SAGE Podcast

Using a case study of Saratoga Springs, NY, and the Saratoga Springs Open Space Project (OSP), this article explores how citizen-led land preservation organizations can form coalitions with diverse interests in pursuit "qualitative growth," urban development reforms. Data come from in-depth interviews of key informants and extensive archival research. Focusing on both land preservation and downtown rehabilitation, the OSP was able to form broad coalitions of historic preservationists, downtown business interests, and developers to shift local development policy that would simultaneously promote in-fill downtown development while discouraging development at the fringe of the community. Though diverse and broad, many of the coalitions shifted, and different issues necessitated new coalition building activities. Furthermore, the continuing need to cultivate relationships with elected officials in a community of high political turnover brought challenges to the organization and the broader land management coalition. Finally, the limits of the OSP’s influence were witnessed by its lack of leverage over officials in neighboring communities and the contradictory development outcomes that ensued as a result of specific Not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) decisions.

Josh Rogen, Editorial Assistant for Urban Education, interviews Rebecca Munnell McHugh, Christy Galletta Horner, and Tanner LeBaron Wallace about their article, "Bridges and Barriers: Adolescent Perceptions of Student–Teacher Relationships." This article appears in the January 2013 issue of Urban Education.

Timothy Kuhn discusses Organizational Communication with MCQ editor James Barker in this sixth installment of the Thought Leadership podcast series.

MCQ editor James Barker reflects on his six-year term as editor and the future direction of MCQ for the journal's 25th anniversary.

The classroom is a social space, and how students experience and perceive that space shapes how they approach their classrooms and what they do in them. Margaret Austin Smith uses ethnographic data of college students' classroom experiences to demonstrate the degree of importance understanding students’ ways of knowing the classroom has on the effectiveness of teaching and learning relationships.

Author Robert H. Brophy discusses his article, "Return to Play and Future ACL Injury Risk After ACL Reconstruction in Soccer Athletes From the Multicenter Orthopaedic Outcomes Network (MOON) Group.""The purpose of this study was to (1) test the hypotheses that player sex, side of injury, and graft choice do not influence RTP and (2) define the risk for future ACL injury in soccer players after ACLR."

Academic disciplines have been characterized as static institutions that do not change or conform to outside forces. Abbott and Silbey have discussed this issue in relationship to how the history of refereed journals in the social sciences can provide information on department, institution, and disciplinary changes that often wear a false guise of continuity. This article analyzes the content of Criminal Justice Policy Review by replicating the methodology Silbey used to study the content of Law & Society Review in terms of editorship, authorship, article contents, method and mode of research, and article topics. The results indicate that although changes in the content of Criminal Justice Policy Review over time may be small, they exist and most correspond with changes in the department, institution, and discipline. Changes in journal content also appear to have been influenced by changes in editorial philosophy and increasing interest in raising the stature of the journal within the discipline.

James Barker, editor of MCQ, interviews Robert R. Ulmer about his article, "Increasing the Impact of Thought Leadership in Crisis Communication."

This podcast features a discussion between Lisa Andermann and Samuel Law on their co-authored article with Danni Li on the relationship between degrees of social defeat and themes of delusion in patients with schizophrenia from immigrant and ethnic minority backgrounds, published in volume 49 issue 5 of Transcultural Psychiatry

Charles Fornaciari and Kathy Lund Dean discuss their paper on using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator in grading student work.

This article presents culture as a vehicle of labor market sorting. Providing a case study of hiring in elite professional service firms, I investigate the often suggested but heretofore empirically unexamined hypothesis that cultural similarities between employers and job candidates matter for employers’ hiring decisions. Drawing from 120 interviews with employers as well as participant observation of a hiring committee, I argue that hiring is more than just a process of skills sorting; it is also a process of cultural matching between candidates, evaluators, and firms. Employers sought candidates who were not only competent but also culturally similar to themselves in terms of leisure pursuits, experiences, and self-presentation styles. Concerns about shared culture were highly salient to employers and often outweighed concerns about absolute productivity. I unpack the interpersonal processes through which cultural similarities affected candidate evaluation in elite firms and provide the first empirical demonstration that shared culture—particularly in the form of lifestyle markers—matters for employer hiring. I conclude by discussing the implications for scholarship on culture, inequality, and labor markets.

Research on family background and educational success focuses almost exclusively on two generations: parents and children. This study argues that the extended family contributes significantly to the total effect of family background on educational success. Analyses using the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study show that, net of family factors shared by siblings from the same immediate family, factors shared by first cousins account for a nontrivial part of the total variance in children’s educational success. Results also show that grandparents’, aunts’, and uncles’ socioeconomic characteristics have few direct effects on educational success. Furthermore, resources in the extended family compensate for lacking resources in low-SES families, which in turn promote children’s educational success. The main conclusion is that the total effect of family background on educational success originates in the immediate family, the extended family, and in interactions between these two family environments.

Weber argued that human suffering creates the demand for theodicies: cultural vocabularies, religious or secular, that explain perceived injustices. This article combines an interpretive analysis of rhetoric commemorating the events of September 11, 2001 with an effort to construct generalizable cultural theory, demonstrating how the Weberian concept of theodicy adds to our understanding of commemorative rhetoric. In the case of September 11 commemorations, the theodicies deployed exhibit a clear fracture. Speakers at the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, have taken a dualistic approach to the problem of theodicy, while speakers in Manhattan have taken a tragic approach. This variation can be explained through a four-part model that argues theodicies are structured by (1) events, (2) carrier groups, (3) audiences, and (4) genre memory. More broadly, I argue for explicit attention to theodicy in cultural sociology, demonstrating that the quest for theodicy is a crucial driving force behind the impulse to commemorate in the first place.

To cope with steep losses in membership and eroding legal protections, some unions have begun to look outward for help. Scholars likewise point to broad-based coalitions as a potential route to labor's revitalization. Yet surprisingly little is known about union coalition work, from when and why it occurs to what union allies typically bring to the table. We take up these issues with a unique dataset on strike events from the 1990s and 2000s, contributing to labor and social movement research. First, we show that despite considerable academic interest in union outreach to other social movements, this phenomenon remains fairly rare. Second, our findings demonstrate how the immediate threat to unions posed by employer intransigence matters not just for the mobilization of external allies, as the social movement literature would expect, but also for the assistance brought to bear by those allies, which has received relatively little attention from scholars. Third, although we find important distinctions in unions’ propensity for outreach, results suggest a more nuanced picture of union activity than previously conceived. In various ways during strike events, both social movement unions (typically highlighted in the literature) and declining industrial unions are turning to coalition partners.

We contribute to research on the relationships between gender, work, and health by using longitudinal, theoretically driven models of mothers’ diverse work pathways and adjusting for unequal selection into these pathways. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Youth-1979 (N = 2,540), we find full-time, continuous employment following a first birth is associated with significantly better health at age 40 than part-time work, paid work interrupted by unemployment, and unpaid work in the home. Part-time workers with little unemployment report significantly better health at age 40 than mothers experiencing persistent unemployment. These relationships remain after accounting for the unequal selection of more advantaged mothers into full-time, continuous employment, suggesting full-time workers benefit from cumulating advantages across the life course and reiterating the need to disentangle health benefits associated with work from those associated with pre-pregnancy characteristics.