Joshua Murray
Associate Professor of Sociology
Affiliated Faculty, Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions
Joshua Murray is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University. His scholarship and teaching focus on corporate elites, campaign finance, social movements, and class conflict. He is the author of Wrecked: How the American Automobile Industry Destroyed Its Capacity to Compete (with Michael Schwartz) published in 2019. He is also the author of numerous scholarly articles published in academic journals such as The American Journal of Sociology, Social Problems, and other academic journals; and of commentaries in the Washington Post, The Conversation, and other prominent outlets. Murray has received the American Sociological Association’s Marxist Sociology section award for best scholarly article for “Moral Economy, Structural Leverage, and Organizational Efficacy: Class Formation and the Great Flint Sit-Down Strike” and the Jeffery Nordhaus Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching. He is currently the Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Sociology.
Specializations
Political Sociology; Global/Transnational Sociology; Social Networks
Representative Publications
Joshua Murray and Michael Schwartz. 2019. Wrecked: How the American Automobile Industry Destroyed Its Capacity to Compete. NY: Russell Sage Foundation
Jennifer Heerwig and Joshua Murray. 2018. “The Political Strategies and Unity of the American Corporate Inner Circle: Evidence from Political Donations, 1982-2000,” Social Problems, spy014, https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spy014
Joshua Murray. 2017. “Interlock Globally, Act Domestically: Corporate Political Unity in the 21st Century.” 2017. American Journal of Sociology, 122(6): 1617-1663.
Joshua Murray and Michael Schwartz. 2015. “Moral Economy, Structural Leverage, and Organizational Efficacy: Class Formation and the Great Flint Sit-Down Strike, Detroit 1936-7,” Critical Historical Studies, 2(2): 219-259