Check out my new piece with Javier Auyero: “Narcops: How Police and Drug Dealers Collude in Argentina,” which was published this month in Insight Crime, a non-profit journalism and investigative organization specialized in organized crime in Latin America and the Caribbean. You can also read it in Spanish here: “Polinarcos: La colusión entre policías y traficantes en Argentina.”
My most recent article, “The Relational Production of Workplace Equality: The Case of Worker-Recuperated Businesses in Argentina,” is now available Online First at Qualitative Sociology!
Work organizations are commonly studied as sites that produce and reproduce inequality. But we know much less about how organizations promote equality. This article examines efforts to broaden access to power, opportunity, and resources in Hotel Bauen, a worker-recuperated business that was converted from a privately-owned company into a worker-run cooperative. Drawing on extensive ethnographic and archival research, I analyze efforts to redesign and redefine work through collective decision-making, job rotation, and pay equity. The article concludes by identifying three mechanisms of equality—inclusion, opportunity distribution, and symbolic leveling—to theorize the relational production of workplace equality and complement the near-exclusive focus on inequality and its effects.
My most recent article, “Watercooler Democracy: Rumors and Transparency in a Cooperative Workplace” is now available at Work and Occupations!
This article examines how rumors impact democracy and transparency in a cooperative workplace. Although literature on rumors generally analyzes them as negative to workplace culture, the author argues that rumors constitute a critical aspect of democratic participation. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a worker-recuperated business in Argentina, the author shows how members use rumors to incite deliberation, participate in decision-making, question organizational policy, and oversee managerial authority. Although informal communication at work can create uncertainty, confusion, and concerns about efficiency, the author finds that rumors can also increase worker influence, encourage organizational accountability, and ultimately protect against the consolidation of power.
On a warm evening in February 2013, residents in Arquitecto Tucci convened to discuss their concerns about their neighborhood. Located on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, the once working-class neighborhood had grown significantly in recent years through the expansion of informal settlements. Paved streets and sidewalks now transitioned into muddy dirt roads. In these areas—many of which were prone to flooding—newer residents constructed simple concrete houses, most of which lacked access to municipal services like electricity, water, sewers, and garbage pick-up.
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Read the full blog post in Panoramas. You can also check out the article, “Collusion and Cynicism at the Urban Margins,” which was published in the Latin American Research Review in 2019.
With Javier Auyero, this project examines relationships of collusion between the state and drug gangs in Argentina. We are currently analyzing over 1,000 pages of court cases and, in particular, wiretapped phone conversations to unpack the content of this collusion. We are especially interested in how these relationships of collusion impacts the behavior of dealers, cops, and the residents caught in the crosshairs.
Our book, The Ambivalent State: Police-Criminal Collusion at the Urban Margins, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. The Spanish edition, Entre Narcos y Policías. Las Relaciones Clandestinas entre el Estado y el Delito, y su Impacto Violento en la Vida de las Personas, was published with Siglo Ventiuno in 2021. We have also published a series of articles based on this project, including one in the 2018 special issue in Sociological Forum entitled “Whose Lives Matter?” and another in a special collection on “Societal Responses to Criminal Governance in Latin America” in the Latin American Research Review.
This project examines how alternative organizations construct and maintain equality in the workplace. It focuses on the case of worker-recuperated businesses in Argentina, which are companies that have been converted from privately-owned enterprises into worker-controlled cooperatives.
Existing research suggests that these alternative organizations innovate in order to survive in a capitalist market. Yet the outcomes of such workplace innovations have not been connected to the production or reduction of inequality. This project builds on research on organizations and inequality to examine how worker-recuperated businesses create more equal workplaces and when and why they are successful in doing so. I am currently working on a book manuscript on my main case study, the worker-run Hotel Bauen, and I have a series of recently published articles.