Meaning and Behavior in Sexual Service Consumption

To what extent does the “girlfriend experience” dominate the market for Internet-based sexual services? Do men who primarily seek the girlfriend experience consume and evaluate sexual services differently from other clients? I apply multiple textual analysis methods using a unique data set of more nearly 600,000 reviews posted by male clients on the world’s largest sex work review website to identify patterns of consumer behavior and criteria of evaluation for satisfaction with sexual services. I find that the girlfriend experience is the most common of three “bundles” of sexual services inductively derived from cluster analysis. Reviewers who seek the girlfriend experience display less concern for monetary value, use more inclusive and affective review language, and engage in a wider variety of sexual activities compared to other reviewers—suggesting that emotional intimacy facilitates sexual exploration even in commercial transactions and supporting the theory that the girlfriend experience appeals to a distinct group of sex work consumers. For the past several years, I have been working diligently to improve the customized dictionary I use to identify 15 different sex acts within review test and ensuring the robustness of my results by using multiple clustering methods to define consumer types. Draft available upon request.

Qualifying Paper for Department of Sociology: “Your Mileage May Vary”: The Evaluation of Emotional Labor in Internet-based Sex Work Markets."

Dinner or a Movie?: Discourses of Quality and Satisfaction in Sex Work Services

Work in progress in collaboration with Elliot Ash.

How are services in emotional labor-intensive economies evaluated by consumers? More specifically, what are the discourses of satisfaction and quality in markets for emotional labor-intensive sex work services? While the consumption of sex work in the United States is not uncommon–5-18% of men living in the U.S. report having at least one paid sexual encounter since they were 18 years old (General Social Survey, 1991-2006), and roughly 1% have visited a sex worker in the past year (Monto 1999; Monto and McRee 2005)–the doubly clandestine nature of sex work as an illegal and socially stigmatized practice poses challenges for research. Our project investigates the demand for and evaluation of sexual services using a dataset of more than half a million reviews. Our original method involves training predictive models on the text of reviews in one domain to find the criteria associated with high and low scores, and then testing the model’s performance in predicting the scores of review texts in other domains, including restaurants and personal services (Yelp), medical care (ZocDoc) and entertainment (IMDB). This comparative approach helps us shed light on the dynamics of consumption and satisfaction in sex work in relation to the much better understood domains of entertainment and service industries. Results in progress, presentation available upon request.

Elliot Ash and Charlotte Lloyd. “Dinner or a Movie?: Discourses of Quality and Satisfaction in Sex Work Service." Summer Institute in Computational Social Science, 30 June 2017.

Governing the Past through National Reconciliation: Containment vs. Integrative Approaches

This paper brings the well-developed sociology of mnemonic practices to bear onto an object that is generally the purview of the interdisciplinary field of transitional justice: national reconciliation. Already implemented in over 30 countries, reconciliation is an increasingly relied-upon political and social ritual through which nations seek to address traumatic pasts. In addition to providing official accounts of past conflicts, reconciliation processes define and manage appropriate uses of the past in present-day national communities. Through successful governance the past ceases to be an unruly, chaotic force capable of generating further conflict and may be harnessed to produce political and social solidarity. But how, precisely, do reconciliation processes attempt to “govern” when, how, and by whom the past is invoked? This paper examines two cases to illustrate divergent approaches to the task of governing the past through national reconciliation. Whereas South Africa’s reconciliation contains a past characterized as imminently dangerous, Australian reconciliation actively integrates the past in order to overcome its difficulty. Anecdotes from two additional “shadow cases” of Rwanda and Canada are also discussed to demonstrate that the differences between containment and integrative approaches cannot simply be reduced to the varying institutional contexts in post-conflict and post-authoritarian reconciliation as opposed to reconciliation in established democracies. Rather, understanding reconciliation processes in terms of their tendencies towards containment versus integrative approaches offers deeper analytical purchase on the practice and social consequences of national reconciliation. Draft in progress, available upon request.

Charlotte Lloyd. “Governing the Past through National Reconciliation: Containment vs. Integrative Approaches.” American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia (August).

Indigeneity and Sport in Reconciliation Action Plans

More than 25 years after the founding of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, reconciliation is entrenched as a way to imagine Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations. But what, precisely, does such a nebulous concept as reconciliation mean in contemporary Australia? How does it ask us to imagine Indigeneity? Through what instruments does it represent non-Indigenous/Indigenous difference? This chapter takes a single contemporary initiative, Reconciliation Action Plans, and one cultural field, sport, as a concrete starting point to investigate these questions.

Lloyd, Charlotte. 2018. “Indigeneity and Sport in Reconciliation Action Plans.” Forthcoming in The difference that identity makes, editors. L. Bamblett, F. Myers, and T. Rowse. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.

Reconciliation Action Plans in Australian Organizations: A Decade in Review

The history of the Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP) program since its founding in 2006 is short but remarkable. Despite uncertain funding, the program has managed not only to survive but expand to 655 organizations within its first decade, with its membership charted to surpass 1000 organizations in 2018. It attracts participation from an impressive range of organizations from large financial institutions to churches, from iconic cultural institutions to small community service providers, from rugby teams to retailers. It has touched the lives of roughly 3 million people, over 25% of workers in Australia, who are employed by a RAP organization. This paper poses two questions. First, where did this program come from? This paper undertakes the first attempt to document the origins of the RAP program in 2006 and trace its evolution over the first decade of its existence, drawing on numerous primary sources, including documents from the program’s history as well as original interviews with the program’s founders at Reconciliation Australia. Second, what does the RAP program suggest about the trajectory of more than 25 years of reconciliation in Australia? The paper contextualizes the RAP program within the history of reconciliation and Indigenous politics and comments on future directions. Presentation available upon request.

Charlotte Lloyd. “’Reconciliation Action Plans’ in Australian Organisations: A Decade in Review.” Australian Historical Association Annual Meeting, Canberra (July 2018).

Possibilities & Pitfalls of National Reconciliation: Mandates, Tools, Frames and Terms

How can we dismantle ethno-racial hierarchies and what kinds of intergroup relations should we aspire to foster instead? In response to these fundamentally important questions, my paper explores possibilities for social change under the auspices of reconciliation—a “moral reordering” of political communities in which new, more inclusive discourses of national identity, history and citizenship are created and institutionalized (Moon 2004). Exciting new scholarship has begun to explore reconciliation not merely as a guide to democratic transitions in post-conflict or post-authoritarian states, but also as a necessary response to long-standing historical injustice in stable and mature liberal democracies (Bashir 2011; Fourlas 2015). However, reconciliation is difficult to evaluate in the abstract because its consequences depend heavily on its philosophies and goals as well as policies and institutions. Any discussion of reconciliation initiatives must carefully consider the specifics of mandates, tools, frames and even the term of reconciliation itself. This presentation draws on examples from South Africa, Canada and Australia to describe the range of possibilities of national reconciliation as well as many of its pitfalls. Presentation materials and recording available upon request.

Charlotte Lloyd. “The Possibilities of National Reconciliation: Mandates, Tools, Frames and Terms.” “Is It Time for Truth & Reconciliation in Post-Ferguson America?” Symposium, Michigan State University Law School, East Lansing (March 2018).

Workplace Technologies of Difference: Conceptualizing Organizational Approaches to Recognition

This presentation proposes the concept of workplace “technologies of difference” as a useful analytical construct for examining, comparing and reimagining these diverse means by which organizations invoke and address social differences. Not only does the term technologies of difference provide a neutral category for the comparison of approaches from distinct traditions, geographies and time periods, but it also emphasizes the importance of investigating how specific technologies, i.e. material and conceptual systems, conceptualize difference and affect the social organization of the workplace. To demonstrate the use of this concept, this article considers the example of Reconciliation Action Plans (RAPs)—plans voluntarily adopted by Australian organizations to foster respect, establish relationships and provide opportunities for Indigenous people— as one such technology of difference. Draft in progress.

Charlotte Lloyd. “Conceptualizing Organizational Approaches to Recognition: Workplace “Technologies of Difference.” Institute for Religion, Politics & Society, Australian Catholic University (June 2018).

Charlotte Lloyd. “Workplace Technologies of Difference: Managing Indigeneity in Australian Organizations through ‘Reconciliation Action Plans.’" Eastern Sociological Society Annual Meeting, Philadelphia (February 2018).

Moralizing the Workplace: States and the Cultivation of the Citizen-Employee

Most often, we think of citizenship in relation to spaces of civic participation, such as the voting booth, town hall debates, and volunteer community clean-ups. Public spaces and events, border crossings, and regulatory agencies from the DMV to the IRS also strongly connote the duties and privileges of citizenship. In this context, the workplace may be an unintuitive site for thinking about citizenship, but as this presentation demonstrates, it is by no means antithetical. The ways that modern democratic states define and encourage acts of “good citizenship” in the workplace bear further investigation. This presentation develops the idea of the workplace as a site where individuals may be called upon to enact civic projects and to practice good citizenship in their capacity as employees. It argues that the rise of “corporate citizenship”, according to which organizations are asked to take on social consciousness and responsibilities, has in turn engendered additional spheres of action where employees are asked to contribute to larger social and political, rather than organizational, projects. States may appeal directly and indirectly to employees to embody and enact practices of citizenship in their workplaces. These ideas are illustrated with reference to the example of Australia’s voluntary “Reconciliation Action Plan” (RAP) program that has gained over 800 organizational participants covering roughly 25% of the workforce in the last decade. In participating organizations, new activities and policies interpellate employees as citizens whose thoughts, beliefs, and actions in the workplace can contribute to fostering—or derailing—reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Australia. Employees in non-participating organizations are asked to be good citizens by bringing their organizations on board with the ambitious national project of reconciliation by joining the RAP program. This case demonstrates the importance of investigating the workplace as a site where citizenship is cultivated and performed. Draft in progress.

Transnational Social Protection: Setting the Agenda

Social welfare has long been considered something which states provide to its citizens. Yet today 220 million people live in a country in which they do not hold citizenship. How are people on the move protected and provided for in the contemporary global context? Have institutional sources of social welfare begun to cross borders to meet the needs of individuals who live transnational lives? This introductory paper proposes a transnational social protection (TSP) research agenda designed to map the kinds of protections which exist for people on the move, determine how these protections travel across borders, and analyze variations in access to these protections. We define TSP; introduce the heuristic tool of a ‘resource environment’ to map and analyze variations in TSP over time, through space, and across individuals; and provide empirical examples demonstrating the centrality of TSP for scholars of states, social welfare, development, and migration.

Levitt, Peggy, Jocelyn Viterna, Armin Mueller, and Charlotte Lloyd. 2016. “Transnational Social Protection: Setting the Agenda.” Oxford Development Studies. 10.1080/13600818.2016.1239702.

Work in progress in collaboration with Jocelyn Viterna & Killian Clark.

Too often, the development literature portrays aid recipients as passive players, either targeted or ignored by the actions of humanitarian agencies. In contrast, Viterna argues that potential aid recipients are active agents in their own communities’ development. Analyzing how communities pursue their own development advances the field in several new directions. It increases the number and kind of aid actors within our academic line of sight. It improves our understanding of why some communities are more successful at tapping into humanitarian aid flows than others. It better measures the impacts of aid on anticipated outcomes, like educational attainment or household income. And it brings to light a number of critical yet typically unanticipated outcomes of development projects, like stark fluctuations in local-level inequalities, transformations in local-level collective mobilization processes, changing migration flows, or the restructuring of local-level cultural relationships. With support from Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Viterna and her colleagues are collecting data on this project in Turkey, Lebanon, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Mexico, and India.