Why do some people get promoted while others get pushed out? Decades of research on workplace discrimination – and a 2027 presidency that recognizes it
Why do some people get promoted while others get pushed out? Professor Vincent Roscigno has spent decades answering that question. His research documents how race, gender, and age discrimination operate in American workplaces – not as isolated incidents but rather as patterns enabled by employer bureaucratic power, legal loopholes, and normative ideals that shape how organizations hire, evaluate, and fire. He has also shown how bullying and harassment at work follow the same fault lines, and how first-generation college students often face invisible barriers that their more advantaged peers seldom experience. His work, published to date in journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, and Social Forces, provides the evidentiary basis for anti-discrimination law and more supportive workplace and higher education policies.
In recognition of this body of work, Roscigno has been elected president of the Sociological Research Association for 2027 – one of the discipline’s highest honors. His election also reflects the centrality of inequality research to the department’s identity: OSU Sociology is ranked in the top 10 nationally in stratification. That ranking is built on the work of Roscigno and colleagues including Chinyere Agbai (who traced the racial wealth gap to the GI Bill), Rachel Dwyer (who has generated cutting-edge national research on workplace inequalities, wealth, and debt), Claudia Buchmann (whose Rise of Women documents the female advantage in education), Douglas Downey (whose How Schools Really Matter overturns assumptions about schools and inequality), Anthony Johnson (who published in ASR on how social class shapes collaboration in elite STEM programs), and Korie Little Edwards (whose work on race in religious institutions was so significant that the ASA named a research award after her).