Teaching
My teaching is anchored in economic and organizational sociology, with sustained attention to inequality, power, and the institutional conditions that make coordination possible. Across courses, students learn to treat organizations and markets as political economies: sites where authority, valuation, and moral claims are produced, contested, and repaired. I emphasize conceptual clarity, careful use of evidence, and the ability to translate theory into observable indicators and plausible research designs.
Across these courses, students examine coordination under constraint: how people and institutions manage legitimacy, dependence, evaluation, and risk. In applied organizational leadership contexts, that vocabulary helps students diagnose organizational problems and specify credible interventions.
A complete list of courses taught (Miami University and Boston College), plus current courses in development.
Leadership theory across strategic, sociological, and normative traditions; case-based analysis of effective and failed leadership.
Organizations as institutions: authority, legitimacy, culture, field dynamics, and organizational change.
Economic sociology: markets as embedded social structures; moral and political foundations of economic life.
Problem construction, claims-making, policy arenas, and competing explanatory frames.
Work organization and inequality: control, consent, precarity, job quality, and strategies of repair.
Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods approaches; research design, evidence, and inference.
Research-driven applied project: stakeholder mapping, evidence collection, analysis memos, and polished deliverables.
Directed research projects (variable topics; student-led design with structured mentoring).
Collective action, mobilization, framing, and the organizational dynamics of movement fields.
Classic and modern sociological theory with emphasis on conceptual translation and analytic use.
Race, gender, and power through movement frames, institutions, and public discourse.
Work, organizations, and social life under automation; governance, inequality, and institutional change.
Collective action, mobilization, framing, and organizational dynamics of movement fields.
Environmental crisis, institutions, and the political economy of risk.
Cooperation, norms, sanctions, and coordination problems across social contexts.
Canonical and contemporary readings organized around enduring sociological problems and debates.
Algorithms as institutions: governance, evaluation, labor, and the political economy of AI.
Attention, persuasion, and valuation: cultural production, platforms, and the organization of markets.
How organizations justify action; how legitimacy is granted, withdrawn, and rebuilt.
Status, distinction, and evaluation; how value is produced and who benefits.
Competition, coordination, and governance across interdependent organizations.
Software-mediated coordination, dependence, and governance through design.
Sensemaking under uncertainty; institutional ambiguity and the politics of knowledge.
Course design draws from classic and contemporary lines in economic and organizational sociology (Weber; Polanyi; Granovetter; DiMaggio & Powell; Fligstein; Bourdieu; Friedland & Alford), scholarship on valuation and evaluation (Zelizer; Fourcade; Beckert; Espeland & Stevens), organizations and inequality (Khan; Rivera; Armstrong & Hamilton), and work on platforms, automation, and governance by design (Schor; Srnicek; Gillespie; Kenney & Zysman; Rosenblat). Where courses engage crisis and public life, they draw from sociological work on risk, publics, and the public sphere (Beck; Hilgartner & Bosk; Habermas; Fraser; Papacharissi).
Readings are sequenced to build analytic capacity: identifying levels of analysis, specifying mechanisms, and connecting claims to evidence.