Companies are becoming adept at identifying wealthy customers and marketing to them, creating a money-based caste system. Professor Steven Fazzari comments on this.

A new study suggest that the stated aspirations of companies to become more diverse haven’t changed how they go about hiring, and that minority candidates responding to job openings that welcome diverse backgrounds might find their prospects of being hired just as limited as before. Professor Adia Harvey Wingfield says the study’s results aren’t surprising.

Donald Trump’s recent refusal on CNN’s “State of the Union” to disavow Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke has reignited debates over the Klan’s role in national politics. That’s not surprising. Its long history has been marked by spectacular rises and falls, from its terrorist origins in the aftermath of the Civil War to its massive revival as a nativist movement in the 1920s and its refashioning as a brutal anti-civil-rights vigilante squad in the 1960s.

Sociologist Mark Rank, with his co-author Thomas Hirschl, have developed an on-line poverty risk calculator. You can enter information about your personal situation and learn what social science data tell you about the risk of poverty you face over different future horizons.

Technology is often tough on labor, whether it’s automation eating jobs or “gig economy” platforms undermining the traditional social contract between employer and employee. Now, some workers are trying to leverage social media and other online networks to their own ends. Professor Jake Rosenfeld comments on this issue.

As the #BlackLivesMatter campus protests have swept across some 60 colleges nationwide, American students, especially the most liberal ones, are being criticized for their intolerance of free speech. Recent data show that 43% of incoming freshmen in 2015 thought it should be a college’s right to ban extreme speakers; 71% supported prohibitions against racist and sexist speech.

Mark Rank, PhD, the Herbert S. Hadley Professor of Social Welfare at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, has received the 2016 Society for Social Work and Research Book Award for his book “Chasing the American Dream: Understanding What Shapes Our Fortunes.”

Ever since Anita Hill testified in front of Congress about her experiences working for Clarence Thomas, then the chair of the EEOC, the issue of sexual harrassment has received significantly more attention. The difference between the workplace culture Hill encountered then and many (though not all) corporate workplaces today is stark.

Despite recent debates around public engagement and the value of our work, there are indications that sociology is still valued and vibrant. One such indication is the return of sociology to Washington University in St. Louis.

The sociology department, re-formed this semester after a nearly 25-year hiatus, currently consists of three professors, all new or returning inhabitants of St. Louis: David Cunningham, Jake Rosenfeld and Adia Harvey Wingfield. Each has unique expectations for the department and for the University.

The Department seeks applications for two tenured positions at the associate professor (possibly early full) level. The 2016 search targets scholars who use state-of-the-art quantitative methods in their research with a focus on either (1) inequality and stratification or (2) social movements and political sociology.