Michael Sauder

University of Iowa | UI · Department of Sociology

Quantification, in the form of accountability measures, organizational rankings, and personal metrics, plays an increasingly prominent role in modern society. While past research tends to depict quantification primarily as either an external intervention or a tool that can be employed by organizations, we propose that conceptualizing quantification...

As rankings have become increasingly institutionalized in higher education, so too have the strategic responses adopted by universities to address them. A key component of these responses is the development of new expertise, embodied in personnel and organizational units, dedicated to managing quantitative assessments. We draw on a qualitative stud...

In this interview, Wendy Espeland and Michael Sauder both reflect on their work on rankings, reactivity and commensuration, and think about the implication their sociological work could have on the practices of those dealing with rankings and their reactive effects.

Rankings have become a popular topic in the social sciences over the past two decades. Adding to these debates, the present volume assembles studies that explore a variety of empirical settings, emphasizing the importance of acknowledging that there are multiple “Worlds of Rankings.” To this end, the first part of the chapter addresses the implicat...

Group Name: VHA Center for Antimicrobial Stewardship and Prevention of Antimicrobial Resistance (CASPAR) Background: Antimicrobial stewardship programs (ASPs) are advised to measure antimicrobial consumption as a metric for audit and feedback. However, most ASPs lack the tools necessary for appropriate risk adjustment and standardized data collecti...

Sociology has been curiously silent about the concept of luck. The present article argues that this omission is, in fact, an oversight: An explicit and systematic engagement with luck provides a more accurate portrayal of the social world, opens potentially rich veins of empirical and theoretical inquiry, and offers a compelling alternative for cha...

The authors explore how newspaper articles engaging seven publicly prominent social science ideas develop from ideas in the public to public ideas when mediators and interpretants use them, and oscillate between these uses as part of an unfolding career.

Background: Implementation science experts define champions as "supporting, marketing, and driving through an implementation, overcoming indifference or resistance that the intervention may provoke in an organization." Many hospitals use designated clinical champions-often called "hand hygiene (HH) champions"-typically to improve hand hygiene comp...

In academia, women trail men in nearly every major professional reward, such as earnings, publications, and funding. Bibliometric studies, however, suggest that citations are unique with regard to gender inequality: female penalties have been reported, but gender parity or even female premiums are routinely documented as well. Two questions follow...

In light of ongoing concerns about the relevance of scholarly activities, we ask, what are public ideas and how do they come to be? More specifically, how do journalists and other mediators between the academy and the public use social science ideas? How do the various uses of these ideas develop over time and shape the public careers of these idea...

Background Smaller workplaces frequently employ low-wage earners, who have higher smoking rates. Organizational culture and workplace health climate are two characteristics that could influence employee smoking. The purpose of this study was to examine the associations between organizational culture, workplace health climate, and smoking among empl...

Introduction: Many workplaces have adopted anti-smoking initiatives to reduce smoking behavior, but small workplaces are less likely to adopt these initiatives. One factor that could influence adoption is organizational culture, defined as the values and assumptions shared by members of an organization. The aim of this study was to examine the typ...

Importance Audit and feedback based on direct observation is a common strategy to improve hand hygiene compliance, but the optimal design and delivery of this intervention are poorly defined. Objective To describe barriers encountered by audit-and-feedback programs for hand hygiene across acute care hospitals within the Veterans Health Administrat...

Background: To reduce the negative consequences of smoking, workplaces have adopted and implemented anti-smoking initiatives. Compared to large workplaces, less research exists about these initiatives at smaller workplaces, which are more likely to hire low-wage workers with higher rates of smoking. The purpose of this study was to describe and co...

Existing research on the Matthew Effect establishes that this dynamic can alter information flow and the distribution of rewards in ways that lead to cumulating advantages for high status actors. We know little, however, about how systems of evaluation, and especially variations in systems of evaluations, influence the expression and strength of th...

Research in sociology suggests that the effects of standards are not nearly as straightforward or as homogenising as they first appear. The present study extends these insights by demonstrating how even standards designed simply to collect data can produce extensive and unanticipated effects in medical fields as their uses evolve across actors and...

We live in an era when individuals, organizations, and governments face pressing demands to be accountable. Not only do we expect actions to be transparent, we also expect them to be demonstrably transparent: the general public has the right to see disinterested evidence of performance, competence, and relative achievement. Quantitative measures se...

Sociologists have focused almost exclusively on academic aspects of status in higher education, despite the prominence of nonacademic activities, specifically athletics, in U.S. colleges and universities. We use the case of football to investigate whether intercollegiate sports influence the distribution of status in U.S. higher education. Analyzin...

While most work on causation in ethnography addresses the normative question of what ethnographers should do, this article addresses the empirical question of what ethnographers actually do. Specifically, it investigates whether ethnographic articles make causal arguments and how these arguments are made. The authors draw on a content analysis of 4...

Drawing on a 15-month ethnographic study of a drug court, we investigate how actors from different institutional and professional backgrounds employ logical frameworks in their micro-level interactions and thus how logics affect day-to-day organizational activity. While institutional theory presumes that professionals closely adhere to the logics o...

Status has become an increasingly influential concept in the fields of organizational and economic sociology during the past two decades. Research in this area has not only helped explain behavior within and between organizations, but has also contributed to our understanding of status processes more generally. In this review, we point to the contr...

This chapter discusses the 'dynamism' of indicators, which depends on several factors. It describes 'successful' indicators as authoritative or significant, since they gather networks of technologies, constituents, and things. It then presents three case studies that study the sets of indicators of higher educational institutions, namely the transn...

The conservative role of the textbook in reproducing the dominant ideas of a disciplinary field is well known. The factors driving that content have remained almost entirely unexamined. Reviewing the universe of textbooks aimed at the American market between 1998 and 2004, we explore the persistence of the identification in American sociology textb...

In August it's the colleges, in April the graduate schools. The annual rankings of universities and their programs result in copies of U.S. News & World Report flying off the shelves, and great fanfare follows. Local news outlets report the lists and the Internet goes all abuzz with discussions about the year's gains and losses in standing. Reactio...

This article demonstrates the value of Foucault's conception of discipline for understanding organizational responses to rankings. Using a case study of law schools, we explain why rankings have permeated law schools so extensively and why these organizations have been unable to buffer these institutional pressures. Foucault's depiction of two impo...

How are organizational reputations established? Expanding on recent work that emphasizes the construction of reputations rather than their cultural content, we explore how forces in the organizational environment define organizational reputation. Specifically, we demonstrate how two types of mediators—reputational arbiters and reputational entrepre...

This article analyzes a process by which established organizational fields change through the incorporation of new field-level actors. Drawing on 137 in-depth interviews with U.S. law school administrators and faculty, the paper demonstrates how the U.S. News & World Report rankings of law schools gained a foothold in the field of legal education,...

Recently, there has been a proliferation of measures responding to demands for accountability and transparency. Using the example of media rankings of law schools, this article argues that the methodological concept of reactivity-the idea that people change their behavior in reaction to being evaluated, observed, or measured-offers a useful lens fo...

This paper will be published in Volume 81, Issue 1 of the Indiana Law Journal. The issue publishes papers submitted to the Symposium on the Next Generation of Law School Rankings. From the article: "In this article we have suggested that the existence of a single dominant ranker of law schools exacerbates some of the problems created by the ranking...

In recent years, there has been a tremendous proliferation of quantitative evaluative social measures in the field of law as well as society generally. One of these measures, the U.S. News & World Report rankings of law schools, has become an almost obsessive concern of the law school community, generating a great deal of speculation about the effe...

For organizations, as for individuals, status position governs access to a variety of valued rewards. To uncover the causes of status position, recent research has focused on the relationship between the attributes of individual organizations and their standing in a status hierarchy. Although this research has made valuable contributions to our und...

This article proposes an interactionist framework for the study of status stratification. This framework returns the focus of status research to how status works, especially emphasizing the symbolic and contextual aspects integral to the concept. By closely examining how status is indicated, how it is employed, and how it is maintained or changed o...

Over the last fifteen years, the U.S. News & World Report ("U.S. News") rankings have become increasingly influential in the world of legal education. These widely disseminated public measures of law school quality are a popular topic among academics as well as in the media, and they have prompted critical responses from virtually every major law s...

Thesis (Ph.D., Sociology)--Northwestern University, 2005.