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Larry looks at me and asks, “Do you know Carolyn Ellis?” Larry, like me, is a new doctoral student at the University of Texas. He says this so sweetly, so simply in his recently rediscovered Texas drawl that I am instantly dubious.

As a site of contestation among job seekers, workers, and managers, the bureaucratic workplace both reproduces and erodes occupational race segregation and racial status hierarchies. Much sociological research has examined the reproduction of racial inequality at work; however, little research has examined how desegregationist forces, including civil rights movement values, enter and permeate bureaucratic workplaces into the broader polity. Our purpose in this chapter is to introduce and typologize what we refer to as “occupational activism,” defined as socially transformative individual and collective action that is conducted and realized through an occupational role or occupational community. We empirically induce and present a typology from our study of the half-century-long, post-mobilization occupational careers of over 60 veterans of the nonviolent Nashville civil rights movement of the early 1960s. The fourfold typology of occupational activism is framed in the “new” sociology of work, which emphasizes the role of worker agency and activism in determining worker life chances, and in the “varieties of activism” perspective, which treats the typology as a coherent regime of activist roles in the dialogical diffusion of civil rights movement values into, within, and out of workplaces. We conclude with a research agenda on how bureaucratic workplaces nurture and stymie occupational activism as a racially desegregationist force at work and in the broader polity.

Presents a special issue, enlisting the help of the author’s students and colleagues, focusing on age, sex, colour and disability discrimination in America. Breaks the evidence down into manageable chunks, covering: age discrimination in the workplace; discrimination against African‐Americans; sex discrimination in the workplace; same sex sexual harassment; how to investigate and prove disability discrimination; sexual harassment in the military; when the main US job‐discrimination law applies to small companies; how to investigate and prove racial discrimination; developments concerning race discrimination in the workplace; developments concerning the Equal Pay Act; developments concerning discrimination against workers with HIV or AIDS; developments concerning discrimination based on refusal of family care leave; developments concerning discrimination against gay or lesbian employees; developments concerning discrimination based on colour; how to investigate and prove discrimination concerning based on colour; developments concerning the Equal Pay Act; using statistics in employment discrimination cases; race discrimination in the workplace; developments concerning gender discrimination in the workplace; discrimination in Japanese organizations in America; discrimination in the entertainment industry; discrimination in the utility industry; understanding and effectively managing national origin discrimination; how to investigate and prove hiring discrimination based on colour; and, finally, how to investigate sexual harassment in the workplace.

Nine months later, after four days and nights on a bus, I was dropped off on El Camino Real, walked into campus with my backpack, and navigated my way to the Sociology Department, temporarily housed in three residential buildings, a volleyball net outside. Wow, now this is laid back, which was totally fine with me as a then legal resident of ski area. So I thought, until I started talking in more depth to Larry Wu, with whom I was rooming for the first few days. Larry had come from Harrison White's group at Harvard. Like others from that group (e.g., David Strang), he already had essentially completed a math major, along with several math-social science courses. My heart sank. Lucky, I thought, that Stanford is willing to give a Master's degrees to those who want to leave Ph.D. program!

In this interview, Alvin Toffler, Tom Johnson, and Larry Bennigson talk about the forces driving change and how business leaders can stay abreast of the threats and opportunities arising out of these changes. The biggest strategic threat to many successful businesses will come from the external environment that tends to be outside the peripheral vision of corporate leadership. Culture, religion, politics, environment, and ethics are all going to interpenetrate one another to an extent never before seen. They will, in turn, penetrate business in all sorts of strange new ways.

Directors help determine the strategic direction of a corporation and are responsible for ensuring the institution has a good system of internal control. Banking institutions without a strategic direction emphasizing sound lending practices that promote the long-run financial health and viability of the institution will be sued more frequently than peer institutions. Institutions that do not have a good system of internal control will also be sued more frequently. Hence, legal expense is a bank corporate governance measure. We compare the performance of bank legal expense and a widely cited corporate governance index in a regression framework to determine which better predicts bank performance. The regressions indicate legal expense is a much better predictor, hence a better measure of bank corporate governance. Regulators should require legal expense reporting and rank institutions by the ratio of legal expense to assets to help identify institutions with weak governance. Seven case studies illustrate the role of legal expense in corporate governance.

Through a survey of 200 employees working in five of the thirty establishments analysed in previous research about the microeconomic effects of reducing the working time (Cahier 25), the consequences on employees of such a reduction can be assessed; and relevant attitudes and aspirations better known.

Cross-level analysis is a problem for mainstream approaches to organizational behavior, but not for psychoanalytic theory. The reason is that psychoanalytic theory is not so much about behavior as about the meaning of behavior, which is relatively invariant across levels. The Jayson Blair scandal at the New York Times is analyzed at the individual, the group, the intrapsychic, the interpersonal, and the organizational levels. Blair’s behavior and the behavior of the Times toward him are explained in terms of a clash between two ways in which meaning is made: the Oedipal and the anti-oedipal.