Network A: Communitarian Ideals and Civil Society
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
José A. Ruiz San Román
José A. Ruiz San Román teaches sociology of communication and public opinion in the Sociology Department Universidad Complutense in Madrid, Spain. His research interests include the effects of mass media in young people, mass media persuasion, and communitarianism in the work of Amitai Etzioni.
Tongji University
Jieren Hu
Jieren Hu is currently an associate professor in the Law School of Tongji University and visiting professor in the Law and Sociology Faculty at Qinghai Normal University. She is also the visiting scholar in the Center for China Studies at UC Berkely, USA. She obtained her Ph.D at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Prof. Hu does research in Sociology of Law, Conflict Resolution and Social Governance in China.
City College of New York
Katherine Chen
Prof. Katherine K. Chen’s research specialties cover organizational studies and economic sociology. Her award-winning book, Enabling Creative Chaos: The Organization Behind the Burning Man Event, shows how an enabling organization can support members’ efforts without succumbing to either under-organizing’s insufficient structure and coordination or over-organizing’s excessive structure and coercive control. Additional articles on prosumption, storytelling, and communification have appeared in American Behavioral Scientist, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Qualitative Sociology, The Sociological Quarterly, and other journals.
To understand how organizations collectively innovate—or maintain the status quo—through relational work and advocacy, Chen is working on two parallel ethnographic projects. One examines the coordination efforts among organizations that help older adults who prefer to “age in place” in their homes. A 2019 Socio-Economic Review article based on this research shows how markets are supported by “bounded relationality” a process by which intermediary organizations train people to undertake consumer routines. Another project studies how a flagship microschool and its network of affiliates communicate innovative ways of organizing learning to multiple audiences. This research focuses on how this network blends a seemingly unlikely mixture of practices from the democratic free school movement, decolonization and abolition efforts, and software project management to promote lifelong learning in communities.
Besides serving as a mentor to tenure-track faculty in CUNY’s Faculty Fellowship Publication Program (FFPP), Chen has focused on developing and supporting interdisciplinary communities that study organizations and markets, with a focus on participatory and liberatory practices that prefigure and expand future possibilities. With Victor Tan Chen, she co-edited a special issue that showcases cutting-edge research on democratic practices by presenters from SASE annual meetings between 2017 and 2019. This Research in the Sociology of Organizations volume, titled “Organizational Imaginaries: Tempering Capitalism and Tending to Communities through Cooperatives and Collectivist Democracy,” will be published in March 2021. In addition, Chen has contributed to methodological discussions regarding research on organizations, including what we can learn from “extreme” cases and how to undertake organizational ethnography in her work as a regular contributor to orgtheory.net, a popular sociology blog, and its 2021 spin-off, the Markets, Power, and Culture blog.
Chen is currently an associate professor of sociology at The City College of New York and the Graduate Center, CUNY. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University and an undergraduate degree from Stanford University.
Joyce Rothschild
Joyce Rothschild is professor emerita at Virginia Tech, having served as a professor in the university’s Department of Sociology and School of Public and International Affairs for 27 years. Her research projects have had several empirical foci – from worker cooperatives to whistle blowers – while her writing has returned frequently to the question of how organizations can accomplish their purposes without hierarchical control. Overall, her work develops a collectivist-democratic alternative to bureaucracy – that is, a form of organization that effectively offers voice and agency to all of its members. Her book with J. Allen Whitt, The Cooperative Workplace: Potentials and Dilemmas of Organizational Democracy and Participation (Cambridge University Press, 1986), won the C. Wright Mills Book Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems.
Virginia Commonwealth University
Victor Tan Chen
Victor Tan Chen is an associate professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy (University of California Press, 2015) and (with Katherine Newman) The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America (Beacon Press, 2007), named by Library Journal as one of the Best Business Books of 2007. He received the 2017 Dunlop Outstanding Scholar Award from the Labor and Employment Relations Association. His work has been featured in the Atlantic, BBC News, New York Times, and NPR. He also edits In The Fray, an award-winning magazine devoted to personal stories on global issues.
This network focuses on the moral or values-based underpinnings of human thought, practices, and institutions that comprise civil societies. This network examines how communities and societies are organized around communalistic values and interactions with governmental systems, organizations, and other collectivities, not merely calculative self-interest or instrumental relations.
Our network has an experimental sub-track called “Emergent Organizations: Creating More Participatory, Inclusive, and Caring Civil Societies and Social Economies.” This sub-track welcomes studies of activities coordinated through formal organizations, informal groups, decentralized projects, or participatory decision-making. For example, individual and panel submissions could examine how organizational or group values, practices, or relations can promote more inclusive, liberatory, democratic, equitable, or caring communities; how such forms can impact economies and polities and shape the nature of work, family, and community life; and how state policies and market pressures affect these collectivities.
Examples of relevant phenomena include, but are not limited to: affinity groups, anti-oppressive human services, artistic or cultural collectives, collectively governed commons, community land trusts, community real estate investment cooperatives, community-based economic exchanges, community-run marketplaces, free schools, giving circles, limited equity housing cooperatives and co-housing, mutual aid networks, open and commons-based (inclusive) innovation and valuation frameworks, participatory budgeting, public-private partnerships, social enterprises, and worker or consumer cooperatives.
If you have questions about submitting to the sub-track within Network A, please contact the sub-track co-organizers:
- Katherine K. Chen, The City College of New York and Graduate Center, CUNY, New York, US, kchen@ccny.cuny.edu
- Joyce Rothschild, Virginia Tech (emeritus), Virginia, US joycevt@aol.com
- Victor Tan Chen, Virginia Commonwealth University, Virginia, US vchen@vcu.edu
If you have other questions about Network A that are not about the sub-track, please contact the other Network A co-organizers:
