SOS9237 ¨C Organizational Foundations of Inequality

Course content

This PhD course will provide students with a broad introduction to key theories, concepts, and methodological issues related to the empirical study of the organizational foundations of inequality.

At the core of research in organization theory and practice lies the fundamental premise that organizations play a key role in generating and sustaining inequality, but also in how to make change come about. To date, significant progress has been made in identifying and testing the particular mechanisms that account for how organizations affect social stratification. Prior research has documented the significance of organizations for understanding inequality and diversity, as they both determine the matching of individuals to positions in the labor market, and implement the evaluation and reward structures used to distribute power, wealth and prestige among individuals and groups.

As such, organizations and organizational practices influence inequality at different stages of the employment process, given that employers manage hiring and job assignments, training and development possibilities, compensation, and promotion and termination processes. Consequently, the distribution of resources and opportunities in society cannot be fully understood without paying attention to the role that organizations and their practices and key organizational members play in contemporary stratification processes and employment outcomes.

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Course leaders

Professor Are Skeie Hermansen, UiO. His research focuses on the incorporation of immigrants and their native-born children at the workplace level and across other societal domains, as well as broader pattern of inequality, segregation, and mobility in education, neighborhoods, and the labor market. Hermansen¡¯s research primarily draws on large-scale administrative data from Norway and other countries, including linked employer-employee data that enable the quantitative study of workplaces and organizational inequality.

Professor Arnfinn Midtb?en, UiO. His research centers on immigration, integration, and ethnic inequality, including topics such as employment discrimination, citizenship, labor migration, children of migrants in education and work, and the history of migration research. Midtb?en combines a range of methods in his research, including field and survey experiments, qualitative interviews, document analysis and traditional surveys.

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Lecturers

Professor Trond Petersen, University of California, Berkeley. His research falls within the areas of social inequality and quantitative methods. He has investigated the role of employer discrimination in creating inequality in wages, hiring, and promotions between men and women, as well as the role of family adaptations in this. In his research, Petersen draw on large-scale quantitative data from the U.S. and Scandinavia, including quantitative data on large firms.

Professor Roberto Fernandez, MIT Sloan School of Management. His research focuses on the areas of organizations, social networks, and race and gender stratification. Fernandez has extensive experience doing field research in organizations, including an exhaustive five-year case study of a plant retooling and relocation. His current research focuses on the organizational processes surrounding the hiring of new talent using data from various organizations.

Professor Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. TBA. He has studied the impact of financialization upon U.S. income distribution, workplace desegregation and equal opportunity, network models of labor market structure, and relational inequality as a theoretical and empirical project. His long-term agenda is to work with others to move the social science of inequality to a more fully relational and organizational stance, which he has synthesized in his contributions to Relational Inequality Theory. He is advancing this agenda through empirical studies of jobs and workplaces, as well as social relationships between jobs within workplaces and the social relationships that link organizations to each other. Tomaskovic-Devey is the incoming chief editor of the American Sociological Review.

Learning outcome

You will obtain knowledge about:

• new and foundational theories about organizational inequality
• key conceptual frameworks in research on organizational inequality
• how to integrate a focus on organizational inequality in empirical research
• the relationship between social policy and measures to reduce employer bias and foster organizational diversity and equality

The participants will be encouraged to relate the course discussions to their PhD-projects.

The course will focus on involving students in both plenary discussions and work in groups.

Admission to the course

PhD students at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography register for the course in?StudentWeb.

Interested participant outside?the Department of Sociology and Human Geography shall fill out this?application form.?

The deadline for registration is April 21th?2024.?After the deadline shall all applicants receive a note about if?the application is approved.

Formal prerequisite knowledge

Applicants must be part of a PhD program. No specific prior knowledge is required, but initial knowledge of one or more of the topics of the course is an advantage.

Teaching

The teaching will involve a combination of lectures, discussions and work in groups. The students will work on a group assignment during the course to be presented on the final day of the course.

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Obligatory activities:

• Read the assigned literature in advance
• Participate actively in discussions during the course

Taking part in the full program requires physical attendance. Academic interventions from invited guest speakers may?be done via a digital platform.

Examination

The entire four-day event makes up the PhD course, with the equivalent of?5 credits. For approval you need to be an active participant throughout the course, be present on all days,?read the curriculum and submit an essay.

Submit essay based on your own research. The essay must be between 4000-6000 words.?The essay must be anchored in the course literature, and discuss a theoretical issue relevant for the course.?Further specifications of the requirements to the essay will be provided to the participants.

Deadline for submission of essay:?August 31th 2024. The participants will then receive comments, after which they will have three weeks to submit the final version.

Examination support material

All exam support materials are allowed during this exam. Generating all or part of the exam answer using AI tools such as Chat GPT or similar is not allowed.

Grading scale

Grades are awarded on a pass/fail scale. Read more about?the grading system.

More about examinations at UiO

• Use of sources and citations
• How to use AI as a student
• Special exam arrangements due to individual needs
• Withdrawal from an exam
• Illness at exams / postponed exams
• Explanation of grades and appeals
• Resitting an exam
• Cheating/attempted cheating

You will find further guides and resources at the web page on examinations at UiO.