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ResearchThe broad areas of specialization that I work in are social movements, the sociology of work, political sociology, and social inequality. I am primarily a quantitative survey researcher, but also employ social network analysis regularly. My research tends to surround the study of alternative social forms. I've been focusing on three areas in particular: community currency (an alternative to the mainstream economy), home schooling (an alternative to the public education system), and workplace democracy (an alternative to bureaucratic control structures). All three of these are "bottom-up" initiatives to empower the marginalized. Community currencies and home schooling are forms of what I call "alternative social movements." For more on this, read my entry on the subject in the Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Justice (available as a pdf file).Brief descriptions of my various projects follow. All of my work is available in pdf format and can be viewed and/or downloaded. See my vita for a more orderly listing with all of the details. Community Currency For the past six years I have been studying various aspects of the community currency movement in the United States. If you're not familiar with local currencies, check out my encyclopedia entry (available as a pdf file) and/or my media appearances page. The first project I worked on tests macro, environmental variables as determinants of community currency system emergence and success. This paper appears in the September 2005 issue of Environment and Planning A and is available here as a pdf file. It is based on the following directory of Hours systems. In June 2004 I delivered a presentation at the Local Currencies in the 21st Century conference at Bard College. From this presentation I drafted a less technical paper (Where Have all the "Hours" Gone?). My more recent research has focused on Time Banking. I am working on a case study of a U.S. Time Bank that has resulted in four papers thus far. My first paper from this project uses social network analysis and focuses on participation of the elderly. It was published in 2008 in the Journal of Aging & Social Policy and is (available as a pdf file). As a complement to the transaction data, I conducted a membership survey in Fall 2006 of the participants in this Time Bank. The major survey findings are published in an article in Volume 11 (2007) of the International Journal of Community Currency Research (follow link for the pdf file). At the 2007 ASA meeting in New York City I presented a paper that focuses on the social movement aspects of local currencies. In this research I link my Time Bank survey data with transaction data to analyze the inputs, processes, and outputs of participation in this local social movement organization. This paper is currently under review for publication (available as a pdf file). I wrote my fourth paper on this Time Bank while on sabbatical in Fall 2007. It is a comprehensive, quantitative case study that thoroughly investigates the motivations, trading patterns, and outcomes achieved through Time Banking (available as a pdf file). I presented a shortened version of the paper at the 2008 ASA meeting in Boston. I am also working on a book manuscript with Judy Lasker of Lehigh and Corinne Kyriacou of Hofstra. It is tentatively titled Equal Times and features case studies of three Time Banks representing the major forms of this movement. I also collaborated with Judy Lasker and her colleagues on a paper forthcoming in Health Promotion Practice. Here, we investigate the health outcomes gained by members of the Time Bank in Allentown, PA (available as a pdf file). Home Schooling In 2005 I concluded analysis of my original survey data collected from an organized group of Southern California homeschoolers (n=235). Doug Mitchell (of the University of California-Riverside) and I have a paper in the May 2005 issue of Sociological Spectrum that is an effort to identify the determinants of perceptions of social movement involvement among parents who home school their children (available as a pdf file). I also have an additional paper in the May 2005 issue of Education and Urban Society in which two major aspects of home schooling are explored. Factors determining the ?ins? of home schooling -- parents? motivations -- and the ?outs? of home schooling -- student achievement -- are identified (available as a pdf file). Also in regard to homeschoolers, my book review of Mitchell L. Stevens' Kingdom of Children was published in the September 2002 issue of the American Journal of Sociology and is available as a pdf file. I have an encyclopedia entry on home schooling in the Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Justice (2007;available as a pdf file) and another one forthcoming in the Encyclopedia of the Life Course and Human Development (available as a pdf file). Workplace Democracy My dissertation was completed in June 2001 (under Edna Bonacich, Rusty Russell, and Bob Hanneman) and is an analysis of Americans' attitudes toward workplace democracy. This secondary data analysis employs the second wave (1991) of U.S. data from Erik Olin Wright's Comparative Project on Class Structure and Class Consciousness. The 269 page document can be downloaded here (pdf file). Several journal articles have been published from this project. The central argument concerns the contradictions underlying both managers and workers simultaneously supporting the idea of workplace democracy. My empirical attempt to clarify these contradictory attitudes was pubished in the February 2003 issue of Work and Occupations (download it here). Since workplace democracy is fundamentally a class phenomenon, I also test the salience of various indicators of social class on Americans' attitudes toward workplace democracy. This article was published in the September 2001 issue of the Berkeley Journal of Sociology (pdf file). I have also explored the implications of workplace democracy for women. An analysis of this relationship was published in May 2000 in Economic and Industrial Democracy (pdf file). I've used the Wright data also to consider the effects of social inequality (race, class, and gender) upon Americans' attitudes toward two Leftist economic alternatives (nationalization and workplace democracy). This article appears in the September 2001 issue of Sociological Forum (pdf file). Miscellaneous I have a draft of a manuscript on protest engagement in America. This is a secondary data analysis of the 2000 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey. In this paper I test micro and meso theories of social movement participation as determinants of Americans' recent protest activity. I presented an early version of this paper (available as a pdf file) in August 2002 at the American Sociological Association meeting. My last piece of published scholarship is a co-authored paper with Rod Ogawa (of the University of California-Santa Cruz). This is an education-related paper in which we consider the implications of "high-stakes" accountability systems (particularly California's). It was published in the September 2000 issue of the Peabody Journal of Education (pdf file). Updated 9/4/09 |
OFFICE: 120 Bedford Street Portland (207) 228-8385 (207) 780-5698 (fax) collom@usm.maine.edu MAILING: Department of Sociology University of Southern Maine 96 Falmouth Street P.O. Box 9300 Portland ME 04104-9300
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