Robin Stryker | Purdue University (original) (raw)
Papers by Robin Stryker
Frontiers in sociology and social research, Dec 31, 2022
Because the US addresses work-family concerns mostly through voluntary employer-provided benefits... more Because the US addresses work-family concerns mostly through voluntary employer-provided benefits combined with anti-discrimination legislation, organizational mediation of law shapes the content and impact of employers' response to employees' work-family issues. Centrality of organizational mediation means centrality of HR professional discourse. Given skyrocketing lawsuits claiming family responsibilities discrimination (FRD), we examine FRD-related discourse, 1980-2012, in the two highest circulation HR journals, situating analysis within a theoretical model of organizational mediation. Anti-discrimination law and the HR profession's pre-FRD role combine to provide incentives and resources shaping HR journal work-family discourse. Discourse employs multiple frames including business case, accommodation, diversity, and compliance, to motivate employer response to employees' work-family issues. Business case framing predominates. But consistent with HR professionals' dual mission of catering to top management's concern for the bottom line while also addressing employees' concerns, all four frames are used, in varying combinations, in complementary fashion. Articles employing a diversity frame are most likely to acknowledge the gendered nature of family responsibilities, but articles employing the business case frame acknowledge the gendered nature of family responsibilities more than half the time. Motivating
University of California Press eBooks, Mar 27, 2015
Berghahn Books, Dec 31, 2022
This article uses Weber's work to elucidate key features of macrointerpretive methods. Althou... more This article uses Weber's work to elucidate key features of macrointerpretive methods. Although relying on a logic different from that of frequentist statistical methods, macrointerpretive methods are based on coherent methodological principles and procedures. The goal of all macrointerpretive method is to render large-scale social actions and processes intelligible. Imputation of chains of meaning, motivation, and consequent likely courses of action are one hallmark. Macrointerpretive work is profoundly historical, and is well suited to reconciling agency and structure. It exhibits a continuous interplay of ideas and evidence, and combines inductive with deductive reasoning to solve anomalies, explain historically specific event sequences, and seek limited historical generalizations that are value-relevant and culturally significant. Enriched by multiple analytic techniques including diverse formal and nonformal narrative and comparative methods, macrointerpretive scholarship embodies tensions between the prominence accorded to narrative vs. comparisons, the concrete and particular vs. the abstract and general, conceptual understanding vs. causal analysis, and subjectivism vs. objectivism. Although built around a diversity of techniques, macrointerpretive scholarship of all sorts is well suited to forming and empirically examining concepts, hypotheses, and theories that help us understand how social structures work, how they reproduce themselves, and how they change.
Springer eBooks, 2020
Using courtroom observations, in-depth interviews, and third-party media accounts, we examine ide... more Using courtroom observations, in-depth interviews, and third-party media accounts, we examine identity management by lawyers facing challenges to verification of prominent role and social identities implicated by participation in Operation Streamline. A controversial criminal procedure in which undocumented border crossers are processed en masse, Operation Streamline provides a strategic case for theory building integrating internal and external role and social identity processes. Relying on systematic interpretative methods to refract non-laboratory data through the conceptual lens of identity theory, we found that defense attorneys participating in Operation Streamline experienced substantial role strain, that is, felt problems in meeting role expectations, because they were torn between role-related values of substantive justice and formal legality that could not be satisfied simultaneously. However, they also perceived these two values to provide culturally available and positive but competing role identity standards to draw from as resources to deflect potential non-verification of their professional identities. Latino/a lawyers—who faced intensified professional role strain and also conflict between a role identity standard of formal legality and meanings and expectations associated with their racial/ethnic identity—perceived culturally available, competing social identity group standards based on race/ethnicity and citizenship. Faced with challenges to positive identity confirmation, attorneys pushed back against role and social identity group standards whose adoption would lead to non-verification and adopted instead the competing standards facilitating verification. Based on our findings and conceptual scope conditions pertaining to our empirical case, we propose three theoretical propositions that may link internal, perceptual control and external, social structural identity processes and can be tested in further research.
Social Science Research Network, Apr 10, 2012
"Law and Society" is the term for scholarship using a variety of social science methods to study ... more "Law and Society" is the term for scholarship using a variety of social science methods to study law and legal institutions. The unique contribution of this approach is its focus on meaning-making as a mechanism of legal effect. A foundational assumption is the need to focus on law in action rather than solely on law on the books. The former refers to the institutionalized doctrine of legal codes and judicial opinions; the latter shows how law operates in practice. Key law and society concepts, including legal consciousness, law as legality, organizational legalization and organizational politics elaborate how law operates in action through meaning making. Meaning-making may involve an overt politics of contested meanings or the exercise of covert power, and is an avenue both for establishing power and for resisting authority. Meaning-making happens both within the formal legal system through, for example, administrative and court enforcement, and outside formal law through for example, construction of compliance by regulated organizations. Each of these meaning-making processes influences the other. The concept of legal consciousness highlights how ordinary people construct legal meanings. The same individuals attribute multiple-and often contradictory-meanings to law in their everyday lives. The various meanings and their interrelationships form a cultural repertoire available to be drawn on variably in different situations. To the extent that either formal law or broader concepts of legality transform social status or identity, or create new social categories or other types of cultural meanings, law and society scholars refer to law's "constitutive" effects-that is, law's power to make, and make sense of, the social world. Law and society research on law and organizations also emphasizes meaning-making Organizations that are not part of the formal-legal system may enact and implement internally sets of law-like organizational rules, structures and procedures that define and effectuate the rights and responsibilities of actors within the organization. From the managerial perspective, a "legalized
Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2019
Research in the sociology of organizations, May 19, 2004
Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Apr 4, 2021
ABSTRACT We used a media-focused vignette experiment to test how speaker role and norm-violation ... more ABSTRACT We used a media-focused vignette experiment to test how speaker role and norm-violation level influenced perceived incivility, including respondents’ age, gender, and partisanship as covariates. One vignette involved deception regarding immigration in political talk radio; the other involved epithetic name-calling in televised political talk regarding state-funded contraception. Respondents perceived the same deception as more uncivil when from a talk radio host-pundit relative to a call-in listener. Respondents did not perceive the same name calling as more uncivil when from a TV interviewer than from a citizen panelist. Covariate effects were found for name-calling, but not deception. Overall findings suggest Americans still hold media practitioners to a higher standard of truthfulness and that reactions to incivility are contextual.
Advances in group processes, Oct 20, 2020
In this chapter, we advance an understanding of identity theory (IT) as originally created by She... more In this chapter, we advance an understanding of identity theory (IT) as originally created by Sheldon Stryker and developed over the past 50 years. We address misunderstandings of IT concepts and connections. We provide definitions of key ideas in IT, propositions that identify important relationships, and scope conditions that outline the circumstances to which IT applies. Our goal is to provide scholars with an accurate view of IT so that it can continue to advance the science of human behavior in sociology and beyond.
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2008
In Why We Need a New Welfare State (2002), four long-time male scholars of the twentieth-century ... more In Why We Need a New Welfare State (2002), four long-time male scholars of the twentieth-century welfare state-Gøsta Esping-Andersen, John Myles, Anton Hemerijck, and Duncan Gallie-argue that the welfare state of the twenty-first century requires "comprehensive redesign." The twenty-first-century welfare state must be redesigned around not just government-market relations and the life-course patterns of men, but also work-family interactions and the life-course patterns of women. Similarly, as Myles and Quadagno (2002) argue in their recent review of literature on social policy and the welfare state, gender relations, family forms, and women's employment are central to contemporary welfare state restructuring in a way that they were not during the "golden age" of welfare expansion. Feminist scholars and themes such as "female friendliness," "social care," and "work-family conflicts" have contributed much to placing women and children on center stage along with men when it comes to welfare state redesign. 1 But likewise, labor market and demographic realities loom large (
University of California Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2019
L'Année Sociologique, Mar 5, 2021
Cet article critique et s’appuie sur le concept de rationalisation de Max Weber, en mobilisant sa... more Cet article critique et s’appuie sur le concept de rationalisation de Max Weber, en mobilisant sa discussion des rationalisations juridique et scientifique et sa distinction entre les rationalisations juridiques formelle et matérielle pour définir les processus de technocratisation et de substantivation du droit. Il montre la relation logique et empirique entre les deux, et discute les tensions qu’elles génèrent dans les systèmes de common law et de droit civil. Élaborer les concepts de technocratisation et de substantivation et mener une recherche empirique sur la manière dont ces processus se déploient permet d’éclairer la nature, les causes et les conséquences d’aspects importants des transformations du droit. La substantivation prend un sens particulier lorsqu’elle est saisie par le cadre d’analyse des effets centrés sur le groupe (group-centered effects framework, GCE). Le GCE aide à préciser quand et comment les lois qui, dans les démocraties capitalistes, accordent des droits civiques aux populations défavorisées et luttent contre les discriminations dont elles font l’objet sont plus ou moins susceptibles d’accroître l’égalité.
SAGE Publications, Inc. eBooks, May 15, 2012
Springer eBooks, 2020
This chapter provides an overview of the development of symbolic interaction and identity theory ... more This chapter provides an overview of the development of symbolic interaction and identity theory as a prelude to introducing the theoretical and methodological advances to these traditions contributed by authors of subsequent chapters in this book. Built on the pioneering work of George Herbert Mead and others, symbolic interactionism focuses on the reciprocal relationship between self and society, in which shared meanings constructed through interaction with others influence social behavior. Where the paradigm originally centered on analyzing micro-social encounters, highlighting specific characteristics of situations and actors, over time it extended its focus to understanding patterns in interaction across situations and time, suggesting that social structure explained these patterns. In the late 1960s, Sheldon Stryker began to codify the premises of structural symbolic interaction. From this, identity theory developed and, over the next five decades, came to encompass both structural and perceptual research agendas. Where the former elucidates behavioral processes relating hierarchies of identity salience structuring the self to patterns of identity commitments and role behaviors, the situational enactments of which are embedded in networks, groups and social institutions, the latter elucidates perceptual control processes exercised by the mind in response to the feedback that self receives from others in interaction. Over time, identity theory’s initial focus on role identities broadened to include group identities and person identities, and bridges developed between identity theory and other theories and paradigms in sociology and the social sciences more generally. These include bridges to theories such as affect control theory and identity accumulation theory, built upon symbolic interactionist premises, and bridges to theories and paradigms beyond symbolic interactionism, including exchange theory and social identity theory. The chapter ends with a preview of ideas and findings developed in the rest of the book.
American Journal of Sociology, Jul 1, 2017
In 1964-68, the U.S. Congress enacted comprehensive legislation prohibiting discrimination in emp... more In 1964-68, the U.S. Congress enacted comprehensive legislation prohibiting discrimination in employment (1964 Civil Rights Act), voting (1965 Voting Rights Act), and housing (1968 Fair Housing Act). A halfcentury later, most scholars concur that voting rights was by far the most successful, fair housing was a general failure, and Title VII fell somewhere in between. Explanations of civil rights effectiveness in political sociology that emphasize state-internal resources and capacities, policy entrepreneurship, and/or the degree of white resentment cannot explain this specific outcome hierarchy. Pertinent to President Trump's policies, the authors propose an alternative hypothesis grounded in the sociology of law: the comparative effectiveness of civil rights policies is best explained by the extent to which each policy incorporated a "groupcentered effects" (GCE) statutory and enforcement framework. Focusing on systemic group disadvantage rather than individual harm, discriminatory consequences rather than discriminatory intent, and substantive group results over individual justice, GCE offers an alternative theoretical framework for analyzing comparative civil rights outcomes.
Frontiers in sociology and social research, Dec 31, 2022
Because the US addresses work-family concerns mostly through voluntary employer-provided benefits... more Because the US addresses work-family concerns mostly through voluntary employer-provided benefits combined with anti-discrimination legislation, organizational mediation of law shapes the content and impact of employers' response to employees' work-family issues. Centrality of organizational mediation means centrality of HR professional discourse. Given skyrocketing lawsuits claiming family responsibilities discrimination (FRD), we examine FRD-related discourse, 1980-2012, in the two highest circulation HR journals, situating analysis within a theoretical model of organizational mediation. Anti-discrimination law and the HR profession's pre-FRD role combine to provide incentives and resources shaping HR journal work-family discourse. Discourse employs multiple frames including business case, accommodation, diversity, and compliance, to motivate employer response to employees' work-family issues. Business case framing predominates. But consistent with HR professionals' dual mission of catering to top management's concern for the bottom line while also addressing employees' concerns, all four frames are used, in varying combinations, in complementary fashion. Articles employing a diversity frame are most likely to acknowledge the gendered nature of family responsibilities, but articles employing the business case frame acknowledge the gendered nature of family responsibilities more than half the time. Motivating
University of California Press eBooks, Mar 27, 2015
Berghahn Books, Dec 31, 2022
This article uses Weber's work to elucidate key features of macrointerpretive methods. Althou... more This article uses Weber's work to elucidate key features of macrointerpretive methods. Although relying on a logic different from that of frequentist statistical methods, macrointerpretive methods are based on coherent methodological principles and procedures. The goal of all macrointerpretive method is to render large-scale social actions and processes intelligible. Imputation of chains of meaning, motivation, and consequent likely courses of action are one hallmark. Macrointerpretive work is profoundly historical, and is well suited to reconciling agency and structure. It exhibits a continuous interplay of ideas and evidence, and combines inductive with deductive reasoning to solve anomalies, explain historically specific event sequences, and seek limited historical generalizations that are value-relevant and culturally significant. Enriched by multiple analytic techniques including diverse formal and nonformal narrative and comparative methods, macrointerpretive scholarship embodies tensions between the prominence accorded to narrative vs. comparisons, the concrete and particular vs. the abstract and general, conceptual understanding vs. causal analysis, and subjectivism vs. objectivism. Although built around a diversity of techniques, macrointerpretive scholarship of all sorts is well suited to forming and empirically examining concepts, hypotheses, and theories that help us understand how social structures work, how they reproduce themselves, and how they change.
Springer eBooks, 2020
Using courtroom observations, in-depth interviews, and third-party media accounts, we examine ide... more Using courtroom observations, in-depth interviews, and third-party media accounts, we examine identity management by lawyers facing challenges to verification of prominent role and social identities implicated by participation in Operation Streamline. A controversial criminal procedure in which undocumented border crossers are processed en masse, Operation Streamline provides a strategic case for theory building integrating internal and external role and social identity processes. Relying on systematic interpretative methods to refract non-laboratory data through the conceptual lens of identity theory, we found that defense attorneys participating in Operation Streamline experienced substantial role strain, that is, felt problems in meeting role expectations, because they were torn between role-related values of substantive justice and formal legality that could not be satisfied simultaneously. However, they also perceived these two values to provide culturally available and positive but competing role identity standards to draw from as resources to deflect potential non-verification of their professional identities. Latino/a lawyers—who faced intensified professional role strain and also conflict between a role identity standard of formal legality and meanings and expectations associated with their racial/ethnic identity—perceived culturally available, competing social identity group standards based on race/ethnicity and citizenship. Faced with challenges to positive identity confirmation, attorneys pushed back against role and social identity group standards whose adoption would lead to non-verification and adopted instead the competing standards facilitating verification. Based on our findings and conceptual scope conditions pertaining to our empirical case, we propose three theoretical propositions that may link internal, perceptual control and external, social structural identity processes and can be tested in further research.
Social Science Research Network, Apr 10, 2012
"Law and Society" is the term for scholarship using a variety of social science methods to study ... more "Law and Society" is the term for scholarship using a variety of social science methods to study law and legal institutions. The unique contribution of this approach is its focus on meaning-making as a mechanism of legal effect. A foundational assumption is the need to focus on law in action rather than solely on law on the books. The former refers to the institutionalized doctrine of legal codes and judicial opinions; the latter shows how law operates in practice. Key law and society concepts, including legal consciousness, law as legality, organizational legalization and organizational politics elaborate how law operates in action through meaning making. Meaning-making may involve an overt politics of contested meanings or the exercise of covert power, and is an avenue both for establishing power and for resisting authority. Meaning-making happens both within the formal legal system through, for example, administrative and court enforcement, and outside formal law through for example, construction of compliance by regulated organizations. Each of these meaning-making processes influences the other. The concept of legal consciousness highlights how ordinary people construct legal meanings. The same individuals attribute multiple-and often contradictory-meanings to law in their everyday lives. The various meanings and their interrelationships form a cultural repertoire available to be drawn on variably in different situations. To the extent that either formal law or broader concepts of legality transform social status or identity, or create new social categories or other types of cultural meanings, law and society scholars refer to law's "constitutive" effects-that is, law's power to make, and make sense of, the social world. Law and society research on law and organizations also emphasizes meaning-making Organizations that are not part of the formal-legal system may enact and implement internally sets of law-like organizational rules, structures and procedures that define and effectuate the rights and responsibilities of actors within the organization. From the managerial perspective, a "legalized
Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2019
Research in the sociology of organizations, May 19, 2004
Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Apr 4, 2021
ABSTRACT We used a media-focused vignette experiment to test how speaker role and norm-violation ... more ABSTRACT We used a media-focused vignette experiment to test how speaker role and norm-violation level influenced perceived incivility, including respondents’ age, gender, and partisanship as covariates. One vignette involved deception regarding immigration in political talk radio; the other involved epithetic name-calling in televised political talk regarding state-funded contraception. Respondents perceived the same deception as more uncivil when from a talk radio host-pundit relative to a call-in listener. Respondents did not perceive the same name calling as more uncivil when from a TV interviewer than from a citizen panelist. Covariate effects were found for name-calling, but not deception. Overall findings suggest Americans still hold media practitioners to a higher standard of truthfulness and that reactions to incivility are contextual.
Advances in group processes, Oct 20, 2020
In this chapter, we advance an understanding of identity theory (IT) as originally created by She... more In this chapter, we advance an understanding of identity theory (IT) as originally created by Sheldon Stryker and developed over the past 50 years. We address misunderstandings of IT concepts and connections. We provide definitions of key ideas in IT, propositions that identify important relationships, and scope conditions that outline the circumstances to which IT applies. Our goal is to provide scholars with an accurate view of IT so that it can continue to advance the science of human behavior in sociology and beyond.
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2008
In Why We Need a New Welfare State (2002), four long-time male scholars of the twentieth-century ... more In Why We Need a New Welfare State (2002), four long-time male scholars of the twentieth-century welfare state-Gøsta Esping-Andersen, John Myles, Anton Hemerijck, and Duncan Gallie-argue that the welfare state of the twenty-first century requires "comprehensive redesign." The twenty-first-century welfare state must be redesigned around not just government-market relations and the life-course patterns of men, but also work-family interactions and the life-course patterns of women. Similarly, as Myles and Quadagno (2002) argue in their recent review of literature on social policy and the welfare state, gender relations, family forms, and women's employment are central to contemporary welfare state restructuring in a way that they were not during the "golden age" of welfare expansion. Feminist scholars and themes such as "female friendliness," "social care," and "work-family conflicts" have contributed much to placing women and children on center stage along with men when it comes to welfare state redesign. 1 But likewise, labor market and demographic realities loom large (
University of California Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2019
L'Année Sociologique, Mar 5, 2021
Cet article critique et s’appuie sur le concept de rationalisation de Max Weber, en mobilisant sa... more Cet article critique et s’appuie sur le concept de rationalisation de Max Weber, en mobilisant sa discussion des rationalisations juridique et scientifique et sa distinction entre les rationalisations juridiques formelle et matérielle pour définir les processus de technocratisation et de substantivation du droit. Il montre la relation logique et empirique entre les deux, et discute les tensions qu’elles génèrent dans les systèmes de common law et de droit civil. Élaborer les concepts de technocratisation et de substantivation et mener une recherche empirique sur la manière dont ces processus se déploient permet d’éclairer la nature, les causes et les conséquences d’aspects importants des transformations du droit. La substantivation prend un sens particulier lorsqu’elle est saisie par le cadre d’analyse des effets centrés sur le groupe (group-centered effects framework, GCE). Le GCE aide à préciser quand et comment les lois qui, dans les démocraties capitalistes, accordent des droits civiques aux populations défavorisées et luttent contre les discriminations dont elles font l’objet sont plus ou moins susceptibles d’accroître l’égalité.
SAGE Publications, Inc. eBooks, May 15, 2012
Springer eBooks, 2020
This chapter provides an overview of the development of symbolic interaction and identity theory ... more This chapter provides an overview of the development of symbolic interaction and identity theory as a prelude to introducing the theoretical and methodological advances to these traditions contributed by authors of subsequent chapters in this book. Built on the pioneering work of George Herbert Mead and others, symbolic interactionism focuses on the reciprocal relationship between self and society, in which shared meanings constructed through interaction with others influence social behavior. Where the paradigm originally centered on analyzing micro-social encounters, highlighting specific characteristics of situations and actors, over time it extended its focus to understanding patterns in interaction across situations and time, suggesting that social structure explained these patterns. In the late 1960s, Sheldon Stryker began to codify the premises of structural symbolic interaction. From this, identity theory developed and, over the next five decades, came to encompass both structural and perceptual research agendas. Where the former elucidates behavioral processes relating hierarchies of identity salience structuring the self to patterns of identity commitments and role behaviors, the situational enactments of which are embedded in networks, groups and social institutions, the latter elucidates perceptual control processes exercised by the mind in response to the feedback that self receives from others in interaction. Over time, identity theory’s initial focus on role identities broadened to include group identities and person identities, and bridges developed between identity theory and other theories and paradigms in sociology and the social sciences more generally. These include bridges to theories such as affect control theory and identity accumulation theory, built upon symbolic interactionist premises, and bridges to theories and paradigms beyond symbolic interactionism, including exchange theory and social identity theory. The chapter ends with a preview of ideas and findings developed in the rest of the book.
American Journal of Sociology, Jul 1, 2017
In 1964-68, the U.S. Congress enacted comprehensive legislation prohibiting discrimination in emp... more In 1964-68, the U.S. Congress enacted comprehensive legislation prohibiting discrimination in employment (1964 Civil Rights Act), voting (1965 Voting Rights Act), and housing (1968 Fair Housing Act). A halfcentury later, most scholars concur that voting rights was by far the most successful, fair housing was a general failure, and Title VII fell somewhere in between. Explanations of civil rights effectiveness in political sociology that emphasize state-internal resources and capacities, policy entrepreneurship, and/or the degree of white resentment cannot explain this specific outcome hierarchy. Pertinent to President Trump's policies, the authors propose an alternative hypothesis grounded in the sociology of law: the comparative effectiveness of civil rights policies is best explained by the extent to which each policy incorporated a "groupcentered effects" (GCE) statutory and enforcement framework. Focusing on systemic group disadvantage rather than individual harm, discriminatory consequences rather than discriminatory intent, and substantive group results over individual justice, GCE offers an alternative theoretical framework for analyzing comparative civil rights outcomes.