Eva Illouz is a world class sociologist. She is a giant of cultural sociology, and I learned immensely from her work. That the corrupt and authoritarian Israeli government denied her this well-deserved prize is testament to her quality and intellectual integrity.

Do our findings extend beyond organizations? We speculate they do. The effects of global reach on identification are highest for those in very clustered networks. Identification with an "imagined community" requires a combination of local cohesion and global integration.

We look at two network measures (inferred from email exchange): local clustering (how tight knit one's ego network is) and a new measure, global reach (how distributed one's ego network is across multiple communities).
Both predict identification, even within person over time.

To measure identification, we use Mittens, an extension of GloVe, to fit person embeddings (from email) across 3 orgs. We measure the similarity between "I" and "we" as each person's identification strength at a given time unit.

github.com/roamanalytic...

New paper from the computational culture lab, forthcoming @amjsoc.bsky.social!
Building on (largely untested) sociological intuitions, we show how positions in the organizational network relate to identification with the organization, using a language model:
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...

Thinking about interpretation, and especially interpretative heterogeneity, is important, because the links between people’s beliefs and their actions are often mediated by interpretation. You and I might both believe in diversity, but disagree on what this ideal means. >>

Framing, for example, affects recipients’ categorization and semantic association, both through verbal (by labeling and analogizing) and non-verbal (relationally and through co-occurrence) channels. >>

To interpret something is to associate it with a cognitive concept (categorization), invoking a set of associated concepts (semantic association). This enables us to conceptualize shared interpretation, and the process by which interpretations are coordinated across people. >>

Why is Macklemore often criticized for cultural appropriation, but Eminem mostly gets a pass? In a new paper, forthcoming
at ASR, we argue, and demonstrate, that people are allowed to borrow from other cultures if they incurred a cost. We call that “cultural tariffing.”

osf.io/preprints/so...