Abstract: Past scholarship has shown that culture and networks are two major inequality-generating mechanisms on the labor market as people who show cultural fit and use social networks tend to gain advantages. Yet, much less is known about how people with limited initial access to cultural and social resources acquire them to achieve career success. To fill this gap, my dissertation builds process models of culture and networks as interrelated pathways to social mobility. I do this using three waves of qualitative interviews with 65 graduate student job seekers, focusing on immigrant students who completed their undergraduate education in their home countries and thus lack initial access to socio-cultural resources valued by US employers. Specifically, my dissertation examines three challenges facing these job seekers and illustrate the processes of addressing them: immigrant job seekers 1) responded to their lack of cultural fit through the process of cultural adaptation, through which people acquire and update their expressed values and self-presentation styles to fit into employers’ cultural expectations, 2) addressed the initial lack of social networks, through connecting via brokers to potential job referrers, and 3) addressed conflicting expectations regarding temporal rhythms of social interactions, by either resorting to strong and homophilous ties that facilitate fast help-seeking, or building relationships slowly at the risk of high opportunity costs on the job market. Taken together, my dissertation offers novel insights into culture and networks as processes of social mobility within structures of inequality.

Abstract: Existing sociological literature provides conflicting theoretical accounts of disadvantaged youth’s aspirations. While structuralists and rational choice theorists contend that disadvantaged young people tend to form low aspirations in the face of limited structural opportunities, cultural sociologists maintain that disadvantaged youth construct highly aspirational imagined futures to claim their moral self-worth in the present. I argue that incorporating time frames into the study of aspirations helps resolve the tension by enabling researchers to investigate when—in what time frame—one model works better than others. I demonstrate the value of this approach using qualitative interviews with 31 eighth-grade students in China’s rural Shanxi Province, where structural constraints of socioeconomic attainment undercut cultural ideals of social mobility. In this context, findings show that respondents focused on practical constraints from their academic performance and family economic strains when projecting their short-term futures (structural/rational choice model) while they constructed future selves distinctive from rural origins in their long-term futures (cultural model). I conclude by discussing this approach’s implications for studying aspirations, expectations, and their relationships to educational and career outcomes. Download PDF here

Hybrid organizations that feature competing institutional logics and practices are increasingly prevalent. How do organizations manage such institutional complexity when crisis happens, that is, when low-probability, high-impact events that threaten the achievement of fundamental goals? While past research emphasizes the importance of structures and routines that include multiple professional groups representing varied goals, the structural account cannot explain why organizations with similar structures often diverge in their ability to balance competing goals. Building on a growing culture literature, we argue that different relational schemas, through which organizational members view and interact with each other, set off divergent responses to the multiple-goal problem. At organizations where members view each other as collaborative problem solvers, the decision-making unit consistently integrate varied goals. At organizations where members view some as decision makers while others as information supplier and strategy implementor, the decision-making unit oscillates between prioritizing some goals over others, depending on pressures leaders faced. We developed this argument using a two-year comparative ethnography of two high schools in the same district in the US, where the Covid-19 pandemic challenges their ability to support students’ academic performance and mental health. In uncovering the divergent processes of responding to this crisis despite adopting similar decision-making structures, this paper contributes to studies of institutional logics and organizational resilience in crisis.

Description: The objective of this course is to introduce students to sociological ideas that will be useful for thinking about the world we live in. To this end, our discussions will be grounded in real-world phenomena and recent historical events. We will use sociological concepts and theories to cast new light on these familiar examples. An overarching theme in this course is to understand a) how social forces constrain and enable individual actions, and b) how individual and collective behaviors shape social conditions. Through readings, class discussions, and hands-on projects, the course is designed to help students gain skills to understand and navigate the social world. Download syllabus here

Description: This course will provide an overview of sociological perspectives on labor market inequality. Throughout the semester, we will critically examine sociologists’ answers to some of the most fundamental questions regarding labor market inequality: Why do people go to work? How do workers transform labor power into products and services? Why do some people enjoy higher income, higher status, and more workplace authority than others? Why do some jobs, occupations, organizations, and industries provide better economic returns and opportunities than others? Engaging with contemporary insights into these questions, students will gain the theoretical tools to think critically about ways in which labor market inequality may be produced or reduced. Download syllabus here