Research
I am a sociologist working at the intersection of economic sociology, organizational sociology, and the sociology of technology. My research asks how organizations and publics coordinate action when authority is contested and legitimacy cannot be taken for granted.
One part of this agenda examines post‑bureaucratic and “horizontal” organizations that reject traditional hierarchy, especially makerspaces and other collectivist settings. Using ethnography and interviews, I show how hierarchy and exclusion can re‑emerge through cultural mechanisms even when formal bosses are absent. Openness can become a resource for distinction: insiders use expertise, taste, and informal gatekeeping to generate social closure inside organizations that publicly claim inclusivity. This work connects classic concerns in organizational sociology, including authority, status, and culture, to contemporary experiments in organizational design.
I also study platform capitalism and gig work as a form of software‑mediated labor control. Platforms manage labor while displacing standard employment ties, producing distinctive combinations of autonomy and domination. My published work shows how economic dependence on platforms shapes heterogeneous outcomes, especially precarity and workers’ capacity to interpret control as “choice.” Current projects examine collective identity formation among gig workers and the academic field that has formed around gig‑economy research, including how data access, disciplinary logics, and legitimacy conflicts fragment what can be known about platforms.
A third strand moves from work organizations to crisis and environmental risk. In disasters, official narratives are often contested in real time, and residents assemble alternative ways of monitoring, interpreting, and warning one another. I theorize these formations as “disaster publics”: groups that improvise vernacular expertise, critique authority, and coordinate mutual monitoring when trust collapses. In parallel, I develop work on systemic fragility and “hyper‑coupling”: the idea that modern infrastructures become brittle when efficiency pressures remove slack and common vendors create synchronized, common‑mode risks. This connects local meaning‑making to larger patterns of infrastructure failure, institutional distrust, and regulatory response.
The research uses ethnography, interviews, coding, network/bibliometric analysis, and comparative case design to connect lived experience to structural conditions. The theoretical aim is integrative but not eclectic: gig work, post‑bureaucracy, disaster publics, and infrastructure failure are different empirical sites, but each involves coordination after legitimacy weakens. The central questions are when repair is possible, when substitutes emerge, and when breakdown becomes more likely.
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Publications
Books, peer‑reviewed articles/chapters, and links.
William Charles
Sociological Forum · 2026
William Charles; Juliet B. Schor
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography · 2025 · 54(3): 391–422
Ryan Gunderson; William Charles; Claiton Fyock
Journal of World‑Systems Research · 2025 · 31(2): 582–614
William Charles; Ryan Gunderson
Critical Sociology · 2025
William Charles
Poetics · 2025
William Charles; Ryan Gunderson
Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour · 2024 · 54(1): 158–178
Ryan Gunderson; William Charles
Environmental Sociology · 2023 · 9(4): 398–408
Ryan Gunderson; William Charles
Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory · 2023 · 24(3): 259–277
Elke Schüßler; William Attwood‑Charles; Juliet B. Schor; Stefan Kirchner
Socio‑Economic Review · 2021 · 19(4): 1217–1243
Juliet B. Schor; William Attwood‑Charles; Mehmet Cansoy; Isak Ladegaard; Robert Wengronowitz
Theory and Society · 2020 · 49(5): 833–861
Connor Fitzmaurice; Isak Ladegaard; William Attwood‑Charles; Mehmet Cansoy; Luka Carfagna
Socio‑Economic Review · 2018 · 16(3): 587–612
William Attwood‑Charles; Sarah Babb
Research in the Sociology of Work · 2017 · 30: 87–115
Juliet B. Schor; William Attwood‑Charles
Sociological Compass · 2017 · 11(8)
Juliet B. Schor; William Attwood‑Charles; Connor Fitzmaurice; Luka Carfagna
Poetics · 2016 · 54: 66–81
Culture, status, and social closure inside “horizontal” designs.
Dependence, identity, and the contested relational structure of platforms.
Improvised sensemaking under low trust; hyper‑coupled infrastructures.
This article examines how communities make sense of disaster when official institutions no longer appear credible. Using a mixed-methods analysis of Facebook discussion after the East Palestine derailment, it develops the concept of the disaster public for place-based collective responses organized around urgency, institutional distrust, vernacular expertise, and practical problem solving.
This article asks how the study of the gig economy has developed as an academic field and why rapid growth has not produced a more integrated body of scholarship. Drawing on bibliometric analysis of the 1,000 most-cited peer-reviewed articles on gig and platform labor, it shows a literature shaped by uneven development, fragmented citation networks, and weak shared reference points.
The project treats academic knowledge production as an organizational problem: data access, disciplinary incentives, and journal audiences shape what can be known about platform capitalism.
This article examines why contemporary infrastructures fail in ways that are both dramatic and difficult to contain. Across cases in rail, aviation, digital infrastructure, and energy, it argues that fragility emerges from the combination of tight interdependence, reduced slack, and growing reliance on shared technical systems.
The project links post-legitimacy, infrastructure, organizational strain, and crises of governance.
Book reviews
William Charles
American Journal of Sociology · 2026 (forthcoming)
William Charles
Social Forces · 2022 · Volume 101, Issue 2, Page e20