Research

• Organizational Inequality in Higher Education

  Faculty diversification, resource dependence, and how universities respond to fiscal and political shocks — the Great Recession, the Black Lives Matter movement, and anti-diversity legislation.

  • Kim, Kwan Woo, Alexandra Kalev, Frank Dobbin, and Gal Deutsch. 2021. “Crisis and Uncertainty: Did the Great Recession Reduce the Diversity of New Faculty?” Sociological Science 8:308–24.
  • Gonsalves, Leroy, Kwan Woo Kim, Frank Dobbin, Alexandra Kalev, and Gal Deutsch. “How to Stop the Clock: The Effects of Tenure Clock Extensions on Faculty Diversity.” Revise and Resubmit, American Journal of Sociology.
  • Kim, Kwan Woo. “Selective Inclusion: Resource Dependence and the Uneven Diversification of the U.S. Professoriate, 1993–2019.” Under Review.
  • Kim, Kwan Woo, John Towey, Alexandra Kalev, Frank Dobbin, and Gal Deutsch. “Social Movements Can Have (Fleeting) Effects on Faculty Diversity.” Working Paper.
  • Kim, Kwan Woo and Laura Hamilton. “Acting Before the Law: How Anti-Diversity Legislation Reshapes Faculty Hiring Before It Passes.” Working Paper.
• Horizontal Stratification Amid Educational Expansion

  How online degree modality and the growth of graduate education create new, unevenly distributed pathways to economic opportunity.

  • Kim, Kwan Woo and Laura Hamilton. “Online Education and Future Financial Well-Being: Do College Social Interactions Matter?” Revise and Resubmit, Sociology of Education.
  • Kim, Kwan Woo, Adam Goldstein, and Charlie Eaton. “Organizations and Effectively Maintained Inequality in U.S. Graduate Education: Racial Sorting by Graduate Degree Program Quality Measures.” Working Paper.
• Gatekeeping in Creative Industries

  Gender bias among book critics, and how the contraction of Hollywood writers’ rooms in the streaming era reshapes who gets to build a creative career.

  • Kim, Kwan Woo and Phillipa Chong. 2023. “Writing By Women or For Women? Either Way, You’re Less Likely to Be Reviewed.” Poetics 96:101737.
  • Dessauer, Julia and Kwan Woo Kim (equal authorship). “Short Order: Restructuring Hollywood’s Writers’ Rooms in the Age of Streaming.” Invited for the Poetics Special Issue on Technology and Inequality in Culture, Media, and the Arts.
• Immigration Attitudes & Political Economy

  How the occupational presence of immigrants shapes native-born workers’ attitudes toward welfare and immigration across Europe.

  • Kim, Kwan Woo. “Competition or Credentialism? The Occupational Presence of Immigrants and European Attitudes Toward Welfare and Immigration.” Revise and Resubmit, Socio-Economic Review.