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Kindergarten teachers are increasingly being called on to deal with emotionally laden topics in their classrooms. Little is known about effective means of supporting early childhood educators in their professional development to cope with these issues effectively. This study examines the utility of the Community of Practice (COP) model to address this need. A two-year COP was established among veteran and novice Israeli kindergarten teachers focused on teaching the Holocaust in their classrooms, which is a culturally mandated topic in preschools and kindergartens in their country. Six teachers were interviewed, and the data was analyzed using grounded theory. Findings show the COP to support teachers in learning more about the subject matter and thinking deeply about its teaching in the early childhood classroom. In addition the COP provided a community of peers that encouraged meaningful feedback in a safe environment, which served to break professional isolation. The COP format was also found to be an effective tool for professional growth due to its support of cooperative learning, professional assurance, empowerment, mindfulness, and a disposition for focusing on the child's needs rather than the demands of the curriculum.

This contribution explores the history of women and feminism in the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) using concepts from feminist radical political economy. A feminist approach changes the categories of economic analysis to offer a new interpretation of an older history: the formation of the Women’s Caucus. I reread the early history of the feminist project in economics through the lens of social reproduction to understand the influence of life experience on practice, particularly on the 1971 women’s walkout during a URPE conference, and on economic theory. Highlighting women’s multiple roles, as graduate students, mothers, wives, girlfriends, and/or caregivers – but ultimately as women – reveals social reproduction as a site of radical politics and demonstrates the importance of reproductive labor for understanding solidarity. In doing so, the analysis provides an example of how a feminist perspective contributes uniquely to economics.

Purpose – This introductory essay to an edited volume proposes possible contributions from economic sociology to the study of work broadly defined. Weber had a vision of economic sociology as a study of not only economic phenomena but also economically relevant and economically conditioned phenomena. Work, in its market and nonmarket variety, falls in all these categories and thus presents a fruitful research arena for economic sociologists who have thus far primarily studied markets and corporations.

Methodology/Approach – The essay provides an analytic review of literature in economic sociology, uses information from the content analysis of recent publications in sociology of work, and provides an overview of chapters included in this edited volume.

Value of paper – Applying economic sociology to work means: (a) investigating its embeddedness in social structures, culture, and politics; and (b) uncovering the socially constructed nature of what constitutes paid market work. This article also proposes that economic sociologists can expand the boundaries of work by examining such activities as care work, work in the informal economy, and prison work.