Assistant Professor of Sociology, Midwestern State University
I study how organizations get people to participate in their own exploitation, and what has to be true before anyone calls that a crime. My work sits at the intersection of the sociology of work and organizations, white-collar and corporate crime, and economic sociology, and it asks a question that runs through all three: when wrongdoing happens inside an ordinary workplace, why is it so rarely legible as wrongdoing to the people standing right next to it?
Most of my empirical research so far has been about wage theft, which is to say violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act by employers against hourly workers in restaurants and retail. It is one of the most common corporate offenses in the United States and one of the least contested, and my dissertation traced the relational work that keeps it that way. Alongside that I write about gambling and prediction markets as a case of regulatory avoidance, and I am developing a broader theoretical project on planning as a social practice and a source of power.
Before academic sociology I trained as a forensic linguist and spent years working in restaurants and bars, which is where the wage theft questions started.
Office
Room O134, Midwestern State University
nicholas.membrez@msutexas.edu
ORCID 0009-0000-8866-0836
Three lines of work
How managers accomplish unpaid labor without either party naming it as theft, why good relationships with a supervisor can make workers less likely to contest a loss, and how the way an organization arranges employee voice shapes whether anyone inside it ever becomes a guardian against wrongdoing.
Online sportsbooks, sweepstakes casinos, daily fantasy products, and prediction markets sell close to the same wager under different legal descriptions. I study how operators and regulators argue over those descriptions, and what the resulting patchwork does to the people who lose money in it.
In most organizations the people who hold the plan are paid and deferred to more than the people who execute it. I am building a theoretical account of planning as a social practice, of the authority it confers, and of the rules it leaves behind that bind some people more tightly than others.
What I am working on now
Three articles are being drawn out of the dissertation, one on symbolic obfuscation, one on managerial citizenship and the failure of complaint-driven enforcement, and one on voice environments as part of the opportunity structure for organizational wrongdoing. A book proposal on the same material is in preparation under the title The Dynamics of Wage Theft.
With coauthors I have a paper under review on predation and state-corporate crime in online gambling, and I am designing a second gambling paper on how operators and regulators construct the legal boundary between a bet and a financial instrument.
The newest project asks how federal courts identify and punish planning in white-collar cases, which is the mirror image of how organizations reward it.