Center for Organizational Research (COR)

October 16, 2020
From Dreams of the Overworked to Behind the Ideal Worker
Melissa Mazmanian, Associate Professor, University of California, Irvine
10:30a.m. – 12:00noon
Virtual Talk

In their recently published book Dreams of the Overworked: Living, Working, and Parenting in the Digital Age, Melissa Mazmanian and co-author Christine Beckman offer vivid sketches of daily life for nine families in Southern California, capturing what it means to live, work, and parent in a world of impossible expectations – expectations amplified by smart devices. In this book, the reader is invited into the homes and offices of these working professional in order to witness the crushing pressure of unraveling plans and celebrate how people—through a web of social “scaffolding”—support each other’s dreams. This book challenges the seductive myth of the individual with phone in hand, doing it all on their own. This ideal didn’t capture the reality of everyday life, even before the pandemic hit. In truth, beneath the veneer of technology is a complex, hidden system of support—our dreams have always been scaffolded by retired in-laws, friendly neighbors, spouses, schools, and paid help. This book makes the case for celebrating the structures that allow us to strive for our dreams by supporting new public policies, challenging workplace norms, reimagining family and community, and valuing invisible work on the home front. In this talk, Dr. Mazmanian will provide an overview of the book and preview a journal article that examines how families respond to work demands that assume everyone should be an Ideal Worker.

A talk of interest to the COR community…

“Innovation with Chinese Characteristics: The Evolving Effects of Political Ties”

Speaker: Heather Haveman
Professor of Sociology and Management
University of California, Berkeley
Haas School of Business
Date: Friday, February 28, 2020
Time: 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM00 noon
Venue: SB1 5100

Talk of interest to COR community…

“Fool Me Once: Disproportionality and Vulnerability to Trust among Black Families in an Affluent School District”

KAROLYN TYSON
Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Professor and Associate Chair,
Department of Sociology
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Friday, February 7, 2020
10:45 a.m. – 12:00 p.m., Education 2001

Abstract: Sampson Hills is an affluent and predominantly white suburb in the Northeast, with a small but established black population. Although it is a “destination district” — a place to which families move for access to high-quality material goods and services, including high-performing schools — black children have endured educational exclusion for decades. What explains this longstanding pattern, particularly in a setting that presumably offers greater opportunities for educational success and social mobility? To address this question, I focus on disproportionality in special education and explore the paradox of how some parents’ trust of schools can contribute to unfavorable outcomes for their children. Based on data from a community ethnography of Sampson Hills, I argue that low-resourced parents are _vulnerable to trust_. I show that in unequal power relationships, individuals with lower power and limited resources are at greater risk of manipulation, yet more compelled to trust, particularly in situations in which the decision holds enormous consequences. To understand ongoing mechanisms of educational inequality, I advance the idea of _vulnerability to trust_, arguing that vulnerability is a position of _structural disadvantage_ and not simply a position one assumes voluntarily as a way to inspire trust.

Bio: Karolyn Tyson is the Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1999. Her main fields of interest are sociology of education, social psychology, and social inequality. Dr. Tyson’s publications have addressed such topics as how schools reproduce social inequality and the role of the schooling experience in the development of attitudes toward school. Her overall program of research centers on understanding how cultural, structural, and individual-level factors affect school achievement and contribute to unequal educational outcomes.

A talk of interest to COR community…

“A Patchwork of intra Schengen Policing: Border games over national identity and national sovereignty”

Professor Maartje van der Woude, Leiden University

Time: 12-1:15 pm
Day: Friday, January 31
Location: The Jennifer Buher-Kane Conference Room (SSPB 4250)

ABSTRACT: The Schengen Agreement was meant to create a “borderless Europe”. Yet, from the outset on, countries have had a very ambivalent relationship to what Schengen stood for politically –  an enhancement of the economy – and what it meant in practice: not being able to properly monitor the movement of flows of people across intra-Schengen borders. By drawing from the work of Wonders (2008; 2016) on the flexibilization of state power which interlinks with Mofette (2018) and Valverde’s (2009) work on jurisdiction and interlegality as well as with the ideas around conscious incompleteness of agreements and regulation, the talk will discuss how member states of the European Union (EU) as well as national enforcement agencies have been consciously using the interplay between the normative regime on the European level and the normative regime, implementation and execution thereof on the national and local level. By using the discretionary space in rules and regulations to the best advantage of their unique interests, the different national and local actors involved in intra-Schengen cross border monitoring all seem to be involved in a complicated border game evolving around the demarcation of boundaries: the actual creation of boundaries to keep out the “crimmigrant” other and to preserve cultural homogeneity, but also the less visible process of sometimes actively creating and sometimes actively crossing boundaries between different jurisdictions and legal mandates.

BIO: Maartje van der Woude is Professor of Law and Society at Leiden University (the Netherlands) and holds her chair in the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Society. She is also affiliated with the Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law at the University of Oslo and the Center for the International Comparative Study of Criminology at the University of Montreal. Her work examines the politics and dialectics of terrorism/crime control, immigration control and border control and the growing merger of all three, also referred to as the process of crimmigration. She is currently working on a 5-year research project – “Getting to the Core of Crimmigration” – that was funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).