Dissertation Summary
Despite eroding job security and work conditions, American workers report a high level of trust in their managers and co-workers within national surveys. My dissertation, “The Processes and Politics of Trust at Work,” is an in-depth ethnographic study of the social and cultural production of workplace trust and its implications for contemporary employment relations. While many studies of trust rely on reified and overly sanguine understandings of this fundamental process of social organization, my research offers a contextualized and culturally embedded account of trust as a relational mechanism of workplace meaning-making and inequality.
Through a year of ethnographic and participant observations and 121 interviews at four stratified work sites in the New York metropolitan area, I argue that trust has become a collective workplace project that aligns employee and employer interests in the face of precarious, short-lived and asymmetrical employment relationships. Workplace actors appeal to trust, as a cultural resource, to fend off the dehumanizing aspects of contemporary work. Workers look for clues that their managers are trustworthy, and meanwhile managers invoke trust to bind workers in relations of obligation. In the context of constant ambiguity, trust becomes a moral choice believed to reflect qualities such as resilience, authenticity and empathy. However, gender, race and class intersect with performances and perceptions of trust, allowing some workplace actors to navigate contemporary employment more successfully than others.
This research is supported by the National Science Foundation and the Bankard Fund for Political Economy.
Other research
I further investigate the moral dimensions of contemporary work through a second research stream focused on the drivers and consequences of American work ethic.
Despite eroding job security and work conditions, American workers report a high level of trust in their managers and co-workers within national surveys. My dissertation, “The Processes and Politics of Trust at Work,” is an in-depth ethnographic study of the social and cultural production of workplace trust and its implications for contemporary employment relations. While many studies of trust rely on reified and overly sanguine understandings of this fundamental process of social organization, my research offers a contextualized and culturally embedded account of trust as a relational mechanism of workplace meaning-making and inequality.
Through a year of ethnographic and participant observations and 121 interviews at four stratified work sites in the New York metropolitan area, I argue that trust has become a collective workplace project that aligns employee and employer interests in the face of precarious, short-lived and asymmetrical employment relationships. Workplace actors appeal to trust, as a cultural resource, to fend off the dehumanizing aspects of contemporary work. Workers look for clues that their managers are trustworthy, and meanwhile managers invoke trust to bind workers in relations of obligation. In the context of constant ambiguity, trust becomes a moral choice believed to reflect qualities such as resilience, authenticity and empathy. However, gender, race and class intersect with performances and perceptions of trust, allowing some workplace actors to navigate contemporary employment more successfully than others.
This research is supported by the National Science Foundation and the Bankard Fund for Political Economy.
Other research
I further investigate the moral dimensions of contemporary work through a second research stream focused on the drivers and consequences of American work ethic.
- In a paper under review, I argue that working mothers navigate a complex cultural terrain when making decisions about how to best manage work and family demands, and I test the association between women's cultural commitments and specific work-family strategies. Introducing a sacred/profane strategy typology, this paper extends scholarship on work-family management beyond the binary language of "trade-offs" and demonstrates women's bounded agency in creatively interpreting and selecting from a "buffet" of strategy options.
- With Allison Pugh, I investigate the cultural context surrounding U.S. workers' documented acquiescence to work intensification. We explore the contesting discourse available to workers by analazying the critique of overwork in newspapers, magazines and - employing methodological innovation - on social media. In a manuscript currently under revision, we outline the volume and form of public critique and discuss the implications of the available cultural vocabulary for worker resistance.
- Elite work environments demand all-encompassing work devotion, yet many organizations boast "well-rounded" employees. What are the norms for talking about leisure in these environments? Pulling on 65 in-depth interviews with high-status professionals, I investigate the meanings and stratification of leisure among elites across five distinct industries. Initial findings from this research have been presented at national conferences, and a manuscript is currently in preparation.