Current Sociology

Please welcome our Sociologists of the Month for June 2024, Lisa Baranik (University at Albany, SUNY, USA), Brandon Gorman (University at Albany, SUNY, USA) and Natalie Wright (Shadow Health, an Elsevier company). Their article for Current Sociology Wasta and its relationship to employment status and income in the Arab Middle East was shortlisted for the second edition (Vol. 71) of the Annual SAGE Current Sociology Best Paper Prize, and is Free Access this month.

Brandon Gorman

Could you please tell us about yourself? How did you come to your field of study?

B. Gorman: I’m an associate professor in the sociology department SUNY-Albany, originally from Northwest Georgia, and a first-generation college student and academic. I’ve got two daughters (5 month old and 9 year old) and I enjoy fishing, hiking, pickling vegetables, and playing tabletop role-playing games.

My main areas of interest are Middle East culture and politics, global and transnational sociology, social psychology, and political sociology. For the article published in Current Sociology, my biggest contribution was my expertise in Middle East studies. I came to this somewhat by accident – I was a senior in high school in 2001 and became interested in the Middle East after 9/11. When I got to college and was required to take a foreign language, I found Arabic on the list and immediately fell in love. I spent the next 13 years learning Arabic and studying the Middle East.

What prompted you to research the area of your article, “Wasta and its relationship to employment status and income in the Arab Middle East”?

B. Gorman: My wife (the lead author) and I spent more than two years living in the Middle East and North Africa while I was in graduate school. She is an industrial-organizational psychologist by training and has no connection to the Middle East outside of me. While we were there, we decided to collect data to do some side studies, and this paper grew out of that.

What do you see as the key findings of your article?

B. Gorman: Our key finding is that wasta, or the process of achieving goals through connections with high-status people, is a key predictor of career success in the Arab Middle East. This means that patterned inequality in the distribution of wasta connections likely creates additional hardships for women, ethnic minorities, people with lower socioeconomic status, and members of other stigmatized communities in this world region.

What are the wider social implications of your research in the current social climate? How do you think things will change in the future?

B. Gorman: This is kind of a tough question. I think that American sociology is somewhat parochial in that we tend to study the United States and use it as a stand-in for human existence writ large. This project is unusual in that we studied career performance in the global south using a local social construct (wasta) that makes sense to the people that we study. There has been an upward trend in American sociologists studying areas of the world outside of the United States and Europe but the relative share is still pretty small. I hope that this will change in the future.

Do you have any links to images, documents or other pieces of research which build on or add to the article? Or a suggested reading list?

B. Gorman:

For more of my work on employment in the Middle East and North Africa:

Baranik, Lisa, Brandon Gorman, and William Wales. 2018. “What Makes Muslim Women Entrepreneurs Successful? A Field Study Examining Religiosity and Social Capital in Tunisia.” Sex Roles 78(3-4):208-219.

On the “internationalization” of American social science:

• Kurzman, Charles. 2017. “Scholarly Attention and the Limited Internationalization of US Social Science.” International Sociology 32(6): 775-795.

For more of my work on Middle East sociology:

• Gorman, Brandon. 2016. “Appropriating Democratic Discourse in North Africa.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 57(5):288-309.
• Gorman, Brandon. 2018. “The Myth of the Secular-Islamist Divide in Muslim Politics: Evidence from Tunisia.” Current Sociology 66(1):145-164.
• Gorman, Brandon and Charles Seguin. 2018. “World Citizens on the Periphery: Threat and Identification with Global Society.” American Journal of Sociology 124(3):705-761.
• Gorman, Brandon. 2019 “Global Norms vs. Global Actors: International Politics, Muslim Identity, and Support for Shari’a.” Sociological Forum 34(1):91-114.
• Gorman, Brandon and Charles Seguin. 2018. “World Citizens on the Periphery: Threat and Identification with Global Society.” American Journal of Sociology 124(3):705-761.