Jonathan S. Coley

How do local governments symbolically manage the diversity of their residents? Drawing from an original representative sample of local government officials, we use a novel survey experiment with open-ended survey responses to examine preferences for cultural objects that symbolically manage religious diversity, an axis of difference that is increasingly salient to social conflict. Our experiment randomly varies the content of holiday displays on government property to measure diversity management strategies. Results show that government officials prefer the assimilationist strategy of a Christmas tree—by itself—over multiculturalist and exclusivist strategies, which both include sectarian religious content. Officials also evaluate Christmas trees as the content least likely to signal government endorsement of religion, compared to other holiday displays. We argue that these patterns can be explained by conceiving of a Christmas tree as a cultural cipher, a well-known cultural object that affords a range of meanings and resonates across social identities as innocuous. We argue that cultural ciphers are useful for an assimilationist approach to managing diversity because their ambiguity allows them to act as a vehicle of symbolic inclusion while also sustaining the meanings of majority groups. We also consider how cultural ciphers may lose their power for civic solidarity.

In the spring of 1229, a dispute between students and tavernkeepers in Paris culminated in one of the earliest recorded university strikes.1 Specifically, during Carnival festivities, a group of st...

In his essay “On Intellectual Craftsmanship”—which he later included as a methodological appendix to The Sociological Imagination—C. Wright Mills ([1952] 1980) discusses the unique approach he took...

A growing body of scholarship shows that many religions promote binary conceptions of gender; a separate line of scholarship on cisgendered organizations examines how binary conceptions of gender pattern many organizational policies. However, little research to date considers how religion shapes organizations’ decisions to maintain cisgendered policies. In this article, we address this gap by analyzing policies toward transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming students at 624 4-year U.S. Christian colleges and universities. Using original data and binary logistic regression, we show that evangelical Protestant colleges and universities are significantly more likely than other Christian colleges and universities to maintain explicitly discriminatory policies toward transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming students. Evangelical Protestant schools are also more likely to lack nondiscrimination policies inclusive of gender identity or gender expression. We argue that these patterns reflect evangelical Protestants’ distinctive moral schemas and identities, which in turn shape the unique organizational characteristics of evangelical Protestant colleges and universities themselves. Our findings advance theory by demonstrating how religion can influence organizations’ decisions to maintain cisgendered policies. The article also contributes to the development of a conceptual framework for understanding why and how cisgendered policies become institutionalized across other organizational contexts.

Occupational activism refers to socially transformative action pursued through one's occupational role or community. In this introduction to Work and Occupations ’ special issue on “Working for Social Change,” we clarify how occupational activism is distinct from other concepts such as social movement activism, labor movement activism, institutional activism, and professional activism. We also identify several theoretical frameworks from adjacent fields that can be repurposed and applied to the study of occupational activism, including social movement theory, organizational inequality theories, and street-level bureaucracy theory. Altogether, our article offers a foundation for future research on activism in and through the world of work.

Do organizations that previously discriminated against one marginalized group go on to discriminate against other marginalized groups? If so, why and under what conditions? We address this question by developing a theory of transmorphic organizations, which suggests that organizations’ likelihood of discriminating against different groups over time will be contingent on their associated moral schemas and organizational identities. We test this theory by analyzing a unique, comprehensive dataset of discriminatory policies at 526 Christian colleges and universities in the United States, a set of organizations that has routinely been exempted from federal non-discrimination policies. Through logistic regression analyses, we uncover an association between schools’ historical policies on race and contemporary policies on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) students among certain types of Christian colleges and universities. Specifically, evangelical Protestant colleges and universities that discriminated against Black students typically formally discriminate against LGBTQ students, whereas mainline Protestant and Catholic colleges and universities that discriminated against Black students rarely formally discriminate against LGBTQ students. We attribute this divergence to the increasingly conservative, individualist moral schemas of evangelical Protestants in general and the relatively exclusive organizational identities of evangelical Protestant colleges and universities. Our study’s findings hold implications for organizational theories of inequality and contribute to ongoing research on religion, race, LGBTQ rights, and higher education.

The U.S. public’s confidence in elections is intensively studied in the last decade but little is known about election confidence among locally elected officials, whose roles and community status may influence public opinion. Using a nationally representative survey of local election officials, we compare election confidence among local elected officials with that of the general public. Local elected officials are more likely to trust both local and national elections. We theorize factors that affect local officials’ trust in elections, including partisan context, state leadership election denial levels, and political ambition. We show how social trust, partisan identity, and ambition significantly influence local officials’ confidence that local and national results reflect the intention of voters. We conclude by showing how the relative lack of intensive partisan polarization among local elected officials is especially important at keeping election distrust low among local officials.

A growing number of states have passed laws that ban or restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in higher education; however, little is known about how such laws affect the prevalence of DEI centers and student-of-color groups, which are often housed within DEI centers. Through logistic regression analyses of longitudinal data on DEI centers and student-of-color organizations across 1,756 U.S. colleges and universities, the authors find that anti-DEI laws are associated with schools losing DEI offices between 2020 and 2024. Yet schools in states with anti-DEI laws were more likely to gain Black, Latinx, and Native American groups and less likely to lose existing Black and Latinx student groups. Additionally, anti-DEI laws were not associated with gains or losses in Asian or Asian American student groups. Our study thus suggests that students are organizing to create new inclusive spaces in response to anti-DEI legislation.

LGBTQ+ resource centers offer multiple forms of support to LGBTQ+ students at U.S. colleges and universities, but in the wake of recent legislation curtailing diversity, equity, and inclusion-related initiatives in higher education, we know little about their current prevalence and why some schools maintain LGBTQ+ resource centers while others do not. Drawing on a comprehensive database of 1,756 four-year, not-for-profit U.S. colleges and universities, we first show that a relatively small percentage of U.S. colleges and universities (14%) currently maintains LGBTQ+ resource centers. Employing binary logistic regression analysis, we then show that larger, selective, public colleges and universities that have higher percentages of full-time students and are located in progressive areas exhibit significantly higher odds of hosting LGBTQ+ resource centers. The study represents one of the most comprehensive analyses to date of college- and university-based LGBTQ+ resource center presence and highlights the enduring structural barriers to LGBTQ+ inclusion in higher education.