 Lisa Torres
Assistant Professor of Sociology
Lisa Torres received her doctorate in sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2002. From 2002 to 2004, she was a UC Faculty Fellow at the University of California, Irvine in the Department of Sociology. Dr. Torres's research examines organizations, jobs, and careers as sites that shape men's and women's, whites' and non-whites' experiences and perceptions of social inequality. Her research strives to link structural explanations of inequality with cultural ones using qualitative and quantitative research methods.
Selected Publications
2004. Lisa Torres and Matt L. Huffman. "Who Benefits? Gender Differences in Returns to Social Network Diversity," Research in the Sociology of Work v. 14, ed. Nancy Ditomaso and Corrine Post. p. 17-33.
2002. Matt L. Huffman and Lisa Torres. "It's Not Only 'Who You Know' that Matters: Gender, Personal Contacts, and Job Lead Quality," Gender & Society, 16 (6), December.
2002. Lisa Torres and Matt L. Huffman. "Social Networks and Job Search Outcomes among Male and Female Professional, Technical and Managerial Workers," Sociological Focus, 35 (1), February.
2001. Matt L. Huffman and Lisa Torres. "Job Search Methods: Consequences for Gender-based Earnings Inequality," Journal of Vocational Behavior, 58 (1), February.
1998. Lisa Torres, Steven Velasco, and Matt L. Huffman. "Comment to Patricia Drentea's 'Consequences of Women's Formal and Informal Job Search Methods for Employment in Female Dominated Jobs,' " Gender & Society, 12 (4), August.
Current Projects
Book Manuscript: Parting Company: the social and organizational process of managerial downsizing.
By most accounts, managerial downsizing is a routine, if unfortunate, aspect of organizational life. But downsizing offers a fascinating case study of how deeply-ingrained beliefs and practices undergo radical transformation. Until the late 1970s—excepting instances of serious misconduct—U.S. companies rarely fired their managerial employees. Long-standing understandings about commitment, obligation, and loyalty all but promised elite workers job security. As powerful social agreements structured the managerial-employer relationship, companies had no organizational practices for instigating managerial terminations. How then did this relationship change? How did companies create organizational practices to routinize what was once extraordinary? Conducting extensive fieldwork at firms undergoing layoffs coupled with historical data, Dr. Torres shows the social and organizational processes by which U.S. companies shifted the terms of managerial employment, developing organizational "scripts" to institute and legitimize managerial terminations. These scripts provided the structure for companies to institute large-scale downsizing of mid to lower-level workers during the 1980s and 1990s.
New Research: Dr. Torres is currently working on a longitudinal study of serially “downsized” managerial and professional workers. This research explores how workers cope with, for example, fragmented careers that affect personal finances (in the long- and short-term) and social ties to community and work organizations.
Academic Conferences
2007. "A Field Experiment Testing Gender Differences in Employers' Response".
2006. "Management Consultants in Mimetic Isomorphism: Exploiting Uncertainty, Creating Problems, Marketing Solutions," The Academy of Management, Atlanta, Georgia
Courses Taught
SOC 101: Research Methods
SOC 175: Sociology of Sex and Gender
SOC 181: Race & Gender Discrimination in Employment
SOC 181: Gender in Race and Film
SOC 230: Sociological Research Methods (graduate level)
SOC 230: Qualitative Research Methods (graduate level)
Contact Information
torres@gwu.edu
(202) 994-0266
Phillips 409C
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