My empirical work focuses on the cases of education and precarious work to investigate equalizing and reproductive social forces and their relationships to inequality. I study how culture, social psychology, and emotion relate to race, class, and gender inequality, such as in labor markets or in socializing organizations like schools.
In one line of research, I use qualitative and quantitative methods to study what happens after historically marginalized students leave college, with or without a degree. I focus on the hundreds of thousands of historically marginalized youth who start but do not complete college, yet are under-studied in stratification research. I examine:
(1) How ideological resources counterintuitively shape upward mobility and labor market outcomes through cultural mismatch among marginalized young adults experiencing precarity after college,
(2) The labor market returns and financial consequences of attending but not completing higher education, including the role of educational debt, and
(3) How experiences of precarious work shape political meaning-making.
A second line of research focuses on schools as organizations, exploring sanctioning logics, policy, culture, and inequality in K-12 education. This ongoing collaboration with Jayanti Owens draws on in-depth interviews with 170 public school teachers nationwide. Please contact me to learn more.
Peer-Reviewed Articles
Payne, Sarah. 2023. “Equalization or Reproduction? ‘Some College’ and the Social Function of Higher Education.” Sociology of Education 96(2):104-128 https://doi.org/10.1177/00380407221134809.*
*Honorable Mention, Robert D. Mare Graduate Student Paper Award, Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section, American Sociological Association (2023)
ABSTRACT: What are the economic consequences of college non-completion? Given escalating student debt, is ‘some college’ still worth it? This paper applies Augmented Inverse Probability Weighting to the NLSY97 to estimate the causal effect of college non-completion on income and financial hardship. Although non-completion yields higher income than never attending college, it also increases financial hardship among more-disadvantaged groups through the mechanism of student debt. However, non-completers of most groups would have had greater income and experienced less financial hardship had they graduated. Such contradictions complicate equalization and reproduction theories of higher education, because higher education appears to have both equalizing (in the case of completion) and reproductive (in the case of non-completion) effects. I argue this ambiguity is substantively meaningful, suggesting future research should examine whether the production of ambiguity constitutes a key social function of higher education.
Under Review
Payne, Sarah. “Skeptical Citizenship and the Politics of Precarity Among Young Black Citizen-Workers in New Orleans.” Under review.
ABSTRACT: Precarious citizen-workers in the United States are disproportionately young, racially minoritized, and non-unionized. Yet, despite growing research on the racial politics of precarity, the contours and effects of such workers’ political subjectivities across varying precarious work contexts are underexamined. Drawing on in-depth interviews, this article investigates the political narratives of young, Black-identifying, precarious, non-organized, citizen-workers, revealing contradictory counter-hegemonic and neoliberal political rationalities that pull participants between mobilizing and demobilizing affects. Consequently, participants practice a skeptical citizenship that is wounded by past and present injustice, frustrated yet self-blaming, and deeply distrustful of government—but is not wholly disengaged from civic life, and hopes for better and more equal opportunity. The article extends research that links precarity to racialized political claims-making, and to citizenship practices specifically. Findings illustrate the mixed, yet latently powerful, political potentials that coexist among young, Black, precarious, non-organized U.S. citizen-workers.
Work in Progress
Payne, Sarah. “Gardener, Climber, Seeker: Mobility Projects as Ends-Means Cultural Models.” Manuscript in preparation.
ABSTRACT: Young adult workers confronting marginalization and growing precarity use cultural repertoires to interpret their situations and take action. Yet many of these cultural tools can seem contradictory, and exposure to contradictory tools can create confusing signals about how to pursue advancement. Data from life story interviews with low-income, Black-identifying youth from New Orleans, Louisiana, instead demonstrate how marginalized young adults synthesize heterogeneous cultural schemas, and how resulting cultural aggregates relate to mobility. Abductively building on theory linking cultural ends and means, evidence shows how actors combine common cultural schemas regarding self, opportunity structure, and social action. These produce shared cultural models, or ideal-typical mobility ideologies oriented around themes of inner transformation, outer mobilization, and social emancipation. Despite persistent precarity, mobility ideologies perpetuate social myths of agency among respondents by aligning self and action in three corresponding narrative identities: metaphorical gardeners, climbers, and seekers, respectively. Mobility ideologies interact and align with both actor resources and social expectations to varying degrees. Counterintuitively, cultural mismatch or incongruence between actor mobility ideologies and ecological expectations correlates with advancement when it helps respondents work against reproductive forces like stereotyping and labor market discrimination. Findings highlight how combinatory and interactive cultural processes—as opposed to cultural repertoires alone—relate to inequality.
Owens, Jayanti and Sarah Payne. “Protective Socialization.” (Working title.) Manuscript in preparation.
Owens, Jayanti and Sarah Payne. “Transformations in Socializing Organizations." (Working title.)
Payne, Sarah. “The Affect System.” (Working title.)
Book
Payne, Sarah. American Dreaming: Ideology, Strategy, and Mobility in the College-for-All Generation. (Working title.) Under contract at University of California Press.
Publications & Working Papers
Drawing on my applied work in college access and college persistence, my dissertation uses in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork to investigate the ideological resources that first-generation, Pell-eligible, young Black adults in New Orleans, LA, draw upon to understand the insecurity they experience after college and navigate precarious labor markets.
Despite similar backgrounds and precarious presents, my participants draw on variants of therapeutic and meritocratic cultural narratives to make sense of their experiences in three strikingly different ways.
Gardeners believe their selves are wounded or flawed and must heal or grow in order to achieve mobility. They view society’s opportunity structure as relatively open, and value other people as aides toward internal development. Climbers believe the self is capable and whole, a vehicle made to navigate opportunity’s possibilities and barriers. They focus on engaging their social networks to help them take the right external risks. And seekers believe the self is whole, but trapped in a relatively closed opportunity structure. They orient action and relationships around personal liberation.
I term these aggregated cultural schemas about the self, opportunity structure, and social action mobility ideologies, explore their social origins, and show how they interact with social means (like social and cultural capital) and ends (like aspirations) to shape unequal mobility pathways.
I am expanding this project longitudinally and developing it into a book (see above).
Culture, Inequality, & Advancement
In a large-scale collaborative project, my coauthor and I draw on in-depth interviews with 170 public school educators across the U.S. This project is on-going. Please contact me for more information.
Schools as Organizations
In this project, I apply tools of causal inference to a nationally-representative data set (the NLSY97) to study how starting but not completing a post-secondary degree — what social science surveys often call ‘some college’ — reproduces inequality.
Much research on educational attainment has focused on the consequences of earning post-secondary credentials. By contrast, I focus on the large proportion of undergraduates (in the U.S., just under 50%) who begin higher education but do not graduate, exploring the relationship between ‘some college’ and race, class, and gender inequality.
I show, for instance, that the financial consequences of ‘some college’ vary considerably by socioeconomic status, and that while more-disadvantaged groups earn more income on average, they also experience more financial hardship following ‘some college’ as a result of educational debt.
The U.S. case of ‘some college’ demonstrates higher education’s simultaneous equalizing and reproductive effects, and I call for theory and policy to grapple with this.
‘Some College’ & Social Reproduction
Affect & Emotion
How do emotion and affect relate to race and racial inequality? I engage this question in three ways.
First, I explore how mobility ideologies produce feelings of satisfaction in historically marginalized individuals and groups under neoliberalism despite structural critiques of inequality and lived experiences of precarity.
Second, I am developing a study of the racial history of student debt in the United States, including its racialized moral and affective economies (e.g., surrounding shame, dignity, and worthiness).
Third, an exploratory theoretical project asks: what is the relationship between culture and affect? Sociologists tend to think about affects as epiphenomenal of other social forces or domains (namely, culture and political economy). In contrast, cultural scholar Sara Ahmed posits that affects circulate, “sticking to” and constituting both objects and subjects, and forming affective economies. What if social scientists (and society) instead constituted affect, long subordinated through racialization and feminization, as a foundational social object or system, as we constitute polity, economy, and culture? Is there an empirical basis for an “affect system”?