Book Review – Born to Rule

By Shay O’Brien (Harvard University) Title: Born to Ruleby Sam Friedman and Aaron Reeves “One of the perennial problems in writing about elites,” Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman (p. 6) observe in their new book, “is figuring out exactly who you’re talking about.” Indeed, this is the first question for any study of the “elite:” who are they, anyway? Born to Rule: The Making and … Continue reading Book Review – Born to Rule

Interview with Matthew Norton

By Giovanni Zampieri Giovanni Zampieri (G): Thank you for accepting the interview! I’d like you to introduce yourself and your work to kick things off. Matthew Norton (M): Hi! I’m Matt Norton, an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon. I think of my work as being a mixture of cultural sociology and historical sociology. The throughline that helps me focus on specific … Continue reading Interview with Matthew Norton

Event Reports – 2024 ASA Annual Meeting

Reports Compiled by Manning Zhang Panel: “Culture in Organizations and Markets” Organized by Anna Woźny (Princeton University and University of Tokyo) The study of culture in organizations and markets has become a vibrant area of sociological inquiry in recent years. This panel showcased five examples of cutting-edge work in this heterogenous field with papers chosen to reflect its breadth, different theoretical and methodological approaches, as … Continue reading Event Reports – 2024 ASA Annual Meeting

Letter from the Chair

Here’s a not-so-secret: over the years there have been discussions about what, if any, is the point of a newsletter these days. The question can be asked too generally to be useful—as in, “what is the points of newsletters at all these days” —or too specific to be comfortable, as in “what is the point of this newsletter these days.” Yet the real heavy lifting … Continue reading Letter from the Chair

Newsletter Announcements

New Books Presser, Lois. 2022. Unsaid: Analyzing Harmful Silences. University of California Press.This book advances a methodological approach for determining what is not said within texts. Researchers and laypersons alike suspect that some text is “coded” – that it contains some “subtext.” They are keen to identify that subtext, to make out what a text is taking for granted or communicating surreptitiously, for left implicit, … Continue reading Newsletter Announcements