This AMCIS Seminar will be given by Dustin Avent-Holt (Augusta University) and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey (University of Massachusetts Amherst).
| Date | 11 March 2021 |
|---|---|
| Time | 16:00 -17:00 |
Organizations are the dominant social invention for generating resources and distributing them. Relational Inequalities develops a general sociological and organizational analysis of inequality, exploring the processes that generate inequalities in access to respect, resources, and rewards. Framing their analysis through a relational account of social and economic life, Donald Tomaskovic-Devey and Dustin Avent-Holt explain how resources are generated and distributed both within and between organizations. They show that inequalities are produced through generic processes that occur in all social relationships: categorization and their resulting status hierarchies, organizational resource pooling, exploitation, social closure, and claims-making. Drawing on a wide range of case studies, Tomaskovic-Devey and Avent-Holt focus on the workplace as the primary organization for generating inequality and provide a series of global goals to advance both a comparative organizational research model and to challenge troubling inequalities.
Dustin Avent-Holt is Associate Professor of Sociology at Augusta University. His research focuses on understanding how various forms of inequality emerge and develop over time. Along with Don Tomaskovic-Devey he co-authored Relational Inequalities: An Organizational Approach (2019, Oxford University Press) and is now further refining, testing, and applying the basic propositions of the theoretical argument developed in their new book.
Donald Tomaskovic-Devey is Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the Director of the Center for Employment Equity. He also convenes the Comparative Organizational Inequality Network (COIN) which includes thirty-plus scientists exploring organizational inequalities with longitudinal linked employer-employee data from fifteen countries. His work has won numerous awards and he has held visiting faculty appointments in Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Sweden. He is currently doing research on organizational inequality variation, intersectional wage gaps, and developing theoretical and empirical models based on relational inequality theory. Recent publications from these projects have appeared in PNAS, PLosOne, Socio-Economic Review, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, the American Sociological Review, and the American Journal of Sociology. He has published four monographs, including Recapitalizing America: Alternatives to the Corporate Distortion of National Policy (Routledge, 1983), Gender and Racial Inequality at Work: The Sources and Consequences of Job Segregation (Cornell, 1993), and Documenting Desegregation: Racial and Gender Segregation in Private Sector Employment since the Civil Rights Act (Russell Sage Foundation, 2012). His most recent monograph, with Dustin Avent-Holt, Relational Inequalities: An Organizational Approach (Oxford, 2019), won the best book awards from two sections of the American Sociological Association.