Written in the form of a dialogue with Brussels sociologist Dieter Vandebroeck, this article retraces the social and intellectual trajectory of Loïc Wacquant as stepping stone to reviewing and discussing the major concepts coined and theoretical propositions elaborated in the course of his research on comparative urban marginality, racial domination, the ghetto, the penal state, neoliberalism, and carnality. This provides an opportunity to specify the relationships between ethnography, history and theory; the dialectic of domination and resistance; the role of public (...) (dis)honor in social life; the uses of Bourdieu's bureaucratic field; and the social and academic conditions of incubation, diffusion, and death of scholarly myths such as the “underclass.” The article closes on a call to clearly distinguish the rhetorical, metaphorical, and analytical usages of concepts and reaffirms the need for epistemic reflexivity as sine qua non for the articulation of robust scientific problematics. (shrink)

Using 16 in-depth interviews drawn from a larger sample of Black/white biracial individuals, this article explores how gender shapes the microlevel process of racial identity construction. Skin color stratification within the Black community, combined with a low rate of marriageable men and high rates of interracial marriages among the most educated and affluent Black men, has created a social context that differentiates the interactional experiences of biracial men and women. The findings highlight the need for more complex theoretical conceptualizations of (...) how gender shapes the way that women negotiate their racial identities in post-Civil Rights America. (shrink)

This article uses two national survey data sets to analyze the effects of skin color on life outcomes for African American and Mexican American women. Using a historical framework of European colonialism and slavery, this article explains how skin color hierarchies were established and are maintained. The concept of social capital is used to explain how beauty, defined through light skin, works as capital and as a stratifying agent for women on the dimensions of education, income, and spousal status. The (...) analysis shows that light skin predicts higher educational attainment for both groups of women. Light skin directly predicts higher personal earnings for African American women and indirectly affects personal earnings for Mexican American women. Light skin predicts higher spousal status for African American women but not for Mexican American women. (shrink)

Framed by theoretical perspectives on Black Feminist Thought, the life course, and the Generation X/Hip-Hop generation, I present findings from a subset of 10 Black women educators in Birmingham, Alabama who participated in a larger life story project. The participants, who came of age professionally across the pre- and post-civil rights movement (CRM), describe divergent and convergent social and historical contexts that shaped their professionalization, as well as their relationships with and perceptions of Black students and parents. Participants across generation (...) theorize that teaching and leading are activist practices in their own right, which entail clandestine support and silent protest, intergenerational bridge-building, and debunking the myth of Black inferiority. Post-CRM educators, in particular, expressed ambivalence about their urban students? futures. I conclude that multigenerational perspectives should figure more prominently in the scholarship on Black education in the US South. This emphasis could spark new directions and strategies for linking successive generations of Black educators, thereby maximizing opportunities for intergenerational dialogue and collaboration for transformative change in urban education. (shrink)

Despite its empirical prominence, there is very little extant organizational research on Big Data. However, there is reason to believe this is changing as organizational theory scholars are beginning to embrace new methods and data sources. In this essay, I present a view that suggests there are several latent opportunities, many of which have been simmering unattended for some time. This research approach is not without its challenges, as the ontological terrain of Big Data is untested and potentially disruptive. However, (...) we are observing a renewal of approaches to text and content analysis. By opening up the toolkit of computational linguistics methods for text analysis, Big Data may bring about fresh synthesis and reshape classic debates around social structure. (shrink)

Although cities were given no role in the constitutional order of the United States, the new nation posed the same potential threats to the accumulation of capital and wealth as European monarchs posed to long-powerful urban centers. In mobilizing for self-protection and advancement, American business developed new practices and discourses of citizenship that sustained a central role for the community as the locus of social provision. The strategy combined opportunity-hoarding through restricted membership in civic groups and obligation-hoarding through the alignment (...) of diverse networks of voluntarism with this civic core. The linkage of business interests to this hybrid charitable-civic configuration constituted a source of resistance to nationalizing tendencies driven by demands for social protection. This alternative model of social provision and civic organization sustained a distinctive pattern of political membership and state development. By fiercely defending the capacity of privately governed civic networks to provide substantial social support, this history of business influence through community organizations lives on in the partial and fragmented character of the American welfare state. (shrink)