is formed through elite actions, its effects are heterogeneous in different network structures. In a highly unified lineage network, self-organization works well, while in the competing network structure where there is a profit-sharing order, elites encounter a crisis of trust. Hence, selforganization dysfunction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contraception is an important part of reproduction and women's reproductive experiences. Yet, unlike other aspects of reproduction, such as childbirth, infertility, and menstruation, contraception has not received much attention from a sociological perspective. To fill this gap, through 86 in-depth interviews with women of reproductive age and 51 interviews with women's health providers, we examine the social construction of contraception, specifically focusing on women's meaning-making around the construct. In doing so, we find complexity in its conceptualization and subsequent decisionmaking. Larger social structures of gender and bodily knowledge impact conceptualization and decisionmaking within and outside of these provider-patient interactions. However, at the same time, medicalized contraception has become naturalized to the point where providers view it as the only type of desirable contraception due to its efficacy. In this paper, we first review literature on patients' increasing consumer role in medicalization to demonstrate the need to examine contraception's medicalization. We then describe other research on patient-provider interactions before explaining extant research on attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors around contraception. Finally, we explore the tension between widely recognized provider authority and knowledge (based in medicalization) and women's knowledge and expertise of their own bodies in contraceptive decision-making. This paper speaks to sociological literature on contraception, medicalization, gendered patient experiences, patient expertise, and provider authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transition to palliative care is intensely emotional for patients, their caregivers, and healthcare providers because accepting palliation means ceasing curative treatment in favor of pain management for the remainder of life. This paper draws from the emotion management perspective to understand how a palliative care team can use emotions in consultations about end-of-life care. The study used ethnographic observations of a palliative care team's consultations with patients and semi-structured interviews with the care team. The study found that healthcare providers strategically leverage emotions to help patients transition to palliative care. Strategies include leveraging anger through the specter of physical pain, leveraging guilt through navigating moral dilemmas, and distancing from anger to build trust. Providers use situational clues and information from the patients' backgrounds to determine which strategy to deploy. If one strategy fails, team members often cycle through other strategies to help persuade patients and their families that palliative care is the best option. This paper argues that leveraging emotions is an integral part of transitioning to palliative care. The strategies outlined here could be useful for studying professional healthcare delivery in other settings. The cultural, organizational, and professional pressures affecting the emotional work of healthcare providers are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the transition to capitalist production in the woolen industry controlled by the Arte Della Lana (the Wood Guild) in Florence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Given that this development occurred hundreds of years before the rise of Protestantism, which some analysts see as a pre-requisite of capitalism, the paper begins by focusing on the Weberian thesis of the spirit of capitalism. The sections that follow the Weberian discussion describe and analysis how as tax collectors for the pope, Italian merchant-bankers dominated a major part of the inter-regional wool trade in Europe. With the accumulation of wool wealth, merchantbankers in the Arte restructured woolen production in Florence from the putting-out system to a fully-developed capitalist mode of production for many of the woolen occupations. The migration of merchant-bankers across European wool areas, and the migration of workers, many of whom were runaway serfs, supported an inter-regional system of woolen-wealth accumulation that produced a capitalist class structure in the woolen economy of Florence in the trecento. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates whether childhood lead exposure increases the likelihood or severity of criminal[ized] activity in adulthood. This paper further asks whether childhood lead exposure is responsible for intra-neighborhood variation in later-in-life criminal[ized] activity, by examining the synergistic biochemical and social effects of lead exposure and neighborhood context. Epidemiological research has established clear links between lead exposure and cognitive and behavioral damage. From this has emerged the common refrain that lead exposure must cause criminal activity. However, very limited research has rigorously tested this assertion using substantial individual-level longitudinal data. Concurrently, criminological research has also repeatedly asserted that neighborhood disadvantage exacerbates youth's criminal activity. However, this literature has not examined the additive or interactive effects of neighborhoods' environmental characteristics (such as lead) alongside social characteristics. I track 150,000 individuals' trajectories from childhood to adulthood in Baltimore city, using a unique, geocoded dataset that combines administrative data from lead tests and criminal case records, alongside neighborhood-level demographic data capturing multiple dimensions of social, economic, and political context. I use GIS rasterization to tailor all data to Baltimore's "Neighborhood Statistical Areas" boundaries, socially-salient geographies relevant to the local context. I measure the individual, additive, and interactive effects of lead exposure and childhood neighborhood social context on the likelihood and severity of criminal involvement in adulthood. I further measure whether individual lead exposure accounts for intra-neighborhood differences in the effect of specific key neighborhood characteristics, namely racial makeup and poverty level, on youth's likelihood of future criminal involvement. I predict that lead exposure and neighborhood social exposure cause independent negative outcomes, and together heighten the other. I further predict a significant interaction effect between lead and certain neighborhood features, indicating lead exposure may account for variation beneath neighborhood-level influences on crime outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The answer to the question "do beliefs matter?" is intuitively "yes." The world appears to be organized into groups based on belief and value affiliation: political parties, religious congregations, sports teams, and allegiances to humanitarian causes, to name a few. This seems to be a ubiquitous phenomenon in American society. However, it is worth investigating whether beliefs themselves are the catalyst of group organization, as opposed to other phenomena, such as demographic or purely organizational signifiers. This paper will put four sociological authors' works in conversation with each other to attempt to better understand the efficacy of using beliefs as factors in sociological analysis. By including in this dialogue two of the founders of the discipline, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, as well as contemporary sociologist of religion Mark Chaves and contemporary cultural sociologist Andrew Miles, the paper hopes to offer potential theoretical and methodological steps forward in considering beliefs in the sociological study of religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can short term, strategic campaigns be a basis for solidarity? This paper offers a theoretical and empirical exploration of a less-frequently discussed form of solidarity between two diverse campaigns; one based less on shared identity and more on shared values; one that is aimed less at persistence and more at short-term impact. Building upon earlier conceptual work (Wright et al. 2018), we call this form drive-by solidarity because of its one-way, unsolicited, hit-and-run nature. This paper examines drive-by solidarity through case of Anonymous' "Operation KKK" (#OpKKK), an online hacktivist campaign against the Ku Klux Klan carried out in response to threats of violence they made against #BlackLivesMatter protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, in November 2014. After constructing a timeline of events from available news stories and videos for context, we use over three million tweets to conduct a series of network analyses to model the most significant online accounts associated with each campaign as well as the connections built across the respective online discursive spheres through retweets and mentions. We graph both the period of the 2014 #OpKKK campaign, along with its revival one year later, in order to empirically examine the short- and long-term effects. Although Anonymous acted unilaterally and made no efforts to be inclusive of #BlackLivesMatter activists in their deliberations, the campaigns became politically coordinated. #OpKKK successfully achieved its initial goals; however, longer-term effects were more volatile. This form of solidarity is theoretically compelling because it seems to challenge much extant theory on the role of identity in building solidarities, and even forces us to rethink social movement success. Furthermore, we propose that drive-by solidarity could offer a possible model for other movements seeking high-impact, low cost, short-term campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corporations increasingly gather massive amounts of personal information in order to offer individuals different products and prices. In this paper I explore how U.S. consumers assess the fairness of companies using personal data in this way. Drawing on two nationally representative surveys that ask respondents to say how fair or unfair they think it is for car insurance companies to use various sorts of personal information, I find that consumers make strong moral distinctions among types of data. Using latent class analysis, I show that Americans fall into four groups in how they think about fair data use. One group is broadly permissive; one thinks data should be used in moderation; one is permissive but only when it comes to data drawn from domain-related (e.g., driving-related) behavior; and one is skeptical of behavioral data as a special sort of information. I then show that each group of Americans has a distinct socio-demographic composition. The richest, best-educated groups are the ones that are most accepting of behavioral data--the kind corporations increasingly use to treat consumers differently. At a time when the practices and rules around personal data use are being hotly debated, this paper demonstrates the importance of taking into account a broad range of consumer voices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do minority concentrations shape the dynamics of race- and ethnic-based hiring discrimination that take place within urban labor markets? This paper synthesizes two branches of labor market stratification literature that developed independently of one another to theorize how demographic contexts of labor markets conditions race- and ethnic-based hiring discrimination that manifest within them. On the one hand, the experimental studies on labor market discrimination offer a sharp tool to derive causal estimates of racial bias in hiring, but undertheorize the contexts in which discriminatory behaviors take place. On the other hand, the quantitative literature linking demographic composition to various forms of social stratification highlights the role of urban contexts but lacks the methodological tool to assess how labor market discrimination operates at hiring interface. Both literatures underexplore the role of Asians and Latinos. Relying on a unique large-scale field experiment that involves submitting nearly 12,000 fictitious resumes to real job postings across 50 major urban areas, I found that the Black-White callback gap widens in cities with a high concentration of Blacks, confirming the 'visibility-discrimination' thesis. I also show that this thesis cannot be extended straightforwardly to other minority-white comparisons. I find a small and inconsistent narrowing effect of percent Asian on the Asian-White hiring gap. I find no evidence of an association between Latino concentration and Latinos' labor market outcomes relative to Whites. The paper concludes with theoretical implications for studies that operate at the intersection of race and stratification, labor market and work, and urban inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Usually, university drop-out has been studied from the perspective of academic failure, specifically a failure of students to integrate academically and socially to university (Tinto's model). Previous research has mainly supported this model but has also revealed that drop-out rates vary remarkably across fields of study, study programs, and universities. This paper takes a different starting point: it illuminates how the inclination to drop out have developed over three decades (1985-2016) and whether student-body composition affects the overall reported tendency to drop-out. Based on pooled cross-sectional data from the Konstanz Student Survey (KSS) with over 80,000 respondents in 24 universities, the paper tests factors such as gender, parental education, motivation and high school diploma grades. The inclination to drop out slightly decrease over decades while the changing composition of the student body explains around one third of this reduction. While BA/MA reform does not seem to contribute to the reduction of drop-out, the paper discusses potential changes to the matching process of students to study programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper adds to ongoing debates on the interaction of democracy and populism by addressing the differences and similarities between democracy and populism, and identifying the dynamic relations between these political processes. Specifically, the paper argues that although democracy and populism vary regarding their definitions, goals, actors, the scope and methods of action and the political identification of their adherents, they are often intertwined and interact together especially in transitional democracies. Using the Orange Revolution and the Euromaidan uprising of 2013-2014 that were both the building blocks to stabilizing democracy in Ukraine, this paper analyses the impact of populism on fledgling democracy and discusses the dual normative and empirical character of populism, and the vulnerability of democratic system to negative interaction effects between populism and democracy. The paper concludes by providing a template for a taxonomy of the elements of democracy and populism in political events of the Orange Revolution and Euromaidan uprising in Ukraine, and a direction of interactions between these elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary society, social justice issues are often related to documentary video clips and their interpretation. Understanding the ways of working with and around video in everyday settings could provide novel perspectives on traditional themes. This paper is based on an ethnomethodological study of videotaped episodes of students' collaborative work with on-line material constructed from texts, images and video clip fragments of oral history interviews. Students worked with a single computer device and one paper sheet in small groups of two or three. The temporal organization of classroom work with digital oral history in this classroom setting is divided to three phases: (1) preparation for watching the video clip, which requires the establishment of an optimal arrangement of material artifacts and participants' bodily orientations; (2) watching the video clip, which points to a preference for uninterrupted watching from start to end, as well as limitation of participants' talk to "running commentary"; (3) reflecting the video clip, which shows orientation to the formulation of required answer and its collaborative writing into the paper sheet, including occasional second watching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fading of pay-setting institutions is one of the most important explanations for America's rising income inequality, yet little is known about this relationship at the workplace level, in particular for employer-provided benefits. The paired objects of this paper, therefore, are the relationship between fading pay-setting institutions and the takeoff in benefit inequality, and the role of workplaces in the upward trend in the dispersal of benefits compared with wages. For these aims the paper utilizes rather unique linked employer-employee administrative data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Employer Costs for Employee Compensation (ECEC) microdata on wages and voluntary benefits costs. The paper reveals that between 1982 and 2015 organizational income polarization in benefits was worse than in wages, supporting this paper's argument that benefits determination is more organization embedded than wages. It further shows that workplace-level pay settings make a greater impact on the level of and inequality in benefits than do wages. Consequently, we find that the decline in labor unions and the liberalization of employment practices (i.e., the proliferation of nonstandard employment relations and the decline of employment by large firms) partly explain why benefit inequality increased at greater than twice the rate of wage inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents how states in the Global South can redefine the category of innovation to promote late development in the face of Northern hegemony. Research on innovation primarily focuses on the question of what is conducive to innovation, treating innovation as an outcome to be explained, yet less attention has been paid to what counts as innovation, who gets to define and categorize it, or how and why that matters, especially in the context of North-South norm convergence/divergence. Meanwhile, existing literature has examined categorization as a ubiquitous force that informs political, economic, and social order, but few studies have explored the role categorization might play in the agenda of state-led late development. Drawing on 113 interviews and extensive historical data, the paper seeks to fill these gaps by studying the political economy of pharmaceutical innovation in China. Specifically, the paper analyzes 1) how the Chinese state redefined the category of new drug from "new to the local industry" (1984) to "new to the domestic market" (2002), and eventually to "new to the global market" (2015) to promote domestic industry growth and upgrading under the pressure of Northern-based Big Pharma, and 2) how such audience-based recategorization (on the principle of "new to whom") was driven by an irrational innovation fever stemming from the gap between guidance on paper and practice on the ground, which has produced mixed consequences for the local industrial performance and access to medicines in the past decades. Through this in-depth case study, the paper aims at deepening our understanding of categorization, innovation, development, and globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the relevance of oil exploration to climate activism in Aotearoa New Zealand. Qualitative data were collected through 66 interviews and 44 participant observations of events (including environmental conferences, community meetings, and public rallies) between 2013 and 2014. At the time of this study, New Zealand was positioning itself to become a major explorer and extractor of oil and gas for global consumption. This study finds that for marginalized climate activists undermined by skeptics and an uninterested or overburdened public, national efforts to become an emergent O&G frontier reenergized their climate action and awareness raising efforts. Those who remobilized reached three calculations: 1) As a public issue, climate change was "tired," "depressing," and "dead;" 2) An oil rig was tangible and offshore risks were known; and 3) Resisting O&G exploration was a climate action (although in many public settings the connection was best unsaid). For climate activists, speaking openly and critically about oil exploration was one way to act surreptitiously on climate change. In addition, this paper weaves age and issue into an analysis of climate change. There were distinct age differences in terms of style of action (growing protest among young adults versus dawning awareness among older adults) and sentiment (anger and frustration among young adults versus obligation and guilt among older adults). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to discuss the main contribution of the sociology of Alfred Schutz for the interpretative biographical research. Schutz handles with biography at least in two different ways: as a manner to investigate the "because" motives for ones action and as a way to exemplify his theoretical considerations. The first step will be to discuss the biographical experience as a key aspect to understand the motivation for action. It will be argued that for Schutz, biography is not exclusively an individual life' trajectory, but results of both individual and social experiences, synthesized on the individual relevance systems, which are embedded by the relevance systems of the community in which one has been socialized. In the second step the paper verifies how Schutz deals with his own biographical experiences to discuss theoretical and empirical aspects of his sociology. Examples of the first kind of use of biography by Schutz are, for instance, "The Stranger" and "The Homecomer", which will be considered briefly in this paper. The third step will be dedicated to establish a dialogue with some of the most influential approaches in the biographical research field, as those proposed by Daniel Bertaux, by Bernard Lahire and by Gabriele Rosenthal, pointing out their advantages and limitations from a Schutzian analytical perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of occupations and professions have shown uniform credentialing systems and standardized bodies of abstract knowledge to be normative markers of established professions. By drawing on such objective sources of expertise, professionals are able to make and justify decisions, establish and maintain legitimacy, and defend themselves from competitors. However, many contemporary occupations lack such credentialing systems and bodies of objective knowledge. In such cases, how do practitioners convince themselves and others that their expertise is legitimate? This paper uses the case of consultants to nonprofits to explore how members of occupations make and justify decisions about clients and internal operations in fields that lack codified bodies of knowledge and uniform credentialing systems. Drawing on a Zelizerian relational work framework and building on recent work on the role of values in constructing occupational mandates, the paper finds that consultants to nonprofits use two strategies to make decisions and legitimate their expertise in the absence of uniform standards: the personalization of legitimacy and deferring to standards of the nearest institutional domain. Using these strategies, consultants redefine consulting as carework, shifting the institutional field to which they are oriented from management consulting to nonprofit organizations. Contributing to our understanding of the role of values in constructing occupational mandates, the case of consulting to nonprofits shows that values can be used by occupational groups not only to distinguish themselves from obvious peer occupations, but also to redefine the field in which the occupation should be considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many analyses of neoliberalism in Latin America assume that it was the debt crises of the 1980s which convinced domestic capitalists of the need for market reform and signaled the exhaustion of the developmental state. Using a combination of primary and secondary sources, this paper argues that in Brazil capitalist support for neoliberalism only emerged roughly five years after the debt crisis, in the aftermath of the Cruzado Plan (Plano Cruzado), a failed government attempt to control rampant inflation. I argue that in the context of increased mobilization and crisis following the plan, newly fortified business organizations spread a vision of neoliberalism which resonated with many industrialists in São Paulo, Brazil's economic capital, and turned them firmly against the developmental state. This period of mobilization stands in contrast to São Paulo industrialists' reaction to the debt crisis of 1981 when they remained both passive and divided over the issue of economic liberalization. Following the Cruzado Plan, however, Brazilian industrialists remained politically fragmented relative to other national bourgeoisie in the region. This continued fragmentation explains the conflict among industrialists over what "economic opening" would look like in the years following the Plano Cruzado. Thus, this paper emphasizes the relative increase in organization and mobilization which turned industrialists against the developmental state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]