The Global Sociology Blog

On NPR: As the article notes: “Part of the gap in pay is driven by choices, even within single job categories. Among physicians, for example, women are more likely than men to choose lower-paid specialties (though thisdoes not explain all of the pay gap among doctors). And among all workers, women are more likely than men [...]

It is with the third chapter of Stanley Aronowitz‘s Taking It Big – C. Wright Mills and The Making of Political Intellectuals, that things get more sociological and critical. This chapter is largely dedicated to Mills’s The New Men of Power – America’s Labor Leaders, published in 1948. “The New Men of Power is not a [...]

SNL mostly sucks, but every once in a while… (via RWW)

.So, I am currently reading Stanley Aronowitz‘s Taking It Big – C. Wright Mills and The Making of Political Intellectuals, which, so far, reads like an intellectual biography of Mills, in the context of the post-War New York intellectual / radical scene. In the context of the strike of the Chicago teachers and the whole [...]

With Networked: The New Social Operating System, Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman offer a very readable introduction to networks and their social consequences. This is a book that aims to reach a larger audience beyond academic walls. So, even though it extensively relies on research (quite a lot from Pew, unsurprisingly), it is not a tedious read at all [...]

I have long been a fan of Arlie Hochschild’s work ever since I read The Second Shift. I think she has been one of the most readable professional sociologists, combining great insights on gender, labor and family dynamics. Her book co-authored and co-edited with Barbara Ehrenreich, Global Woman, is a brilliant piece of work delineating [...]

I have already posted quite a bit about David Harvey‘s Rebel Cities: From The Right to the City to the Urban Revolution: the fetishism of the local and the horizontal monopoly rent and local capitalism the cities in the context of the anti-capitalist struggle And more broadly on global cities. It is somewhat of a given [...]

In the Guardian, as part of the “graduate without a future” series: “But at a personal level, what should a kid do? One answer I’ve explored with my students is emigration. There are in fact plenty of jobs for British graduates in the Far East and in Latin America, where British degrees are in demand. [...]

There is so much more to be done with 21st century peasants than just making them poorer and more precarious. The following is just sample of stories collected over the last few weeks. Consider it my own, much less smart, version of Gans’s functions of poverty – the functions of the precariat. 1. Gives the [...]

I know I am totally behind on this but this is a very interesting video on how iPads are made at the infamous Foxconn factory: Of course, the fact that workers are lining up to take these jobs is often used as an argument that the low wages and lousy working conditions (which have improved [...]

Well, not really: “At a TUC event last month we lamented: we are going backwards. Women are leaving the workforce in ever greater numbers, to meet the usual fate of women who don’t work in a shrinking state divesting itself even of free access to the Child Support Agency and legal aid – poverty, and indifference to poverty. When [...]

Arne Kalleberg‘s Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: The Rise of Polarized and Precarious Employment Systems in the United States, 1970s to 2000s is a very clear and detailed examination of the evolution of the labor market in the United States over the past 40 years, deepening the precarization conceptual framework presented in his 2008 ASA presidential [...]

Sorry about the lack of recent posts, guys. Between the beginning of the term and the massive amount of academic writing I have foolishly and irresponsibly agreed to do, I will be swamped until February 15th. That being said, while taking a break from The Writing, I watched this film, scifi fan that I am: [...]

This has already made the rounds: “Dozens of workers assembling Xbox video game consoles climbed to a factory dormitory roof, and some threatened to jump to their deaths, in a dispute over jobs that was defused but highlights growing labour unrest as China‘s economy slows. The dispute boiled over last week after contract manufacturer Foxconn Technology Group said [...]

Oh, let me see… WOMEN! Women who work in this field and visit CES: “Some women at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas have expressed their frustration at the scantily-clad “booth babes” hired by some companies to promote their stalls.” Video at the link for the full misogyny of it. The assumption is [...]