Specialization in
Political Economy and Global Social Change

About Our Faculty…

Steven Brint (PhD, 1982, Harvard University) is an internationally recognized authority on middle class politics and the politics of higher education. Professor Brint's forthcoming book, The Future of the City of Intellect: The Changing American University, a study of continuity and change in American colleges and universities since 1970. His book, Diverted Dream, received the 1991 American Education Research Association's "Outstanding Book" award and the 1991 Council of Colleges and Universities' "Outstanding Research Publication." His other two books are Schools and Societies (1998) and In an Age of Experts: The Changing Role of Professionals in Politics and Public Life (1994). His work on the professions and middle-class politics has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Work and Occupations, Sociological Theory and in volumes edited by such scholars as William Julius Wilson, Morris Fiorina, Theda Skocpol, and Terry Nichols Clark.

Christopher Chase-Dunn (PhD, Sociology, Stanford University, 1975) is the founder and co-editor of the electronic Journal of World-Systems Research and directs the Institute for Research on World Systems at UC-Riverside. He is currently studying international economic, political and cultural integration of the world-system over the past 200 years and working on a comparative study of stateless, state-based, and modern world-systems. He received the Distinguished Publication Award, Political Economy of the World-System section of the American Sociological Association for his book, Global Formation: Structures of the World Economy (1989). His many books also include Globalization on the Ground: Postbellum Guatemalan Democracy and Development (2001, with Nelson Amaro and Susanne), The Spiral of Capitalism and Socialism: Toward Global Democracy (2000, with Terry Boswell), and Rise and Demise: Comparing World-Systems (1997, with Thomas D. Hall). Chase-Dunn was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2001.

Katja M. Guenther (PhD, University of Minnesota, 2006) conducts research on gender, social movements, and the state in comparative perspective. She is especially interested in how gender and opportunities for feminist resistance vary across places and scales of governance. Her primary research project focuses on the development of local feminist movements in eastern Germany since the collapse of state socialism there. A secondary branch of her research program examines interactions between the gender policies of the European Union (EU) and the gender policies of the EU’s member states. She employs feminist methods and epistemologies in her fieldwork. She has published papers in edited anthologies and the journal Social Politics: International Journal on Gender, State, and Society, and has papers forthcoming in Politics & Gender and Qualitative Research.

Robert Hanneman (PhD 1979, University of Wisconsin) is the author of books on welfare state development, centralization in the structure of social service delivery systems, medical care system performance, dynamic models of sociological theories, and social network analysis methods. He has done work in military and economic sociology, and is currently examining the evolution of organizational populations and the evolution of cooperation in the United States salt industry from 1800 to 2000. His research areas include computational modeling (simulation) for theory construction, economic sociology, social networks, political and military sociology. He has published Collins, Randall and Robert Hanneman. 1998. "Modeling the Interaction Ritual Theory of Solidarity." Pp. 213-237 in P. Doreian and T. Fararo (eds.) The Problem of Solidarity: Theories and Models. Gordon and Breach; Russell, Raymond and Robert Hanneman. 2000. "The Use of Part-Time Employees and Independent Contractors Among Small Enterprises in Russia." Research in the Sociology of Work. Vol. 9: 187-208, Russell, Raymond and Robert Hanneman. (Forthcoming). "The Role of Institutional Processes in the Formation of Worker Cooperatives in Israel." In J.R. Hollingsworth and Karl Mueller (eds.) Socioeconomics: New Perspectives. Rowan and Littlefield.

Augustine Kposowa (PhD 1990, Ohio State University) works on three general areas: Social Epidemiology, Political Economy, and Criminology. Dr. Kposowa is currently studying the effects of patients' race or ethnic background on physician diagnostic decision-making and treatment. In the field of political economy, he works on identifying the sources of violence, civil wars, and military coups détat in Post-Colonial Africa, and the consequences of these events on human quality of life. He is at present working (with J. Craig Jenkins) on the causes of global civil conflict in the post-Soviet era. He also studies the impact of immigration on the U.S. labor market and on crime rates across states and metropolitan areas. In criminology, Dr. Kposowa's primary emphasis is on the sources of violent victimization, notably homicide, and the role of social disadvantage (e.g. poverty, unemployment, and racial discrimination) on crime. He has published in numerous scientific journals, including Psychological Medicine, Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, American Journal of Industrial Medicine, Ethnic & Racial Studies, British Journal of Sociology, Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Social Forces, American Journal of Sociology, and American Sociological Review.

Matthew C. Mahutga (PhD, UC Irvine, 2008) studies the political economy of global social change from a social-structural perspective. Using varied types of quantitative macro-comparative methods, Matthew has published empirical work on the relationship between economic globalization and changes to the international division of labor, as well as the effect of foreign direct investment on income inequality and pollution. He has also published work on the use of social network analysis for the study of the structure of the world-economy. Current projects include examinations of the relationship between the world-system of states and the world-city system; variation in economic growth across positions in the international division of labor; methodologies for the quantification of core / periphery structures with relational data; the veracity of economistic accounts of the benefits of international trade vis-a-vis social-structural accounts; and the relationship between production network formation and the organization of the global manufacturing sector. His work appears in Social Forces, Social Problems, the International Journal of Comparative Sociology, the Journal of World-Systems Research and elsewhere.

Ellen Reese (PhD, 1998, University of California, Los Angeles) examines the politics of welfare in the United States, past and present. She is currently writing a book comparing the 1950s welfare backlash with the present one. Her book focuses on how race, class, and gender interests conspired to limit poor mothers' welfare rights in both periods, and why welfare retrenchment has worsened in recent years. With John Krinsky (City University of New York), she has begun work on a second book, which focuses on the rise of welfare rights activism in Los Angeles, Milwaukee, and New York City since passage of the 1996 federal welfare reform act. This book focuses on how local political economies and demographic contexts present different challenges and opportunities for challenging welfare privatization, the lack of child care, workfare policies, and immigrants' welfare rights. Her research has been published in Gender & Society, Work and Occupations, Social Politics: International Journal on Gender, State, and Society, Journal of Poverty, and Race, Gender, and Class.

Raymond Russell (PhD, 1979, Harvard University) focuses on how workers can participate in the ownership and control of their workplaces. His book Sharing Ownership in the Workplace (1985) examined forms of employee ownership in the United States, while Utopia in Zion (1995) surveyed the history of worker cooperatives in Israel. Since 1996, Russell has been investigating the relationship between work and ownership in the contemporary Russian economy. Articles based on these studies have appeared in such journals and series as Work and Occupations, Industrial Relations, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, and Research in the Sociology of Work.