In Preparation
“The Legitimation of Big Business: Using Diachronic Word Embeddings to Measure Discursive Reclassification in the Press”
abstract.
This paper investigates the historical legitimization of large corporations by the American media. Once condemned as soulless threats to democracy, media narratives gradually repositioned these corporations as legitimate market actors. Employing innovative computational methods, specifically diachronic word embedding models, alongside deep reading, this paper analyzes long-term trends in media representations. Two key discursive reclassification mechanisms emerge: category ruptures and moral partitioning. The former detached corporations from their previous state-centered identity, while the latter legitimized the category by morally distinguishing between “good” and “bad” corporations, redirecting critiques of the form to criticisms of specific “bad” members. These findings challenge conventional assumptions about the privatization of the corporation and contribute to our understanding of organizational legitimation more generally.
“How to Manage the Market: The Construction of the Economic Actor in Business Self-Help, 1970-2020” (with Di Zhou)
abstract.
This paper investigates the evolution of economic subjectivities within the realm of popular business self-help books. By employing a computational, mixed-method analysis of best-selling titles from the New York Times over the past five decades, we explore the changing portrayal of economic actors. Our findings reveal significant shifts in the depiction of economic actors, with a decline in the “financialized self” and a reduction in investment-focused advice, particularly following the Great Recession. Instead, authors increasingly emphasize a “therapeutic” perspective, telling readers that disciplined emotions, habits, and practices are an essential component of economic success. These differences correspond to changes in self-help’s practical advice, with books decreasingly advising active investment strategies and instead increasingly highlighting disciplined consumption. We argue that these trends expand our understanding of the construction of economic actors, demonstrating a transition from finance-centered discourse to a more self-oriented and psychological approach in personal finance self-help literature.
“Seeing like a Company or a Consumer: Moralized Perspectives on Pricing Institutions and the Role of Selective Empathy” (with Barbara Kiviat)
abstract.
Sociologists have long shown that morals are key to understanding when and how markets will be extended to monetize previously unpriced products. Yet surprisingly little research has examined the moralization of the assigned prices themselves. In this paper, we draw on three survey studies to examine Americans’ moral beliefs about risk-based pricing, a pricing institution in which consumers who are predicted to be costly are charged more. In markets for both insurance and consumer loans, we uncover a pattern in which high income individuals are consistently more likely than lower income individuals to accept the moral legitimacy of tethering prices to individual behavior, irrespective of economic self-interest and ideology. To explain this pattern, we introduce a novel theoretical lens we term selective empathy—that is, in evaluating pricing arrangements, individuals direct their empathy to one exchange partner or the other, taking the perspective of either the company or the customer. We find that wealthier individuals are more likely to empathize with firms and sellers rather than with high-risk consumers. These findings, we argue, provide evidence for an affective basis underlying pro-market, pro-capital attitudes.
“The Dynamics of Managerial Ideologies: Ideological Reorientation in the Transformation of Work, 1935-2005” (with Nathan Wilmers)
abstract.
This article asks why firms adopt novel managerial ideologies. Over the past forty years, managerial ideas about workers have undergone rapid change. As companies abandoned postwar models of work, some adopted a “high road” approach to management, describing their employees as assets, while others adopted a “low road” approach, describing their employees as costs. In this article, we use research on organizational identity to develop a theory of how and why firms adopt one approach or the other. We argue that firms’ previously adopted managerial ideologies are sticky, such that firms that adopted an asset orientation in the past will continue to do so in the future. Furthermore, the type of worker defining that orientation changes when firms’ occupational composition changes. We argue that the organizational adoption of new managerial ideas is characterized by ideological reorientation—that is, management ideologies shift in response to occupational changes but are also constrained by each firm’s prior cultural history. We test these ideas using computational text analysis to analyze long-run variation in management ideology across a large panel of corporate annual reports. We find that ideologies forged in the old economy guided corporations into either high-road or low-road approaches to the new economy.
Publications
Goldstein, Adam, and Carly R. Knight. 2023. “Boom, Bust, Repeat: Financial Market Participation and Cycles of Speculation.” American Journal of Sociology 128(5): 1430-1471. [pdf]
This article asks whether the experience of a boom-and-bust cycle renders economic actors more or less likely to engage in risky financial activities in the future. The financialization of U.S. households has occurred in the context of two successive mass-participatory asset bubbles: first in the stock market during the 1990s and later in the housing market during the 2000s. Behavioral economic theories predict that prior experience of market crashes should dampen speculative tendencies and prompt actors to behave more conservatively. By contrast, the authors build on the sociological literature about the financialization of daily life to develop an alternative hypothesis: that participation in financial markets increases actors’ tendencies to engage in risky investment by socializing them to attend to novel market opportunities. The authors test these alternatives using panel data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. Results from both control function and matched regression models reveal that those who participated more directly in the late 1990s stock market were more prone to invest aggressively in the mid-2000s housing market. These positive effects obtain irrespective of whether households gained or lost wealth during the bubble. The results provide new evidence about how financial capitalism is reshaping economic behavior.
Knight, Carly. 2022. “When Corporations Are People: Agent Talk and the Development of Organizational Actorhood, 1890–1934.” Sociological Methods and Research 51(4): 1634-1680.[pdf]
Research in organizational theory takes as a key premise the notion that organizations are “actors.” Organizational actorhood, or agency, depends, in part, on how external audiences perceive organizations. In other words, organizational agency requires that external audiences take organizations to be agents. Yet little empirical research has attempted to measure these attributions: when do audiences assume that organizations are agents and how have these attributions changed over time? In this article, I suggest that scholars can triangulate across computational methods—including named entity recognition, dependency parsing, topic models, and dictionary methods—to analyze attributions of agency in text, discourse that I term “agent talk.” I demonstrate the utility of this approach by analyzing how business organizations were discussed as agents during a key period of organizaional development, the turn of the twentieth century. Analyzing articles from two of the leading national newspapers, the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, I examine agent talk in everyday business discourse. I find that agent talk generally increased over the early twentieth century, as organizations were depicted as active subjects in text and personified as speakers. Moreover, I find that this discourse was concentrated in social and legal semantic contexts: in particular, contexts relating to labor, regulation, and railroads. Finally, I show the uneven growth of this rhetoric over time, as organizations across different semantic arenas were personified as speakers. Overall, these results show how measures of discourse can provide a window into how and when audiences endow organizations with actorhood.
Knight, Carly R. 2023. “Classifying the corporation: the role of naturalizing analogies in American corporate development, 1870–1930.” Socio-Economic Review 21(3): 1629-1655. [pdf]
Abstract. Although the American corporation is now taken for granted as a private market actor, the corporation was once just as readily accepted as a quasi-public ‘creature of the state.’ This conceptual shift marks one of the most historically consequential instances of conceptual reclassification in American economic history. How was an understanding of the corporation as subordinate to the state replaced with an understanding of the corporation as prior to the state? In this article, I demonstrate that the symbolic privatization of the corporation was the joint product of both liberal and progressive legal theorizing. Further, I show that ‘naturalizing analogies’ are key to understanding this conceptual transformation. In tracing the legal theorization of the corporation, I show how the instability of naturalizing analogies, and their ability to entail associations beyond those intended by their proponents, played a role in corporate reclassification and are therefore critical to understanding the symbolic structure of corporate capitalism.
Knight, Carly, Frank Dobbin, and Alexandra Kalev. 2022. “Under the radar: Visibility and the effects of discrimination lawsuits in small and large firms.” American Sociological Review 87(2): 175-201. [pdf]
Abstract. Research on how discrimination lawsuits affect corporate diversity has yielded mixed results. Qualitative studies highlight the limited efficacy of lawsuits in the typical workplace, finding that litigation frequently elicits resistance and even retribution from employers. But quantitative studies find that lawsuits can increase workforce diversity. This article develops an account of managerial resistance and firm visibility to reconcile these divergent findings. First, we synthesize job autonomy and group conflict theories to account for resistance that occurs when dominant groups perceive non-dominant groups to be attempting to usurp managerial authority, in this case through litigation. Second, we integrate insights from organizational institutionalism, which suggests that highly visible firms seek to demonstrate compliance with legal and societal norms. Drawing on this theory, we predict that only large, visible firms will see increases in diversity following lawsuits, and, by the same token, that the most visible workplaces of those large firms, their headquarters, will see the greatest changes. We test our hypotheses with data on litigation and workforce composition from a diverse set of 632 firms that were sued by the EEOC between 1997 and 2006. This study shows that understanding the consequences of lawsuits across firms, and across organizations within them, is key to tackling workplace discrimination. Schwemmer, Carsten, Carly Knight, Emily D. Bello-Pardo, Stan Oklobdzija, Martijn Schoonvelde, and Jeffrey W. Lockhart. 2020. “Diagnosing gender bias in image recognition systems.” Socius. (6): [pdf]
Image recognition systems offer the promise to learn from images at scale without requiring expert knowledge. However, past research suggests that machine learning systems often produce biased output. In this article, we evaluate potential gender biases of commercial image recognition platforms using photographs of U.S. members of Congress and a large number of Twitter images posted by these politicians. Our crowdsourced validation shows that commercial image recognition systems can produce labels that are correct and biased at the same time as they selectively report a subset of many possible true labels. We find that images of women received three times more annotations related to physical appearance. Moreover, women in images are recognized at substantially lower rates in comparison with men. We discuss how encoded biases such as these affect the visibility of women, reinforce harmful gender stereotypes, and limit the validity of the insights that can be gathered from such data. Knight, Carly and Isaac Reed. 2019 “Meaning and modularity: The multivalence of “Mechanism” in sociological explanation”. Sociological Theory 37(3): 234-256 [pdf]
Abstract. Mechanisms are ubiquitous in sociological explanation. Recent theoretical work has sought to extend mechanistic explanation further still: into cultural and interpretative analysis. Yet it is not clear that the concept of mechanism can coherently unify interpretation and causal explanation within a single explanatory framework. We note that sociological mechanistic explanation is marked by a crucial disjuncture. Specifically, we identify two conflicting mechanistic approaches: Modular mechanism models depict counterfactual dependence among independent causal chains, whereas meaningful mechanism models depict relational interdependence among semiotic assemblages. This disjuncture, we argue, is grounded in incompatible causal foundations and entails mechanistic models with distinct and conflicting evidentiary standards. We conclude by proposing a way forward: a sociological pluralism that is attentive to the productive incongruity of our distinct explanatory models Featured in ASA Theory Section’s Newsletter, Perspectives. [pdf] Knight, Carly R., and Mary C. Brinton. 2017. “One egalitarianism or several? Two decades of gender-role attitude change in Europe.” American Journal of Sociology 122(5): 1485-1532. Abstract. This article challenges the implicit assumption of many cross-national studies that gender-role attitudes fall along a single continuum between traditional and egalitarian. The authors argue that this approach obscures theoretically important distinctions in attitudes and renders analyses of change over time incomplete. Using latent class analysis, they investigate the multidimensional nature of gender-role attitudes in 17 postindustrial European countries. They identify three distinct varieties of egalitarianism that they designate as liberal egalitarianism, egalitarian familism, and flexible egalitarianism. They show that while traditional gender-role attitudes have precipitously and uniformly declined in accordance with the “rising tide” narrative toward greater egalitarianism, the relative prevalence of different egalitarianisms varies markedly across countries. Furthermore, they find that European nations are not converging toward one dominant egalitarian model but rather, remain differentiated by varieties of egalitarianism. Knight, Carly R, András Tilcsik, and Michel Anteby. “The Geography of Stigma Management: Abstract. This study examines whether self-monitoring—a ubiquitous social psychological construct that captures the extent to which individuals regulate their self-presentation to match the expectation of others—varies across demographic and social contexts. Building on Erving Goffman’s classic insights on stigma management, the authors expect that the propensity for self-monitoring will be greater among sexual minorities, especially in areas where the stigma surrounding minority sexual orientations is strong. The authors’ survey of U.S. adults shows that sexual minorities report significantly higher levels of self-monitoring than heterosexuals and that this difference disappears in large cities. These findings speak to sociological research on self-presentation, with implications for the literatures on identity formation, stigma management, and labor markets. Tilcsik, András, Michel Anteby, and Carly R Knight. “Concealable Stigma and Occupational Abstract. Numerous scholars have noted the disproportionately high number of gay and lesbian workers in certain occupations, but systematic explanations for this type of occupational segregation remain elusive. Drawing on the literatures on concealable stigma and stigma management, we develop a theoretical framework predicting that gay men and lesbians will concentrate in occupations that provide a high degree of task independence or require a high level of social perceptiveness, or both. Using several distinct measures of sexual orientation, and controlling for potential confounds, such as education, urban location, and regional and demographic differences, we find support for these predictions across two nationally representative surveys in the United States for the period 2008–2010. Gay men are more likely to be in female-majority occupations than are heterosexual men, and lesbians are more represented in male-majority occupations than are heterosexual women, but even after accounting for this tendency, common to both gay men and lesbians is a propensity to concentrate in occupations that provide task independence or require social perceptiveness, or both. This study offers a theory of occupational segregation on the basis of minority sexual orientation and holds implications for the literatures on stigma, occupations, and labor markets. Sampson, Robert, Christopher Winship, and Carly R Knight. “Translating Causal Claims: Knight, Carly. 2014. “Mechanism-Based Causal Analysis.” The International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences. [pdf] Review of “Trade and Nation: How Companies and Politics Reshaped Economic Thought”, by Emily Erikson. British Journal of Sociology. [link] How the Corporation Lost its Image as a ‘Creature of the State’ Law and Political Economy Blog. “External Authorities and Group Beliefs: Review of Jeff Guhin’s Agents of God” Syndicate “Beyond Moral Motivations – Stefan Bargheer, Moral Entanglements: Conserving Birds in Britain and Germany.” 2019. [pdf] “The Causal Implications of Mechanistic Thinking.” (with Christopher Winship). Handbook on Causal Analysis for Social Research. 2013.
The Relationship between Sexual Orientation, City Size, and Self-Monitoring.” Socius: Sociological
Research for a Dynamic World, 2: 1-10.
Segregation: Toward a Theory of Gay and Lesbian Occupations.” Administrative Science Quarterly
60(3): 446–81.
Principles for a Policy-Relevant Criminology.” Criminology & Public Policy 12 (4): 587-616.Book reviews & other publications