Social Footholds at Work

We are pleased to announce the Philipp Brandt's HDR defense on Thursday, February 26, at 15h in room K.011 at Sciences Po.

Title : Social Footholds at Work

The members of the jury are:

M. Gilles BASTIN, Professeur des universités, l'Institut d'Études Politiques de l'Université Grenoble Alpes (rapporteur)
Mme Elizabeth Bruch, professeure agrégée, Université du Michigan
M. Olivier GODECHOT, Directeur de recherche CNRS, CRIS, Sciences Po Paris (garant et rapporteur)
M. John Levi MARTIN, professeur émérite Florence Borchert Bartling, Université de Chicago
Mme Christine MUSSELIN, Directrice de recherche émérite CNRS, CSO, Sciences Po Paris
Mme Sophie MüTZEL, professeur de sociologie, Universität Luzern (rapporteuse)

Summary :

The three volumes of Social Footholds at Work offer a comprehensive sociological account of  how people navigate work across stable and unstable settings. Together, they show how data  scientists defined a new role and identity in the 2010s, how New York City taxi drivers found  their footing in a precarious industry, how immigrant workers in Germany navigated firms and  occupations, and how US federal economic development agents operated in a hostile political  setting. These contributions result from a range of established methods and methodological innovations that integrate ideas from qualitative research into analyses of large-scale behavioral  records. This approach traces the local unfolding of technological and economic  transformations.  

The findings inform a larger argument about nonstandard work by capturing how workers  reconcile a job’s overt appearance and social context. Across the separate studies, the  manuscript develops the idea of ‘social footholds’ to identify temporary configurations wherein  workers change their trajectory. They may be structural, such as in the formal labor market, or  cultural, such as in the emergent data science profession. And they can yield rewards for some groups of workers and risks for others. Throughout, however, they offer a lens for detecting  emergent sources of inequality. 

Volume 1 grounds the empirical and theoretical contributions in an intellectual trajectory. It  centers on observation-making as a unifying methodological principle, organized around two  dimensions: moves between institutional and cultural context and moves between analytical  approaches and techniques. The discipline of sociology offers concepts and techniques for  making and interpreting observations, but these guardrails also distract from the underlying  issues demanding explanation. A focus on observations and changing the tools for making them  retains attention on the social problem at hand. 

Volume 2 develops this approach through a methodological framework, a series of empirical  insights, and a larger theoretical argument. The methodological framework builds on abduction,  the creative moment in which new observations challenge existing theories, and researchers  must formulate new explanations. The digital era has presented sociologists with new datasets  and data processing technologies that make such surprising situations more common. The  image of computational ethnographies offers guidance for these situations, motivating the  reconstruction of lived social experiences from large-scale datasets. It ensures that the analysis  improves our understanding of social problems rather than remaining stuck behind the  technologies that mediate observations. 

Three substantive studies illustrate different versions of this approach. An analysis of  partnerships among taxi drivers recovers social dynamics of which no formal records existed and associates them with the economic costs and returns of drivers. A study of employees in  the German labor market reveals fleeting arrangements of formal structures that work  differently for different groups, notably citizens and immigrants. In addition to further mapping  the spectrum of labor market experiences, it discovers a new version of the classic theory of  labor arbitrage. A third study of decision-making among professional sociologists using  quantitative research techniques highlights an overlooked problem – secondary technical  problems – and demonstrates the role of cultural scripts in responses to those problems. The  volume presents these three mechanisms as three instances of social footholds: relations,  structures, and culture. 

Volume 3 provides extensive observations of footholds before theory could name them. The  core is a monograph-length analysis of the emergence of the data scientist role in the early  2010s and two article-length studies of specific mechanisms in that process. This study reports  rearrangements of: technological infrastructures – structural footholds; temporary collective gatherings – relational footholds; and the invention of a new rhetoric around the data scientist  role – cultural footholds. A study of the early-modern interpretation of the Bible in England  presents another instance of cultural footholds as well as an elaborate computational machinery for recognizing them. And a pair of studies shows how publicly funded agents create relational  footholds for small- and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises to step on. All these studies  make stand-alone contributions to our understanding of professions and the rise of the digital  era, religion in political history, and public-private partnerships. Together with the other two volumes, however, they provide a comprehensive foundation for a new sociological idea of  social footholds.