PhD

Economic Sociology Seminars

The Economic Sociology Seminars for Fall 2024 will run in collaboration with the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research.  Seminars will take place on Tuesdays from 1:00-2:30 p.m. in E62-350.  Please contact Jessica Lipsey (jessi71@mit.edu) for additional details, or if you wish to be added to the mailing list to receive updates. 

Fall 2024

  • October 1, 2024

    Vanessa Conzon, Assistant Professor of Management and Organization, Carroll School of Management, Boston College

    Advantaging White Men:  How Play Sustains Gender and Racial Inequality in Organizations

  • October 29, 2024

    Julia Melin, Assistant Professor of Business Administration, Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College

    Does Remote Work Help or Harm Early-Career Women’s Psychological Safety and Professional Confidence? Insights from a Field Experiment

    Despite early-career women’s greater preference for remote work, it is unclear whether working remotely is more harmful or beneficial for their psychological safety—a feeling that is critical for building professional confidence, with implications for retention. I argue that in male-dominated fields, remote work limits early-career women’s access to instrumental and expressive resources, causing disproportionate harm to their psychological safety and professional confidence compared to men and more professionally advanced women. I test my prediction and a potential intervention by leveraging unique longitudinal data collected from biotechnology employees immediately before and after a forced shift to remote work. Upon going remote, early-career women in the company underwent a 6-month intervention consisting of virtual peer groups and career coaching. I find women in the intervention maintained pre-remote levels of psychological safety while also experiencing a significant boost in professional confidence, whereas women in a matched control group showed meaningful declines on both outcomes. Men and more professionally advanced women were unaffected by the remote transition. For all employees, professional confidence strongly predicted organizational retention one-year post-intervention, with psychological safety fully mediating this effect. Supplementary qualitative insights offer support for the intervention’s impact while providing more granularity into the factors underlying its effects. Results identify how in male-dominated fields, the impact of remote work on psychological safety and professional confidence varies based on gender and career stage. Findings also demonstrate a novel way organizations can leverage digital technologies to prevent these negative effects while granting all employees the flexibility of remote work.

  • November 5, 2024

    Kwelina Thompson, MIT Sloan School of Management 

    “Exalted Expectations:” Organizing in the Publishing Industry Across a Century of Change

  • November 12, 2024

    Jonathan Mijs, Assistant Professor, Boston University

     

  • December 10, 2024

    Susan Silbey, Professor of Behavioral and Policy Sciences, MIT Sloan School of Management