Research

My research is motivated by questions about democracy, citizenship, and inequality. As a scholar, I apply an interdisciplinary approach to the study of American political power threading disparate literatures in race/racism, work and organizations, political development, and Black politics. I am most interested in how the United States government produces and reinforces racial domination through public policy institutions and the professionals who run them. Below you will find information about my published and forthcoming scholarly work. A complete review of my research can be found on my CV, here.

Serving The Last Plantation*

In this article, I explore the implications of when the US Congress, the nation’s highest lawmaking body, does not follow its own rules. I investigate lawmakers’ decision to exempt themselves from federal workplace law and retreat from democratic principles. I argue that their decision has limited the rights of congressional employees, most notably black workers, and represents a key mechanism through which lawmakers have maintained a racialized legislative structure. I demonstrate this by examining the management of the House of Representatives restaurant system. I analyze the racial politics that embroiled these dining facilities during Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the Post-Civil Rights eras. Here, black workers mobilized for expanded rights as workers and citizens. Lawmakers responded to their demands by privatizing jobs and social space within the Capitol. In all, these congressional restaurants capture the behind-the-scenes confrontations between lawmakers and workers to structure the racial order in the legislature.

*This paper is under review

Congress as a Racialized Social System

In this paper, I theorize how the congressional workplace became racialized and identify the racial processes that maintain a racialized workplace today. I investigate how lawmakers have organized their workplace and made decisions about which workers would be appropriate for different types of roles in the Capitol. Through a racial analysis of the congressional workplace, I show a connection between Congress as an institution and workplace and how racial domination is a thread that connects and animates both its formal and informal structures.

Jones, James R.  2019. “Congress as a Racialized Social System” Race, Organizations, and the Organizing Process (Research in the Sociology of Organizations). Melissa Wooten, ed. Emerald Insight Limited, 171-191.

Racing Through the Halls of Congress: The “Black Nod” as an Adaptive Strategy for Surviving in a Raced Institution

Throughout the day, African Americans routinely nod to one another in the halls of the Capitol, and consider the Black nod as a common cultural gesture. However, data from over sixty in-depth interviews suggest there is an additional layer of meaning to the Black nod in Congress. From the microlevel encounters, I observed and examined, I interpret the nod as more than a gesture that occurs in a matter of seconds between colleagues or even among perfect strangers in the halls of Congress. The Black nod encompasses and is shaped by labor organized along racial lines, a history of racial subordination, and powerful perceptions of race in the post-Civil-Rights era on the meso-, and macrolevels. Using this interpretive foundation, this article will show how the nod is an adaptive strategy of Black staffers that renders them visible in an environment where they feel socially invisible.

Jones, James R. 2017. “Racing Through the Halls of Congress: The “Black Nod” as an Adaptive Strategy for Surviving in a Raced Institution.” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, (14)1, 165-187.