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Guided by voice and leadership theory, this paper aims to articulate the underpinnings of upward defiance (competence deficiency; ignorance of concerns; structural gaps between echelons) and to describe the managerial actions that help depose those underpinnings.

The paper analyzes 30 historic narrative accounts of actual mutinies. The journalistic accounts from bygone eras provide unparalleled insight into the basic dynamics of mutiny and provide novel insights into organizational defiance.

The principal findings show that the underpinnings of mutiny in organizations derive from three foundations: disconnections between authority echelons, modes of addressing member disgruntlement, and the need for management to develop continuous competencies.

The paper goes beyond reports of mutinies in the popular press and lore by applying the findings to modern organizations.

David P. Baker is a Professor of Education and Sociology at the Pennsylvania State University, where he is also the associate director of the Social Science Research Institute. He publishes widely on the comparative analysis of education and stratification, and the global impact of education as an institution. Recent publications include “Student Victimization: National and School System Effects on School Violence in 37 Nations” (American Journal of Education Research, 2002) and “Socio-Economic Status, School Quality, and National Economic Development: A Cross-National Analysis of the ‘Heyneman-Loxley Effect’ on Mathematics and Science Achievement” (Comparative Education Review, 2002).Aaron Benavot is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Grounded in an institutional approach to education and development, his research has examined historical and cross-national patterns in official school curricula, the consequences of educational expansion on economic development and democratization, the economic impacts of curricular contents, and the origins and expansion of mass education. He is currently studying the diversification of educational knowledge in local Israeli schools and also the dynamics of transnational social science research projects in the European Union.Karen Bradley is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Western Washington University. Her research examines women’s participation in higher education cross-nationally. Recent publications include “Equal but Separate? A Cross-National Study of Sex Segregation in Higher Education” (with Maria Charles, American Sociological Review, 2002) and “The Incorporation of Women into Higher Education: Paradoxical Outcomes?” (Sociology of Education, 2000). She is currently collaborating with Maria Charles on a project sponsored by the Spencer Foundation and the American Educational Research Association that examines factors underlying women’s underrepresentation in engineering and math/computer science programs in several countries.Wendy Cadge is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Bowdoin College. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton University. Her research focuses on the cultural aspects of globalization in the United States and Southeast Asia. Her first book, Heartwood: the First Generation of Theravada Buddhism in America, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.Maria Charles is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. Her research explores how cultural ideologies and social structures affect the economic and social status of individuals and groups. Most recently, Charles is author of “Deciphering Sex Segregation: Vertical and Horizontal Inequalities in Ten Countries” (Acta Sociologica 46:265–286, 2003), and coauthor of Occupational Ghettos: The Worldwide Segregation of Women and Men (with David Grusky, Stanford University Press, in press) and “Equal but Separate: A Cross-National Study of Sex Segregation in Higher Education” (with Karen Bradley, American Sociology Review 67: 573–599, 2002).Chang Y. Chung is a Statistical Programmer at the Office of Population Research, Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of South Carolina and M.S.E. in systems engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. He is involved in multiple research projects as statistical programmer, data manager, and co-author. A recent publication is “Employment and Earnings of Foreign-Born Scientists and Engineers in U.S. Labor Markets” (with Thomas Espenshade and Margaret Usdansky, Population Research and Policy Review, 2001).Sara R. Curran is an Assistant Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Sociology at Princeton University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She has research interests in demography, migration, gender, economic development, environment, aging and Southeast Asia. She is currently writing a book, Shifting Boundaries, Transforming Lives: Globalization, Gender, and Family in Thailand. Recent publications include: Ambio. Special Issue: Population, Consumption, and Environment, (with Tundi Agardy, 2002) and “Engendering Migrant Networks: The Case of Mexican Migration,” (with Estela Rivero Fuentes, Demography, 2003).Bruce Fuller is a Professor of Education and Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. His work focuses on the dilemmas around the decentering of public aims and institutions within the worlds of child care, family welfare, and school reform. Prior to becoming a full-time teacher, he worked for a state legislature, a governor, and then as a heretical sociologist at the World Bank. His most recent books are Inside Charter Schools: The Paradox of Radical Decentralization (Harvard, 2000), and Government Confronts Culture (Taylor & Francis, 1999).Emily Hannum is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on education, poverty, and social inequality, particularly in China. Recent publications include “Ethnic Differences in Basic Education in Reform-Era Rural China” (Demography, 2002) and “Education and Stratification in Developing Countries: A Review of Theories and Empirical Research” (with Claudia Buchmann, Annual Review of Sociology, 2001). Currently, she is working on a project sponsored by the Spencer Foundation and National Institutes of Health that investigates factors in the family, school, and community that support rural children’s education and healthy development in Northwest China.Nabil Khattab completed his Ph.D. at the University of Jerusalem. He is currently a Marie Curie postdoctoral research fellow at the Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research, University of Manchester. His main areas of interest are sociology of education, the ethnic and gender aspects of the labor market, and social inequality. His most recent publication is “Segregation, Ethnic Labor Market, and the Occupational Expectations of Palestinian Students in Israel” (The British Journal of Sociology, 2003). In his current project, he is looking at the labor market prospects for Pakistani-Bangladeshi women in the U.K. and Muslim women in Israel.Patricia McManus is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research centers on gender and family inequality under advanced capitalism. She will spend 2003–2004 in Berlin at the Max Planck Institute’s Center for the Study of Sociology and the Life Course, where she will study welfare state policy and married women’s work careers in the United States, Germany, and Great Britain. Current projects also include a study of the impact of residential mobility on gender inequality within households (with Claudia Geist), and a cross-national comparison of the wage penalties for motherhood in the United States and Germany (with Markus Gangl).Stephen L. Morgan is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Cornell University. His main areas of interest are social stratification, sociology of education, and methodology. Recent publications include “Modeling Preparatory Commitment and Non-Repeatable Decisions: Information Processing, Preference Formation and Educational Attainment” (Rationality and Society, 2002) and “Counterfactuals, Causal Effect Heterogeneity, and the Catholic School Effect on Learning” (Sociology of Education, 2001). His current projects include studies of black-white differences in educational achievement and changes in labor market inequality in the 1980s and 1990s.William R. Morgan is a Professor of Sociology at Cleveland State University. He has been studying and developing education in northern Nigeria over a period of 25 years. In Cleveland, he recently completed data collection for a seven-year study of the impact of the treatment and recovery process for cocaine-addicted women on their children’s development, sponsored by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. His new project is a pilot study of the peer recruitment method to deliver HIV/AIDS education to networks of high-risk adolescents and young women.Hiroshi Ono is an Assistant Professor at the European Institute of Japanese Studies, Stockholm School of Economics. He is interested in social stratification and inequality, and the sociology and economics of education, family, and work. Currently he is working on two projects. The first is examining Internet inequality in five countries, and the second is comparing human resource practices between foreign-owned versus domestic firms in Japan. His recent publications include “College Quality and Earnings in the Japanese Labor Market” (forthcoming, Industrial Relations), and “Gender and the Internet” (with Madeline Zavodny, Social Science Quarterly, 2003).Hyunjoon Park, a doctoral student in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is interested in social stratification, education, and health inequality with a particular focus on East Asian countries. His current project examines the process of the transition to adulthood among Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese young people across several dimensions, including educational and occupational attainment, and family formation. Two forthcoming publications include “Intergenerational Social Mobility among Korean Men: In Comparative Perspective” (Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 2003), and “Racial/Ethnic Differences in Voluntary and Involuntary Job Mobility among Young Men” (with Gary Sandefur, Social Science Research, 2003).Susan E. Short is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Associate Director of the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University. She specializes in family sociology, social demography, and social inequality. Recent coauthored publications include “Use of Maternity Services in Rural China” (Population Studies, forthcoming); “Maternal Work and Time Spent in Child Care in China: A Multimethod Approach” (Population and Development Review, 2002); “China’s One-Child Policy and the Care of Children: An Analysis of Qualitative and Quantitative Data” (Social Forces, 2001); and “Birth Planning and Sterilization in China” (Population Studies, 2000). In on-going research, funded by the NICHD, she examines the consequences of China’s one-child policy for child well-being.Rongjun Sun is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Cleveland State University. His research focuses on population aging, and family relations in both the United States and China. Recent publications include “Old Age Support in Urban China from both Parents’ and Children’s Perspectives” (Research on Aging, 2002) and “Community-Acquired Pneumonia in Older Veterans: Does the Pneumonia Prognosis Index Help?” (with Lona Mody and Suzanne Bradley, Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 2002). He is currently studying the mortality of the oldest-old in China.Anchalee Varangrat is a Lecturer at the Institute for Population and Social Research, Mahidol University, Thailand. Her research focuses on family formation, population, and development. She is the author of Population Projection for Thailand, 2000–2025 (Thailand Ministry of Public Health and Mahidol University, 2003). Currently, she is working on a project sponsored by the Wellcome Trust on factors affecting Thai marriage patterns.Regina E. Werum is Associate Professor of Sociology at Emory University. Her research focuses on educational inequality from comparative historical and international perspectives. Recent publications include “Warehousing the Unemployed? Federal Job Training Programs in the Depression-Era South” (American Journal of Education, 2001), and a forthcoming chapter with B. Powell and L. Steelman titled, “Macro Causes, Micro Effects: Linking Public Policy, Family Structure, and Educational Outcomes” (in After the Bell: Educational Solutions Outside of School, edited by D. Conley). Currently, she is working on a project sponsored by the NAE/Spencer Foundation and NSF that investigates cross-cultural differences in how social capital affects academic outcomes.Raymond Sin-Kwok Wong is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests include inequality and stratification, sociology of education, quantitative methodology, urban poverty, and economic sociology, particularly Chinese entrepreneurship in East Asia. His recent publications include “Multidimensional Association Models: A Multilinear Approach” (Sociological Methods & Research, 2001), “Occupational Attainment in Eastern Europe Under Socialism” (Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 2002), and “Chinese Business Firms and Business Entrepreneurs in Hong Kong” (De-Essentializing Capitalism: Chinese Enterprise, Transnationalism, and Identity, edited by Edmund Terence Gomez and Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, 2003).Gad Yair is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interests include the sociology of schools and schooling, organizational theory, the sociology of learning, sociological theory and its history, and the theory-methodology nexus. Recent relevant publications are “Educational Battlefields in America: The Tug-of-War over Students’ Engagement With Instruction” (Sociology of Education, 2000) and “Decisive Moments and Key Experiences: Expanding Paradigmatic Boundaries in the Study of School Effects” in The International Handbook on the Sociology of Education: An International Assessment of New Research and Theory, 2003).

Although the commodification of black bodies amid state violence and widespread racism is nothing new, considering the histories of Hollywood, jazz, minstrelsy, or even athletes enslaved on plantations (Rhoden, 2006), the hyper commodification of the contemporary black athlete, alongside expansive processes of globalization, growth in the profitability of black bodies, and their importance within colorblind discourse, demonstrates the importance of commodification within our new racist moment. Likewise, the shrinking opportunities afforded to African American youth, alongside clear messages about the path to desired black masculinity (Neal, 2005; Watkins, 1998; West, 1994), push black youth into a sports world where the possibility of striking it rich leads to a “win at all costs” attitude. Robin Kelley argues that African American youth participate in sports or engage in other cultural practices as an attempt to resist or negotiate the inherent contradictions of post-industrial American capitalism (Kelley, 1998). Patricia Hill Collins describes this process in the following terms: “Recognizing that black culture was a marketable commodity, they put it up for sale, selling an essentialized black culture that white youth could emulate yet never own. These message was clear – ‘the world may be against us, but we are here and we intend to get paid’” (Collins, 2006, p. 298). Celia Lury concurs, noting that heightened levels of commodification embody a shift from a racial logic defined by scientific racism to one centering on cultural difference. She argues that commodity racism “has contributed to shifts in how racism operates, specifically to the shift from a racism tied to biological understandings of ‘race’ in which identity is fixed or naturalized to a racism in which ‘race’ is a cultural category in which racial identity is represented as a matter of style, and is the subject of choice” (Lury, 1996, p. 169; as quoted in Spencer, 2004, p. 123). In the context of new racism, as manifested in heightened levels of commodification of Othered bodies, racial identity is simply a choice, but a cultural marker that can be celebrated and sold, policed, or demonized with little questions about racial implications (Spencer, 2004, pp. 123–125). Blackness, thus, becomes little more than a culture style, something that can be sold on Ebay and tried on at the ball or some something that needs to be policed or driven out-of-existence. Race is conceptualized “as a matter of style, something that can be put on or taken off at will” (Willis as quoted in Spencer, 2004, p. 123). Collins notes further that the process of commodification is not simply about selling “an essentialized black culture,” but rather a particular construction of blackness that has proven beneficial to white owners. “Athletes and criminals alike are profitable, not for the vast majority of African American men, but for people who own the teams, control the media, provide food, clothing and telephone services, and who consume seemingly endless images of pimps, hustlers, rapists, and felons” (2006, p. 311). bell hooks, who describes this process as “eating the other,” sees profit and ideology as crucial to understanding the commodification of black bodies. “When race and ethnicity become commodified as resources for pleasure, the culture of specific groups, as well as the bodies of individuals, can be seen as constituting an alternative playground where members of dominating races…affirm their power-over in intimate relations with the other” (Hooks, 1992, p. 23). She, along with Collins, emphasizes the importance of sex and sexuality, within this processes of commodification, arguing that commodification of black male (and female) bodies emanates from and reproduces longstanding mythologies regarding black sexual power.

On November 7, 1986, the metropolitan New York chapter of The Planning Forum presented a one‐day workshop on “Restructuring the Corporation—Why, What, and How.” Constance Bauman and Patricia Comer of the NY/NJ Port Authority organized the program.

In this paper we build upon previous research that examines how workers in devalued occupations transform structural conditions that threaten their dignity into resources with which to protect themselves. Through in-depth interviews and fieldwork with early childhood educators (ECE), we examine the work experiences of teachers in four distinct work contexts: daycare centers and within elementary schools, each in either the public or private sector. We find that these different school organizational contexts shape what kinds of identity challenges early childhood teachers experience. Different organizational contexts not only subject teachers to different threats to their work-related identity but also have different potential identity resources embedded within them that teachers can use on their own behalf. Thus, while all the early childhood educators in our sample struggle with being employed within a devalued occupation, the identity strategies they have developed to protect their self-worth vary across employment contexts. We show that the strategies these interactive service workers use to solve identity-related problems of dignity at work involve the creative conversion of constraints they face at work into resources that help them achieve valued work identities.