Research

My research addresses the intersections of culture, religion, and economic sociology; a common theme in this body of work concerns the ways in which moral meanings influence economic processes.  I am also interested in the ways that different social locations shape individuals’ moral outlooks as well as prospects for mobility.   My research makes use of both quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis, and has been published in numerous scholarly journals, including Poetics, Social Forces, and the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.

Moral Discourse and Market Processes

In a book manuscript tentatively titled Wal-Mart Wars:  Families, Citizens, and Morality in the Debate Over America's Largest Retailer, I use the recent debate over Wal-Mart as a way to analyze how Americans construct moral views of the market in public discourse, particularly surrounding the largely mundane process of shopping.  Complementing the recent interdisciplinary surge of morality studies, the book also contributes to literatures in culture and economic sociology, in that it explores market processes as they are both constructed and contested by social movement activists with strong ties to their own social locations and repertoires.

The first part of my research analyzes the press releases and website content of Wal-Mart and its main adversary Wal-Mart Watch, and focuses explicitly on how these competing social movements invoke the dialectical discourses of thrift and benevolence, freedom and fairness, and individualism and community in their public rhetoric.  A key finding concerns how these two groups build their moral discourse around radically different core categoires:  Wal-Mart's supporters, for example, testify that “Wal-Mart’s low prices are the only way that our family can survive” while Wal-Mart’s opponents focus their arguments on the wellbeing of larger collectivities such as workers and citizens – categories that are cognitively far removed from the familial focus of Wal-Mart and its advocates.

The second portion of the manuscript examines the means by which national media outlets present the Wal-Mart debate.  Examining a sample of over 1200 articles drawn from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal  and USA Today during 2000-2006, I find that the predominant category of debate adopted within the media presents Wal-Mart controversies as primarily concerning workers’ issues – a move that in some ways endorses the goals of the union-funded group Wal-Mart Watch, but also circumscribes the debate by focusing principally upon technical issues such as wages, health benefits, and logistical matters such as overtime and scheduling.  As a result, the quality of the debate that reaches the broader public is comparatively “thin,” addressing mostly technical matters instead of larger moral dilemmas, such as the moral rights of workers in free market capitalism.

Low-Wage Workers and Unionization

My work has also addressed various aspects of low wage work, such as the potential for unionization among retail service workers. In a paper recently published in Research in the Sociology of Work, I argue that retail workers employ a relational ethic in understanding key aspects of their employment: job responsibilities, self-development, and conflict in the workplace.   This finding is significant for labor organizers who seek to make inroads in the largely unorganized retail sector, and suggests that traditional unionization models that emphasize power and conflict with management may be less successful than relational strategies that emphasize cooperation and mutual gain. 

I have also explored issues related to organized labor movements by analyzing different aspects of public religious discourse.  In an article entitled “Prayers of the People:  Moral Metaphors in the Right to Life and Faith Based Labor Movements” (published in Poetics in 2008), I compare the discursive strategies of scripted religious liturgy among pro-life and pro-labor activists.   Building upon George Lakoff’s theory of familial metaphors and political reasoning, my analysis identifies the smaller metaphors that make up larger moral frameworks, suggesting that moral worldviews may be more varied and contextually dependent than typically assumed, particularly in formal discursive settings.

Poverty, Organizations, and Stratification

Finally, my research also addresses the consequences of organizational membership for social mobility in settings ranging from poor urban neighborhoods to religious denominations.  With coauthors Mario Luis Small and Erin Jacobs (Social Forces 2008), I argue in that researchers need to pay closer attention to the role of organizations as a source of social network ties for poor neighborhoods.  Conceiving of organizational membership in a slightly different way, I have also explored the consequences of childhood membership in conservative Protestant denominations for educational attainment across three different cohorts in the General Social Survey.  In a paper recently published in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (2008), I find that being raised in a conservative Protestant denomination exerts a negative effect on adult educational attainment, and argue that this is the result not of a particular ideology (such as a religious distrust of science and higher education), but an artifact of network similarity and intergenerational inequality among evangelicals.