Stanford Sociology
PhDs on the Market
2011-2012
Kendra Bischoff
Kendra will be a Spencer Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow in Equality of Opportunity and Education, Stanford University Center for Ethics in Society starting Fall 2011.
I completed my PhD in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University in August 2011. Beginning in September 2011 I will be a Spencer Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow in Equality of Opportunity and Education at the Stanford University Center for Ethics in Society. My research interests include social stratification and inequality, sociology of education, and political sociology. My research focuses on the causes and consequences of racial and economic segregation, the effect of school context on student outcomes, and the intersection of politics and education. My dissertation research uses a mixed-methods research design to explore the academic and social effects of participating in an interdistrict school desegregation program.
Dissertation: "Negotiating Disparate Social Contexts: Evidence From an Interdistrict School Desegregation Program."
Committee: Sean Reardon (co-chair), C. Matt Snipp (co-chair), and Doug McAdam
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Kendra's website
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Lynny Gencianeo Chin
Lynn will be a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Stanford's Institute for Research in the Social Sciences starting Fall 2011.
My research focuses around questions that are central in social psychology, small group processes, social inequality and organizations. I am interested in questions very fundamental to sociology as a discipline: How does the division of labor affect intragroup interactions? Does specialization inhibit or promote group cohesion and attachment? How does task structure impact the development of ingroup status hierarchies? What exactly does it mean for a group to be "egalitarian" in actual practice? In my research, I try to connect task structure to microlevel interactions that in turn shape macro-level outcomes. In my dissertation, I used experimental laboratory data to examine how the division of labor in small work groups influence the development of group cohesion by shaping group members' perceptions of ingroup 1) interdependence, 2) similarity, and 3) relative status. I am also very interested in testing social psychological theories, especially those related to social identities, outside of the lab using other methodologies. Some of my other research includes studying the structural determinants of individuals' political identities and ethnic attitudes and prejudices. One of my current interests lies in understanding how ethnic and gender stereotypes color how resource holders evaluate the organizational structure of entrepreneurial ventures founded by women and minorities. This dual interest in fundamental social questions and their relation to the real world is also reflected in how I approach teaching, including courses like Social Structure and the Individual.
Dissertation: "Unifying the Divide: Effects of the Division of Labor on Person-to-Group Attachment."
Committee: Cecilia Ridgeway (Chair), Karen Cook, and Rebecca Sandefur
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Lynny's CV
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Brian Cook
My research interests lie primarily in political sociology, organizations and conflict. Much of my research focuses on the interplay between political economy and organizations in regions of conflict and political transition, and I have conducted fieldwork in a number of countries in Africa including Malawi, Mozambique and South Africa. My dissertation explores the impact of democratization on political parties and social movement organizations across racial groups in South Africa. From townships surrounding Cape Town to isolated Afrikaner communities in the Karoo desert, this research has taken me to a diverse array of communities in South Africa and has provided important insights into the long-term impact of democratization with implications beyond Sub-Saharan Africa to events currently unfolding in North Africa and the Middle East. In addition to my dissertation project, I have also conducted research on the role of international humanitarian organizations in regions of conflict, and I am currently working on a research project with Susan Olzak and Ruud Koopmans that examines the relationship between immigration policy and discourse and anti-immigrant events in Western Europe. I have taught undergraduate sociology courses on writing, quantitative and qualitative methods, and I have been involved in teaching fieldwork and research methods seminars to students in the International Relations Honors Program at Stanford for the past three years.
Dissertation: "The Political Economy of Collective Action in Emerging Democratic Regimes: Democratic reform, economic development, and collective action in South Africa from 1994-2010 ."
Committee: Doug McAdam(chair), Andrew Walder, and Susan Olzak
CV and more information on Brian's research interests can be found on his website.
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John Chandler Johnson 
My research develops and computationally applies a formal theory of prices as socially coordinated information. This relaxes neoclassical economics’ assumption of perfect information, using information theory as a micro-to-macro bridge between sociological mechanisms and system-level economic behavior. My dissertation uses this framework to examine commodity price volatility as a consequence of dynamic and endogenous social structural reproduction processes. Leveraging my dissertation’s coordination theory, my future research will continue to explore system-level economic effects of social interactions, ultimately pursuing cross-cultural, microsociological explanations of macroeconomic growth.
Dissertation: “Prices as Socially Coordinated Information: Market Volatility Implications from a Microsociological Price Theory.”
Committee: Mark Granovetter (chair), Dan McFarland, and Andrew Walder
dissertation abstract
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Chandler's CV
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Yan Li
Yan is currently a visiting Professor at Reed College.
I study social inequality and its social psychological foundations and my research intersects inequality, social psychology, gender, race and ethnicity, immigration, Asia and Asian America, and social change. My dissertation explores ideologies of inequality by studying the variations in Asian immigrants’ acquisition or adaptation of racial and gender stereotypes in the U.S., and the cross-cultural and structural constraints and facilitators of such ideological assimilation.
Dissertation: “Ideological Osmosis: Asian Immigrants’ Understanding of Race and Gender Inequalities.”
Committee: C. Ridgeway (Chair); A. Walder; and M. McDermott
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Website
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Kaisa Snellman
Kaisa will be a Saguaro Post Doctoral Research Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School beginning Fall 2011.
I am a PhD candidate in Sociology at Stanford University. My research addresses several questions central to the study of organizations, institutions, and social movements: What accounts for variation in organizational responses to institutional change? How do social networks shape the diffusion of new ideas and practices or impede or instigate collective civic action? What is the role of framing processes in institutional change and social movement processes? I examine connections between institutions and institutional change, social networks, and collective action using a broad range of methods from advanced statistics to network simulations and topic models from computational linguistics.
I am a graduate fellow at the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (PACS), where I examine the relationship between neighborhood civic infrastructure, connections between the political and religious elite, and collective civic action. My dissertation research on diffusion of shareholder orientation in Finland has been generously funded by the Academy of Finland and the Foundation for Economic Education.
Dissertation: "Battles in Boardrooms: The Diffusion of Shareholder Rhetoric and Practice in Finland, 1990-2005."
Committee: Walter W. Powell (chair), Doug McAdam, John-Paul Ferguson
dissertation abstract
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Kaisa's CV
Website
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