Research

My research agenda broadly considers the relationship between culture, work, organizations, and inequality. In my current project, a study of evaluation and inequality in American fine dining, I draw on two original data sets—120 in-depth interviews with critically celebrated chefs in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area and 1380 restaurant reviews from the Michelin Guide in the same two cities. I analyze how chefs and critics make sense of and evaluate chefs and restaurants in the field, analyzing chefs’ creative processes, daily management of staff, and interpretation of critics’ assessments of their products, among other things. One article from this project is published in Social Problems, another is featured in Poetics, and I am currently preparing a book manuscript and several additional articles drawing on this data.

I have also published research on symbolic compliance and sexual harassment on college campuses (in Sociological Forum), the intellectual development of the theoretical concept of institutional logics (in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Business and Management) and the gender dynamics of the western literary canon (published in Gender Issues).

Beyond the fine dining case, I maintain several projects—both collaborative and independent—focused on inequality in artistic labor markets. My collaborative project with Dr. Alexandre Frenette (Vanderbilt University) and Dr. Nathan Martin (Arizona State University) received a research grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Drawing on findings from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) survey, we consider how systems of ethnoracial, gender, class, and educational inequality affect arts graduates’ experiences in higher education, in internships, and in creative careers (these findings are published in the 2021 annual policy report released by SNAAP). We build on the findings we present in the report to further examine the role that institutions of higher education play in reproducing and potentially combating the inequalities we observe through in-depth interviews with institutional intermediaries at colleges and universities that require and/or support student internships in the arts and other creative fields. We are currently completing data collection and analysis for the next phase of this project and recently published the first paper from this collaborative project in Poetics (2023).

In addition to these projects, I have also begun data collection for another major project considering how actors who are differentially positioned within a field of cultural production understand the commercial and symbolic value of everyday cultural products. Through interviews with writers, readers, publishers, marketers, booksellers, and librarians, I consider how different actors, with different relationships to the same cultural product, understand the value and meaning of romance novels, a robust segment of the American publishing landscape.