February 2021

As a middle school math teacher, I taught at a school serving a wealthy student body and my students had incredibly high test scores. But I had also taught at a school where the majority of students were eligible for free or reduced lunch and my students had incredibly low test scores. In the low-poverty school, I was seemingly a very effective teacher—yet, in the high-poverty school, I was seemingly a very low-quality teacher.

This experience led me to a career as a sociologist focusing on inequities in education. In my most recent study, I investigated the use of test scores to assess the effectiveness of teachers.

Over the last decade, consumer-driven health care elevated customer satisfaction to be the central mission of hospital care. Satisfaction surveys and hotel-style amenities rose hand-in-hand to become central features of U.S. hospitals. This trend has done more harm than good. It focuses everyone’s attention on front-stage aspects of health care over what matters most to patients: excellent medical treatment.

As I discovered in a recent study published in Social Forces with my colleague Xinxiang Chen, satisfaction scores are driven by room and board hospitality, rather than medical quality or patient survival rates. Moreover, when hospitals face greater competition from other facilities, there is higher patient satisfaction, but lower medical quality.

Most of the research on rising economic inequality focuses on technological skill, productivity, and market forces. But of course, that is only part of the story. Just as important is workers’ bargaining power. The weakening of labor unions, which has left workers with less collective power to fight for their own interests, is a major story behind rising economic inequality in recent decades.

In a recent article, I find that rising wages for highly rewarded occupations has very little to do with technological advances, in and of itself, and a lot to do with the politics of production (broadly define) and power.

In the wake of George Floyd’s death and the resulting Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, many in the United States have become increasingly concerned not only with police brutality, but with the impact of systemic racism in the United States.

One important aspect of systemic racism comes in the form of job quality. There are significant gaps between white and Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino/Latina, and other racial/ethnic minority workers in the United States in this regard. White workers, for instance, tend to receive better pay, more fringe benefits, and have an easier time getting hired than workers of color.

Many large professional firms—such as law firms, accounting firms, consulting firms, and investment banks—make substantial efforts to recruit members of racial and ethnic minority groups at the entry level. However, the numbers of people of color in such firms drop significantly at more senior levels. All too often, these professionals find it difficult to obtain recognition and responsibility, and leave their firms when their initial hopes turn to discouragement. Why does this happen over and over?

An important key to this puzzle lies in the process of skill development in professional work.