Award-Winning Visiting Sociologist Joins Faculty

Morgantown, WV, March 9, 2006: An award-winning visiting professor has joined the faculty of the School of Applied Sciences in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University.

This semester, Dr. Joyce Rothschild joins the Division of Sociology and Anthropology as the Anna Deane Carlson Distinguished Professor of Social Science. Rothschild is teaching an undergraduate course on “Economy and Society” and a graduate course on “Democracy and Power in the US.”

Dr. Rothschild comes to WVU from the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech where she has helped create a multi-disciplinary social science Ph.D. program in “Governance and Globalization.”

Rothschild’s research has focused on worker-co-operatives and community organizations that create a livelihood for people and provide products and services to people in a directly democratic fashion. Her book, “The Cooperative Workplace: Potentials and Dilemmas of Organizational Democracy and Participation,” won the C. Wright Mills Book Award as the most significant book in the field of sociology, as it showed how co-operative organizations function in a democratic form.

Recently, Rothschild has focused her research on the growing number of whistle blowers in the workplace. Based on interviews with nearly 400 whistle blowers, Rothschild was among the first researchers to find that whistle blowers frequently face severe reprisals in the workforce and “silent observers,” employees who witness wrongdoing but remain silent, are often afraid of suffering retaliation should they speak up. Rothschild’s work on organizational retaliation against whistle blowers has been used in framing whistle blower protection statutes in some states.

This semester, Rothschild is putting together a new volume on how the federal government could invigorate local economies by encouraging the development of thousands of worker-owned and democratically managed co-operatives.

“We in the Division of Sociology and Anthropology feel very fortunate to have such a well established, engaging sociological scholar visiting with us this semester,” said Dr. Melissa Latimer, chair of the Division of Sociology and Anthropology. In 2000, the Anna Deane Carlson Visiting Professorship was established in the name of Anna Carlson, a 1943 Sociology graduate. Each year the professorship has allowed the Division of Sociology and Anthropology to bring in outstanding social scientists to enhance academic instruction and stimulate research.

For more information, please contact Dr. Latimer at 304-293-5801 ext. 3209 or Melissa.Latimer@mail.wvu.edu.

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