Calvin Morrill
Biographic Data
| ID | 89785 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Calvin Morrill |
| GIVEN NAMES | Calvin |
| FAMILY NAME | Morrill |
| SIGNATURE | MORRILL C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Berkeley |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9954-3499 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 376 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Reinventing “Youth” in Socio-Legal Studies
The social category of “youth” occupies liminal space with blurred boundaries between “childhood” and “adulthood.” Dominant modes of socio-legal inquiry into youth typically yield adult-centered, criminological accounts that place adult interests and perspectives at the core of their analyses, focusing ultimately on remedies to quell troubled adolescents and suppress disruptive delinquents. Youth-centered accounts, by contrast, locate young peopl…
The power of the accused
The power of the accused
Law and society scholars have long studied rights mobilization and gender inequality from the vantage point of complainants in private workplaces. This article pursues a new direction in this line of inquiry to explore, for the first time, mobilization from the vantage points of complainants and those accused of violating the rights of others in public-school workplaces in the United States. We conceptualize rights mobilization as legal, quasileg…
Learning from Laurie Edelman
Faculty members, students, policymakers, practitioners, and laypersons will learn from Laurie Edelman's brilliant scholarship for generations to come. She developed not only a new theory and a conceptual vocabulary for understanding the interplay of law and organizations-think, "legal endogeneity," "managerialization of law," or "symbolic structures" (Edelman, 2016)-but also a more precise account of the mutual influence between law and society. …
Conversations in Law and Society
This article uses oral histories of surviving founders to explore the emergence of law and society as a scholarly movement and its transformation to a scholarly field. The oral histories we draw on come from a unique public archive of interviews with founders of law and society titled Conversations in Law and Society, which is maintained by the Center for the Study of Law & Society (CSLS) at the University of California, Berkeley. We supplement a…
Navigating Conflict
Unsettled Times for American Families
In Caring for Our Own: Why There Is No Political Demand for New American Social Welfare Rights (2014), Sandra Levitsky reveals how an enduring ideology of family responsibility and a decoupling of social support groups from organized advocacy constrains mass legal mobilization to address long-term elderly care in the United States. This essay argues that American families have entered an unsettled period linked to social inequality, young adult l…
Discussion Law & Society Review at Fifty
This contribution presents a series of statements on the future of publishing by the Law & Society Review and the Law & Society Association generally. Framed by the first author's introductory and concluding comments are contributions by Halliday, Liu, Morrill, Seron, and Silbey. This debate, based on a LSR 50th anniversary panel held at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the LSA, is intended to open up a broader conversation among members of the Associa…
Law, Mobilization of
The More You Talk, the Worse It Is
Prior works have established the association between students’ perceptions of school discipline and both behavioral and academic outcomes. The interplay between disciplinary fairness and students’ perceptions of their rights, however, warrants further investigation. In an effort to better understand the development of students’ perceptions of school disciplinary climates amid variation in school legal environments, we identified students’ percept…
In-services and empty threats
Conflict Resolution in Organizations
Two meta-theoretical traditions mark research on conflict resolution in organizations: the rationalist tradition, which portrays organizations as goal-directed collectivities and conflict resolution as a threat to efficiency and performance; and the cultural tradition, which portrays organizations as normative collectivities constituted by ongoing social interaction, interpretive dynamics, and institutional environments, and emphasizes the interp…
Legal Mobilization in Schools
In this article, we analyze ethnoracial patterns in youth perceptions and responses to rights violations and advance a new model of legal mobilization that includes formal, quasi-, and extralegal action. Slightly more than half of the 5,461 students in our sample reported past rights violations involving discrimination, harassment, freedom of expression/assembly, and due process violations in disciplinary procedures. Students, regardless of race,…
Culture and Organization Theory
Culture has become a legitimate concern and part of the basic conceptual toolkit in much of contemporary organization theory. This article historically traces the contested place of culture in organization theory—from acultural rationalist theorizing at the turn of the twentieth century; to the accidental “discovery” of shop floor culture by human relations scholars in the 1920s; to mid-twentieth-century explorations of informal and institutional…
Together Alone
Product Review
Covert Political Conflict in Organizations
This review considers a class of political activity that has largely been ignored by researchers extending social movement theory into organizations: covert political conflict. Although much of the literature we discuss focuses on contemporary corporations where the bulk of research on covert conflict has occurred, we also explore studies of covert conflict in a range of historical and organizational contexts that fall outside the contemporary wo…
Elaborating Analytic Ethnography
Among the diverse styles of qualitative methodology is what John Lofland referred to as `analytic ethnography.' In contrast to the traditional interpretive style that attempts to get at the crux of `what is going on', to the more formal approach that seeks to identify the cognitive rules undergirding behavior, and to the more recent postmodern preoccupation with individual experience and voices, analytic ethnography seeks to develop systematic an…
Power Plays
Telling Tales in School
This study departs from mainstream criminology to approach youth conflict and violence from a youth-centered perspective drawn from cultural studies of young people and sociolegal research. To access youth orientations, we analyze experiential stories of peer conflict written by students at a multiethnic, low-income high school situated in an urban core of the western United States. We argue that youth narratives of conflict offer glimpses into h…
Toward an Organizational Perspective on Identifying and Managing Formal Gatekeepers
Voice and Context in Simulated Everyday Legal Discourse
Everyday legal discourse refers to the spoken language with which ordinary people constitute the law-in-action. In this article, we experimentally investigate the social distribution of rule- and relationally-oriented discourse found by ethnographers in small-claims court settings. We examine the influences of sex differences and social ties between disputants on these types of discourse in a mock small-claims setting using a quantitative content…
White-Collar Blues
Ethnographic Contributions to Organizational Sociology
The authors examine the contributions of ethnography to organizational sociology in five substantive areas: (1) the elaboration of informal relations, (2) organizations as systems of meaning, (3) organizations and their environments, (4) organizational change, and (5) ethics and normative behavior. They then discuss three claims that ethnographers typically make: that ethnography provides for depth, multiple perspectives, and process. These claim…
New Ethnographies
Elaborating Analytic Ethnography
Among the diverse styles of qualitative methodology is what John Lofland referred to as `analytic ethnography.' In contrast to the traditional interpretive style that attempts to get at the crux of `what is going on', to the more formal approach that seeks to identify the cognitive rules undergirding behavior, and to the more recent postmodern preoccupation with individual experience and voices, analytic ethnography seeks to develop systematic an…
Covert Political Conflict in Organizations
This review considers a class of political activity that has largely been ignored by researchers extending social movement theory into organizations: covert political conflict. Although much of the literature we discuss focuses on contemporary corporations where the bulk of research on covert conflict has occurred, we also explore studies of covert conflict in a range of historical and organizational contexts that fall outside the contemporary wo…
Legal Mobilization in Schools
In this article, we analyze ethnoracial patterns in youth perceptions and responses to rights violations and advance a new model of legal mobilization that includes formal, quasi-, and extralegal action. Slightly more than half of the 5,461 students in our sample reported past rights violations involving discrimination, harassment, freedom of expression/assembly, and due process violations in disciplinary procedures. Students, regardless of race,…
Telling Tales in School
This study departs from mainstream criminology to approach youth conflict and violence from a youth-centered perspective drawn from cultural studies of young people and sociolegal research. To access youth orientations, we analyze experiential stories of peer conflict written by students at a multiethnic, low-income high school situated in an urban core of the western United States. We argue that youth narratives of conflict offer glimpses into h…
Ethnographic Contributions to Organizational Sociology
The authors examine the contributions of ethnography to organizational sociology in five substantive areas: (1) the elaboration of informal relations, (2) organizations as systems of meaning, (3) organizations and their environments, (4) organizational change, and (5) ethics and normative behavior. They then discuss three claims that ethnographers typically make: that ethnography provides for depth, multiple perspectives, and process. These claim…
Reflections on Anthropology's Ethnographic Crisis of Faith
Culture and Organization Theory
Culture has become a legitimate concern and part of the basic conceptual toolkit in much of contemporary organization theory. This article historically traces the contested place of culture in organization theory—from acultural rationalist theorizing at the turn of the twentieth century; to the accidental “discovery” of shop floor culture by human relations scholars in the 1920s; to mid-twentieth-century explorations of informal and institutional…
Institutional Isomorphism and Informal Social Control
Widespread satisfaction among users of community mediation, but low voluntary usage, provides a context within which institutional isomorphism between state and informal social control organizations can be empirically investigated. Data drawn from a triangulated ethnography of a single community mediation center suggest that community mediation centers come to be isomorphic with more established governmental social control agencies in order to ma…
Conflict Management, Honor, and Organizational Change
How do top managers of a large American corporation manage conflict among themselves? This article investigates intracorporate executive conflict management in a Fortune 500 manufacturer via ethnographic methods. It focuses on the links between executive conflict management and widespread innovations in (1) top managerial formal structure and (2) hostile takeovers and their symbolic imagery. More speciafically, the article focuses on how these in…
Toward an Organizational Perspective on Identifying and Managing Formal Gatekeepers
Discussion Law & Society Review at Fifty
This contribution presents a series of statements on the future of publishing by the Law & Society Review and the Law & Society Association generally. Framed by the first author's introductory and concluding comments are contributions by Halliday, Liu, Morrill, Seron, and Silbey. This debate, based on a LSR 50th anniversary panel held at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the LSA, is intended to open up a broader conversation among members of the Associa…
The management of managers
The More You Talk, the Worse It Is
Prior works have established the association between students’ perceptions of school discipline and both behavioral and academic outcomes. The interplay between disciplinary fairness and students’ perceptions of their rights, however, warrants further investigation. In an effort to better understand the development of students’ perceptions of school disciplinary climates amid variation in school legal environments, we identified students’ percept…
Conflict Resolution in Organizations
Two meta-theoretical traditions mark research on conflict resolution in organizations: the rationalist tradition, which portrays organizations as goal-directed collectivities and conflict resolution as a threat to efficiency and performance; and the cultural tradition, which portrays organizations as normative collectivities constituted by ongoing social interaction, interpretive dynamics, and institutional environments, and emphasizes the interp…
The Power of Language in Adjudication and Mediation
The language used by witnesses and litigants can powerfully influence evaluations by legal decision makers of disputant credibility and blame. Previous experimental research has addressed this claim in many studies of undergraduates and law students. It is not known whether this generalization applies to sitting judges or whether it extends to other institutional contexts in which dispute settlement occurs, such as mediation centers. In this arti…
The Customs of Conflict Management among Corporate Executives
This article examines the customs of conflict management among executives at the tops of two large business organizations. The argument advanced here derives from the notion that conflict management varies with the informal norms that govern interpersonal networks. Ethnographic, social network, and perceptual data collected in the present investigation suggest that where executives experience fragmented and atomized interpersonal networks, they a…
New Ethnographies
Organizational Conflict Management as Disputing Process The Problem of Social Escalation
In this article, organizational conflict management is conceived as a "disputing process" involving the social escalation from grievance stage to conflict and dispute stages. The Disputing Process Instrument (DPI) was designed as a way to study these phenomena quantitatively. Seven behaviors are represented in the instrument: conciliatory negotiation, third-party mobilization, overt retaliation, covert retaliation, toleration, avoidance, and disc…
Conversations in Law and Society
This article uses oral histories of surviving founders to explore the emergence of law and society as a scholarly movement and its transformation to a scholarly field. The oral histories we draw on come from a unique public archive of interviews with founders of law and society titled Conversations in Law and Society, which is maintained by the Center for the Study of Law & Society (CSLS) at the University of California, Berkeley. We supplement a…
In-services and empty threats
New Ethnographies
The power of the accused
Law and society scholars have long studied rights mobilization and gender inequality from the vantage point of complainants in private workplaces. This article pursues a new direction in this line of inquiry to explore, for the first time, mobilization from the vantage points of complainants and those accused of violating the rights of others in public-school workplaces in the United States. We conceptualize rights mobilization as legal, quasileg…
Voice and Context in Simulated Everyday Legal Discourse
Everyday legal discourse refers to the spoken language with which ordinary people constitute the law-in-action. In this article, we experimentally investigate the social distribution of rule- and relationally-oriented discourse found by ethnographers in small-claims court settings. We examine the influences of sex differences and social ties between disputants on these types of discourse in a mock small-claims setting using a quantitative content…
Mediation
The management of managers
New Ethnographies
The Customs of Conflict Management among Corporate Executives
This article examines the customs of conflict management among executives at the tops of two large business organizations. The argument advanced here derives from the notion that conflict management varies with the informal norms that govern interpersonal networks. Ethnographic, social network, and perceptual data collected in the present investigation suggest that where executives experience fragmented and atomized interpersonal networks, they a…
Conflict Management, Honor, and Organizational Change
How do top managers of a large American corporation manage conflict among themselves? This article investigates intracorporate executive conflict management in a Fortune 500 manufacturer via ethnographic methods. It focuses on the links between executive conflict management and widespread innovations in (1) top managerial formal structure and (2) hostile takeovers and their symbolic imagery. More speciafically, the article focuses on how these in…
The Power of Language in Adjudication and Mediation
The language used by witnesses and litigants can powerfully influence evaluations by legal decision makers of disputant credibility and blame. Previous experimental research has addressed this claim in many studies of undergraduates and law students. It is not known whether this generalization applies to sitting judges or whether it extends to other institutional contexts in which dispute settlement occurs, such as mediation centers. In this arti…
The Quest for Authority and Honor in the American Professions, 1750-1900. Samuel Haber
The Power of Language in Adjudication and Mediation
The language used by witnesses and litigants can powerfully influence evaluations by legal decision makers of disputant credibility and blame. Previous experimental research has addressed this claim in many studies of undergraduates and law students. It is not known whether this generalization applies to sitting judges or whether it extends to other institutional contexts in which dispute settlement occurs, such as mediation centers. In this arti…
Organizational Conflict Management as Disputing Process The Problem of Social Escalation
In this article, organizational conflict management is conceived as a "disputing process" involving the social escalation from grievance stage to conflict and dispute stages. The Disputing Process Instrument (DPI) was designed as a way to study these phenomena quantitatively. Seven behaviors are represented in the instrument: conciliatory negotiation, third-party mobilization, overt retaliation, covert retaliation, toleration, avoidance, and disc…
Reflections on Anthropology's Ethnographic Crisis of Faith
Institutional Isomorphism and Informal Social Control
Widespread satisfaction among users of community mediation, but low voluntary usage, provides a context within which institutional isomorphism between state and informal social control organizations can be empirically investigated. Data drawn from a triangulated ethnography of a single community mediation center suggest that community mediation centers come to be isomorphic with more established governmental social control agencies in order to ma…
New Ethnographies
New Ethnographies
Aggression and Violence
White-Collar Blues
Ethnographic Contributions to Organizational Sociology
The authors examine the contributions of ethnography to organizational sociology in five substantive areas: (1) the elaboration of informal relations, (2) organizations as systems of meaning, (3) organizations and their environments, (4) organizational change, and (5) ethics and normative behavior. They then discuss three claims that ethnographers typically make: that ethnography provides for depth, multiple perspectives, and process. These claim…
Voice and Context in Simulated Everyday Legal Discourse
Everyday legal discourse refers to the spoken language with which ordinary people constitute the law-in-action. In this article, we experimentally investigate the social distribution of rule- and relationally-oriented discourse found by ethnographers in small-claims court settings. We examine the influences of sex differences and social ties between disputants on these types of discourse in a mock small-claims setting using a quantitative content…
Toward an Organizational Perspective on Identifying and Managing Formal Gatekeepers
Power Plays
Telling Tales in School
This study departs from mainstream criminology to approach youth conflict and violence from a youth-centered perspective drawn from cultural studies of young people and sociolegal research. To access youth orientations, we analyze experiential stories of peer conflict written by students at a multiethnic, low-income high school situated in an urban core of the western United States. We argue that youth narratives of conflict offer glimpses into h…
Covert Political Conflict in Organizations
This review considers a class of political activity that has largely been ignored by researchers extending social movement theory into organizations: covert political conflict. Although much of the literature we discuss focuses on contemporary corporations where the bulk of research on covert conflict has occurred, we also explore studies of covert conflict in a range of historical and organizational contexts that fall outside the contemporary wo…
Elaborating Analytic Ethnography
Among the diverse styles of qualitative methodology is what John Lofland referred to as `analytic ethnography.' In contrast to the traditional interpretive style that attempts to get at the crux of `what is going on', to the more formal approach that seeks to identify the cognitive rules undergirding behavior, and to the more recent postmodern preoccupation with individual experience and voices, analytic ethnography seeks to develop systematic an…
Product Review
Together Alone
Culture and Organization Theory
Culture has become a legitimate concern and part of the basic conceptual toolkit in much of contemporary organization theory. This article historically traces the contested place of culture in organization theory—from acultural rationalist theorizing at the turn of the twentieth century; to the accidental “discovery” of shop floor culture by human relations scholars in the 1920s; to mid-twentieth-century explorations of informal and institutional…
Sociology (27 works) · Political science (24 works) · Law (20 works) · Law (17 works) · Psychology (15 works) · Social Psychology (10 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Management and Organizational Studies (9 works) · Social science (9 works) · Anthropology (8 works)