Research
My research agenda covers three main questions. Throughout these research areas, I consider how the processes I study affect inter-group inequalities as well as organizational and market outcomes.
1. How are early-career workers coping with career uncertainty?
Cooper, Zosia. “Beyond the paycheck: why young Americans invest in financial markets.” Under review at American Journal of Sociology.
In my job market paper, I study how recent college graduates are preempting career instability by engaging with “democratized” (i.e. easily accessible) markets. Using survey data analysis, I establish a surge in financial investment among 18-24 year olds over the past decade, particularly among groups previously underrepresented in investment, like women and people of color. Then, using life history interviews and in-depth longitudinal follow ups, I find that young people use investment to hedge against perceived future lifestyle pressures, both material (low salaries, job instability, and volatile housing and service markets) and cognitive (work-related fatigue and identity loss). Comparing those who do invest with those who don’t, I find that career clarity—knowing the industry and role you plan to be employed in, even if you aren’t yet employed—enables calculation of cash inflows and outflows as well as a clearer understanding of the risks of careers.
Cooper, Zosia. “Same money, different message: a comparative analysis of YouTube career and finance advice” (working title). Data analysis in progress.
How does pursuing security under conditions of uncertainty intersect with gender and ethnoracial identity? To study this, I am looking closely at the variation in the advice young people encounter during their efforts to build careers and wealth. Personal finance texts, for instance, encourage women to build careers in order to retain financial independence from men, and people of color to accumulate visible wealth in order to model possibility for the next generation. These morally-laden appeals may lead to further variation in how young people combine democratized markets and organizational careers, based on their desire to overcome challenges that they believe are specific to their identity group. To understand these patterns, I am conducting a computational analysis of video transcripts from personal finance YouTube channels. YouTube is not only the most common medium through which young people learn about personal finance, but its scale also lets me move beyond any single creator to map patterned appeals aimed at the same audience.
2. How are popular beliefs about work changing behavior at work?
Cooper, Zosia. “How career trade-offs shape professional identification in early career work.” Working paper available upon request.
Trends like quiet quitting suggest that as work becomes more uncertain, workers reevaluate the proper role of work in their lives. Yet, this connection is still being theorized. In another paper from my dissertation, I draw on longitudinal interview data with early career professionals to help build this theory. I find that career uncertainty causes young people to deeply consider the role of work in their lives and form morally-laden beliefs around “who I am in relation to work,” which shape workplace behavior downstream. In particular, I find that those who choose to pursue careers they perceive as relatively lucrative over lesser-paid alternatives that they are passionate about do not pursue high achievement in their careers, but instead prioritize meaning-making outside of work.
Scruggs, Jared and Zosia Cooper. “The propagation and enactment of contentious frames toward work, at work.” Preparing for submission to Academy of Management Review.
Online movements against overwork and corporate employment relationships (e.g., The Nap Ministry, backlash against corporations) have gained momentum in recent years, generating memes that are often contentious: for instance, “work will not love you back,” or “if you died today, your job would be posted tomorrow.” In this theoretical paper, we consider the conditions under which contentious anti-work beliefs might encourage workers to take action within their workplaces. This work builds a conceptual model not only of the propagation of these beliefs but of the enactment of these beliefs in organizations, ranging from individual demotivation to group resistance and even collective action.
3. How do professionals experience and manage political tension in their fields?
Cooper, Zosia, Amy J. Binder, and Jeffrey L. Kidder. “Ideological heterogeneity in professional fields: How politics can reinforce professional identification.” Under review at American Sociological Review.
In this paper, we develop the concept of professional polysemy. Polysemic professions are those in which there is more than one way to understand what it means to be a member of that profession. Professional polysemy enables conservative professionals to identify with professional values that align with their political values, even in fields that they see as predominantly left-leaning. In academia, this means identifying with traditional values of intellectual rigor and openmindedness, while largely rejecting progressive academic values of inclusion and equity based on identity categories. We explore the settings in which these traditional professional values may be activated and contrasted to progressive professional values. We argue that this activation means that conservative professionals do not engage in collective action to change professional practice, and that their discontent with progressive professional values instead manifests as tension with their progressive colleagues.
Cooper, Zosia, Amy J. Binder, and Jeffrey L. Kidder. 2024. “Keeping Libertarianism Alive in the Academy: Organizations, Scholars, and the Idea Pipeline.” Socius 10:23780231241287949. doi:10.1177/23780231241287949
We examine how actors outside of academia built an “idea pipeline,” adapting organizational forms and processes that already existed in the field, to promote their preferred professional practice in the social sciences and humanities.
Other publications from this project:
Binder, Amy, Jeffrey L. Kidder, and Zosia Cooper. 2025. “Sometimes Contentious Curricula: The Frame Alignments of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Programs Run by Libertarian Scholars.” The Sociological Quarterly 1–21. doi:10.1080/00380253.2025.2609099.
Kidder, Jeffrey L., Amy J. Binder, and Zosia Cooper. 2025. “Normalizing Disreputable Exchanges in the Academy: Libertarian Scholars and the Stigma of Ideologically-Based Funding.” Qualitative Sociology 48(1):51–72. doi:10.1007/s11133-024-09586-6.
Kidder, Jeffrey L., Amy J. Binder, and Zosia Cooper. 2025. “‘We Don’t Fit at All’: The Symbolic Boundaries of Libertarians Connected to the Academy.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology. doi:10.1057/s41290-025-00270-y.