City College of New York

Katherine Chen

Virginia Commonwealth University

Victor Tan Chen

Victor Tan Chen is an associate professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University who studies economic inequality, labor markets, social policy, and alternative organizational forms. He is the author of three books on economic issues: The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America (with Katherine S. Newman), which was named one of Library Journal’s best business books of the year; Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy, for which he received the  John T. Dunlop Outstanding Scholar Award from the Labor and Employment Relations Association; and Organizational Imaginaries: Tempering Capitalism and Tending to Communities through Cooperatives and Collectivist Democracy (with Katherine K. Chen), which received the Joyce Rothschild Book Prize from the Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations. Chen’s work has been featured in the Atlantic, New York Times, BBC News, Fortune, and NPR. He also edits In The Fray, an award-winning magazine devoted to personal stories on global issues.

Bryn Mawr College

Amanda Barrett Cox

Amanda Barrett Cox is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Bryn Mawr College. Her research examines how organizations transform and reproduce social inequality. Her specific areas of interest include organizations and power, economic elites and philanthropy, education and social mobility, social networks, and emotions. Cox’s current work includes an ethnographic study of two organizations attempting to redistribute power across institutional roles—a philanthropic foundation seeking to transfer control over a portion of its grant-making to a community-based board, and a democratic school in which students and teachers have equal voice (one vote per person) in decisions. Additionally, she is working on a computational text analysis of pledge letters written by philanthropists, and she is collaborating on a project with colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania and Dickinson College that investigates the school- and neighborhood-based social networks of parents sending their children to a school of choice. Her prior work includes an ethnographic study of the summer session of a program that prepares low-income students of color to attend elite boarding schools.

Cox’s work has received awards from several sections of the American Sociological Association, and her work has appeared in American Journal of Sociology, Sociology of Education, Sociological Forum, Symbolic Interaction, and Du Bois Review. She has co-authored pieces that appear in Teachers College Record, Educational Researcher, The New York Times, and The Hechinger Report.

Before pursuing her PhD, Cox worked as a community organizer and a high-school Latin teacher. She holds a PhD in sociology and education from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in Sociology of Education from Stanford University, an MSEd in Education, Culture, and Society from the University of Pennsylvania, and a BA in Classical Civilizations from Wellesley College.

Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences

Philipp Degens

Philipp Degens is Professor of Social Entrepreneurship and Social Economy at the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Previously, he was Acting Professor of Sociology (Dynamics and Regulation of Economy and Society) in the Department of Socioeconomics at the University of Hamburg. His academic expertise includes cooperatives, commons, civil society and the third sector as well as the debates and options for societal transformation and sustainability.

Philipp is currently working on two projects that combine perspectives from economic, political, organizational and legal sociology: Firstly, he analyses community-supported agriculture as a specific form of economic democracy, and he explores how secondary organizations aim to strengthen the movement and promote individual initiatives. Secondly, he examines different approaches to reconfiguring the institution of property to promote sustainability. For instance, he analyses cooperative forms of land tenure and he explores how the discourse on rights of nature challenges conventional notions of ownership and private property.

Philipp is a board member of the “Sociology of Law” section of the German Sociological Association and has been a research associate at the Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies “Futures of Sustainability: Modernization, Transformation, Control“.

California State University San Marcos

Paola Ometto

Paola Ometto is an Assistant Professor of Management in the College of Business Administration at California State University San Marcos. She is passionate about how organizations can be sources for a more environmentally sustainable and socially just world. She researches how communities, social movements, and institutional factors impact entrepreneurship and organizations. Empirically, she studies cooperatives, social enterprises, moral markets, and entrepreneurship in Brazil and North America. Prior to joining CSUSM, she received her Ph.D. in Strategic Management and Organization from the Alberta Business School (University at Alberta) and a Ph.D. in Public Administration from FGV-EAESP (São Paulo – Brazil). She has received a National Science Foundation grant to study multi-cultural and underserved communities engaging in entrepreneurship. Her work has been published at Business & Society, Research in the Sociology of Organizations as well as other journals.

Virginia Tech

Joyce Rothschild (Advisor)

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.

Reed College

Marc Schneiberg

Marc Schneiberg, the John C. Pock Professor of Sociology at Reed College, is an economic and organizational sociologist who research focuses mainly on the rise, contemporary fates, and economic consequences of organizational diversity and alternatives to giant, shareholder corporations within American capitalism. He has studied the evolution of cooperative and other alternative enterprise systems in the US, including electrical and agricultural cooperatives, insurance mutuals, community banks, and credit unions. He has also addressed how such systems can help reshape markets, subject corporations to countervailing forces, and foster both resilience and shared prosperities in local economies. With National Science Foundation support, he is currently studying organizational variety within American banking and how it combined with state policy to channel flows of loans away from—and in to—small business in poor and minority communities during the pandemic. Schneiberg also has long standing interests in institutions and their relationships with social movements, and in economic governance, including association, regulation and self-regulation in American manufacturing and finance. He has been honored to serve in various capacities in the American Sociological Association, the NSF and the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. His work can be accessed on his webpage.

Baruch College and the Graduate Center, CUNY

Jason Spicer

Jason Spicer‘s research and teaching focus on the relationship between politics and the economy at multiple spatial scales, from the local to the trans-national. He primarily examines: (a) the potential of alternative economic models, such as cooperatives and social and solidarity economy organizational forms, to create a more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable economy; and (b) the role policy, planning, and political processes play in conditioning the viability of alternative economic arrangements in different contexts. He also engages in applied policy and advisory work with governments and third sector partner organizations. His academic and applied research have appeared in wide-ranging outlets, from Socio-Economic Review and Economic Development Quarterly to the Stanford Social Innovation Review. For more information, visit his website.

University of Notre Dame

Orla Stapleton

Orla Stapleton is assistant professor of development studies in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. She earned her PhD in sociology from Indiana University in 2022. She holds postgraduate degrees in humanities from New York University and in development studies from SOAS University of London, as well as an undergraduate degree in philosophy and history from University College Dublin.

Prior to joining the Keough School, she held research positions in the Humanitarian Research Group at INSEAD and in the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University.

Stapleton’s main research interest overlaps social interaction, constructing social solidarity, and business in community. Her current focus is on the social meaning of alternative exchange practices among small business owners.

She is also an award-winning instructor and has published four pedagogical case studies with teaching notes at the European Case Clearing House.