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Workers make claims to professional status even when they fail to meet what many sociologists would call minimal criteria for a profession. On the surface such activity may seem counter-productive, but in reality such claims can help practitioners achieve a certain level of status or prestige not afforded to other workers. There are consequences for making such claims, however, including internal stratification and external challenges to professional jurisdiction. In this paper I argue that realtors are one group that makes professional status claims through a process of collective career narration. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the concept of chaotic career trajectories: those careers exemplified by random movement in wages, stability, and security from job to job. In other words, a group of workers as an entire unit- in this case web designers- collectively follow chaotic career trajectories, with no discernible rhyme or reason to their employment mobility patterns. In this paper, I examine the existing sociological literature on career trajectories and argue that one aspect of many web designers' careers- namely multiple simultaneous employment- contributes to chaotic mobility patterns. I conclude by arguing that chaotic careers may become the norm for various sectors of workers within a post-industrial employment landscape. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares two cases of "unorganizable" workers: teaching assistants (TAs) and web designers. Although both sets of workers experience unstable, insecure employment, TAs successfully organized while web designers have failed to do so. The stumbling block for TAs centered on their ambiguous status as workers and apprentices while web designers contend with social isolation and uncertain status as quasi-professionals and self-employed contractors. Drawing on extensive qualitative data, I draw from the TA case to explore the future of unionization for web designers. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I explore how a group of New Economy technical professionals, web designers, socially construct perceptions of job security in the face of occupational-level and personal employment instability. Web workers normalize risk and uncertainty in their daily lives via an assortment of strategic practices including consideration of autonomy from authority, flexible scheduling, creative outlet, technical advancement, and buffering against financial risk. Web designers internalize these norms via the practice of work itself, referred to as structural normalization, and through the formation of technical communities. While not all web workers benefit uniformly from uncertain work arrangements, the creation of adaptive strategies allows several to overlook what many contemporary workers would perceive as risky employment patterns and continue their pursuit of financial success and personal fulfillment in their work. In this way we come to understand why web workers, often of their own volition, choose unstable career paths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the course of interviewing 50 web designers in a local labor market, the author found that information technology (IT) workers rely heavily upon job search organizations for technical assistance, social support, and in social networking. Participant observation at three of these organizations revealed that factors such as manifest and latent goals, rules of membership, leadership structure, and labor market strategy are all connected to the gendering of each group. In particular two groups revealed varying forms of implicit ?masculine? culture while the third reflected a more explicit ?feminine? ethos. This paper argues that job search organizations in web design and related occupations that rely heavily upon word of mouth and contracting arrangements significantly influence the sex composition and patterns of gendered division of labor in these industries, leading to ghettoization and resegregation. While some job search organizations sustain sexual inequalities in web design and related industries, others work to combat these inequities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the authors examine opportunities for academic synergy and scholarship of teaching in developing a joint SociologyAnthropology Social Research Methods class in an inter-disciplinary departmental context. We focus our analysis here on issues of epistemology and methods, brainstorming ideas of how to use strengths from each discipline along with new insights drawn from inter-disciplinary integration in designing and delivering an undergraduate, applied methods course. One key finding is that teachers in these settings must constantly reflect upon their own disciplinary assumptions in order to improve pedagogy and a fruitful learning environment. We conclude the paper with ideas of how to apply this model to other inter-disciplinary (including other Sociology/Anthropology) contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From Walmart to the ?Dream Job?: Reproducing Inequality in State-Sponsored Job Search Organizations Authors: Heather Flynn Jonathan Isler Vicki Smith Department of Sociology, University of California, Davis ABSTRACT Employment and job training organizations map job seekers onto a social class system that is stratified by class, gender, and race. They are sites in which, among other things, people learn what jobs are available to them and what are not. For people who lack the skills, the experiences, or the cultural capital to readily access formal market opportunities or for people who have been locked out of previously stable careers such organizations can reproduce systemic stratification or they can disrupt it and act as vehicles for economic and social mobility and internal labor markets. In this paper we present a comparative analysis of two types of employment or job preparation organizations in order to shed light on the reproduction of social class in our increasingly stratified occupational system. Specifically, we analyze how class locations are socially constructed by and enacted in employment organizations in an era characterized by an upsurge of a hegemonic low-wage employment model and a profound reconfiguration of the conditions of middle-class employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]