Research
Wrongdoing that does not look like wrongdoing
My research asks how ordinary organizational life produces harm that nobody involved is willing to call harm, and what it would take for the people closest to it to name it, contest it, or count it.
The white-collar crime literature has a standing account of why these offenses succeed. Offenders have legitimate access to the target, they are separated from their victims in space or in time, and the conduct looks superficially like normal business. That account explains a great deal about securities fraud and environmental violation, where the victim is distant, diffuse, or not yet born.
It explains wage theft badly, and wage theft is the most common version of the crime. The victim is inside the organization. She is present for every shift. She is usually the only person in the building who knows exactly how many hours she worked. By the standard logic she should be the ideal guardian, and the offense should be rare. It is instead routine, and it costs low-wage workers in the United States tens of billions of dollars a year.
My work follows that contradiction down to the level of interaction. What I find is that the conditions the literature treats as structural are, on the shop floor, actively produced. Information asymmetry is not a background condition that managers happen to enjoy. It is something they build, in conversation, using their position in the hierarchy and their relationships with the people they are taking from. Guardianship is not an individual capacity. It depends on organizational arrangements that decide whether a worker can recognize a violation, say so, and be heard.
From there the questions widen. If wrongdoing gets its cover from the way work is described, then the fights over how activities are described are worth studying in their own right, which is what took me to gambling and prediction markets, where the same wager is lawful or unlawful depending on which agency is asked. And if authority inside organizations is what allows some descriptions to stick and not others, then the source of that authority is worth an account of its own, which is what the planning project is for.
Peer-reviewed publications
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2023
Organizational Perspectives on Digital Labor Market Intermediaries
A review and synthesis of what sociologists know about the organizations that now sit between workers and employers, from job boards and staffing agencies to algorithmic matching platforms, and what treating them as organizations rather than as neutral infrastructure changes about the analysis.
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2022
Agrochemical Exposure and Environmental Illness: Legal Repression of Latin American Banana Workers
An analysis of how corporations facing claims from banana workers exposed to agrochemicals used the legal system itself as a repressive instrument, turning the venue where grievances were supposed to be resolved into a mechanism for exhausting the people who brought them.
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2018
Review of Masculinities in the Criminological Field: Control, Vulnerability and Risk-Taking
Under review
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2026
Jackpot Justice: Predation, Profit, and State-Corporate Crime in Online Gambling
Legalized online sports betting in the United States was built by states and operators together. The paper treats the resulting harms as state-corporate crime rather than as consumer misfortune, examining how the revenue interests of state governments and the product design decisions of operators combine to produce predictable losses among identifiable groups of bettors.
To be presented at the American Society of Criminology annual meeting, Chicago, November 2026.
Work in progress
Three articles and a book are being developed from the dissertation data, and a second gambling paper is in design. Drafts of any of these are available on request.
Wage theft and organizational wrongdoing
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Book
The Dynamics of Wage Theft
The full argument, built from forty in-depth interviews with frontline managers and hourly employees in restaurants and retail. The book follows a single violation through three vantage points: how a manager accomplishes and describes it, how a worker receives and classifies it, and how the organization's arrangements for employee voice determine whether it is ever contested.
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Article
Symbolic Obfuscation in Wage Theft and Organizational Wrongdoing
Managers in this data rarely used the neutralization techniques the literature expects. What they did instead was reframe unlawful practices, in the moment and to the people being harmed, as lawful requirements, as ordinary care for a workplace, or as the worker's own choice. The paper names this symbolic obfuscation and argues that information asymmetry in white-collar offending should be treated as accomplished work rather than as a standing condition.
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Article
The Dark Side of Managerial Citizenship Behaviors
Wage enforcement in the United States is complaint-driven, which makes the worker the effective guardian. This paper shows that managers who offer flexibility, personal support, and respect do not commit less wage theft. They convert the guardian into a participant, because workers reciprocate with uncompensated labor and file it under good conduct rather than under loss. The opportunity perspective expects separation from the victim to do the concealing. Here proximity does it instead.
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Article
Wage Theft: The Role of Voice in Organizational Wrongdoing
Guardianship from inside an organization requires three things an individual cannot supply alone. The worker has to recognize the practice as a violation, be able to say so, and be heard. Crossing formal against informal voice pathways with receptive against unreceptive management yields four voice environments, and across eighty workplace cases the difference between them is stark: wage theft appeared in every workplace with informal pathways and unreceptive management, and in none of the workplaces with formal pathways and receptive management.
Gambling, prediction markets, and legal avoidance
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Article
The theory and rhetoric of legal avoidance in digital wagering
A contract that pays out if a team wins is a bet under one body of law and a swap under another. Sweepstakes casinos, daily fantasy contests, and event contracts on regulated exchanges all sell something close to the same wager while claiming to sit outside gambling regulation. The paper examines the arguments operators and regulators make about those boundaries, and treats the boundary work itself as the object of study rather than as a legal technicality to be resolved before the sociology begins.
Where the work is going
These are the projects I am building toward over the next several years. The first is a theoretical program; the rest are empirical studies at various stages of design.
A sociology of planning
In almost every setting where work is divided, the people who conceive, design, and decide are rewarded more than the people who carry out what was decided. That asymmetry is so familiar it usually goes unexplained. I am developing an account of planning as a social practice that treats the asymmetry as the thing to be explained rather than the background against which other things are explained.
The project runs across three levels at once. At the micro level it looks at households and small groups, at the meso level at organizations, and at the macro level at states, where James Scott's work on legibility and high-modernist planning is the obvious point of departure and also the obvious problem, since it selects on failure. Two extensions matter most to me. The first is planning that is not recognized as planning at all, and planning that is recognized but goes unpaid, for which the clearest case in my own life is course preparation. The second is what planning leaves behind: rules and boundaries that constrain everyone's future action, but that do not bind the people who wrote them in the same way they bind everyone else.
A good deal of the current writing is demarcation work, separating planning from rationality. The intuitive move is to treat rationality as future-oriented action and planning as a subtype of it, but that reading does not survive contact with the literature. Weber's value-rational action switches the consequentialist future off and remains rational. A large strand of rationality studies, from Garfinkel through Weick to Boltanski and Thevenot, is retrospective and concerns the accounts people give afterward. And Weberian rationalization often works by removing the occasion for projective thought rather than creating it, since a rule is a decision somebody already made so that nobody has to make it again. My own reading of Simon runs the same way: routines displace future planning only because someone planned them first, which makes rationalization a product of planning rather than a rival to it.
Planned empirical studies
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Design
How courts punish planning in white-collar cases
Organizations reward planning. Federal sentencing penalizes it, through enhancements for sophisticated means and for the defendant's role in organizing an offense. The study reads court documents in federal white-collar cases to see how prosecutors and judges identify planning, what vocabulary they use to describe it, and how that description translates into punishment, with a quantitative layer drawn from United States Sentencing Commission data. It is the mirror image of the planning project, and it is designed so that undergraduate methods students can work on parts of it.
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Design
Texas grey-market gambling: advertising discourse and student wagering
A discourse analysis of how prediction market platforms, sweepstakes casinos, and daily fantasy operators advertise products that are not legally gambling in Texas, paired with a multi-site survey of college students on the onset, persistence, and desistance of wagering.
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Planned
The employer side of frontline planning
The worker-side planning study asks whether frontline planning is recognized and rewarded. This companion asks the same question of employers and human resources professionals: what counts as planning when they describe a job, how it is priced, and what happens to the planning frontline workers do that never appears in a job description.
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Planned
Who holds the plan in community-oriented policing
Community and problem-oriented policing formally ask frontline officers to diagnose local problems and design responses, which is to say they ask officers to plan. Departments then evaluate those officers on measures that have little to do with planning. The study looks at officer discretion, evaluation systems, and what happens to plans made by people who are not authorized to plan.
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Service
Evaluation of the Wichita Falls Crisis Aid Response Team
A program evaluation of the local co-responder team that pairs police and fire personnel with behavioral health staff. It is a service project first, and also a case of a new protocol being executed by people who did not write it.
Dissertation
The Dynamics of Wage Theft: Organizational Obfuscation, Citizenship, and Voice
Ph.D., Sociology, North Carolina State University, 2025. Committee: Martha Crowley (chair), Stacey DeCoster, Steve McDonald, Thomas Shriver.
Violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act are pervasive and costly for hourly workers in the United States, and they are concentrated in restaurants and retail. Scholarship has identified the macroeconomic conditions that produce them. What has been missing is an account of the micro-level, relational processes through which the violations are actually carried out, justified, and contested at work.
Drawing on forty in-depth interviews with frontline managers and hourly employees, the dissertation asks how managers conceal and accomplish wage theft while maintaining a positive self-image, when and why workers acquiesce or resist, and what explains variation in legal compliance within the same industry. It offers two concepts: symbolic obfuscation, the process by which managers use hierarchical position and relational ties to redefine unlawful practices as ordinary or necessary, and the dark side of managerial citizenship, in which supportive management produces uncompensated reciprocation from workers who do not experience it as loss. A typology of voice environments then accounts for the variation in compliance across otherwise similar workplaces.
Available through the North Carolina State University Libraries electronic theses and dissertations collection. A copy is available on request.
Selected conference presentations
- 2026
Jackpot Justice: Predation, Profit, and State-Corporate Crime in Online Gambling
- 2025
Voice, Symbolic Power and Wage Theft in U.S. Retail and Restaurant Firms
- 2025
The Dark Side of Organizational Citizenship
- 2024
Neutralizations as Symbolic Power in the Commission of Wage Theft
- 2023
Organizational Perspectives on Digital Labor Markets
- 2019
Legal Repression and Transnational Movements: Agrochemical Exposure in Latin America