What Do We Care About Here? How Can We Tell?: Shaping Values-Informed Team Culture

Session Submission Type: Workshop

Description

This workshop explores how Sociology as a discipline informs individual and collective values, introduces leadership practices that support teams in enacting these values through words and actions, and provides frameworks that allow values-informed teams to bridge the gap between research and praxis. Drawing on the Parsonian tradition of locating values within culture, as ideas that shape action and community orientation, this workshop aims to make those guiding normative principles explicit and empirical. We will address how power impacts cultural values, as well as the contested meanings of specific values, and focus on how to actively shape our professional culture to create equitable access and a greater sense of belonging for all members of our departments. Workshop participants will practice identifying guiding values, explore strategies that translate values into team norms and agreements, and generate action items that will allow leaders/practitioners to utilize frameworks within their home departments. This workshop will be particularly useful for community leaders interested in using a sociological lens to co-envision concrete ways to disrupt departmental cultures and folkways that function to preserve social hierarchies, and contribute actively to an intentionally inclusive workplace culture that reflects its members’ shared values.

Learning Goals/Objectives:
(1) Identify guiding values we hold as sociologists and consider how our field(s) and research inform those values
(2) Practice translating individual and collective values into Norms and Agreements, an iterative tool that seeks to make guiding values evident in our actions and behaviors
(3) Identify opportunities to integrate Norms and Agreements in our roles as sociologists, department leaders, researchers, mentors, and educators seeking to shape inclusive departmental culture

Sub Unit

• Workshops / Departmental Management and Leadership Workshop

Presenters

• Pia Furkan, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

• Penn Pritchard, University of Massachusetts Amherst - Office of Equity and Inclusion

Session Organizer

• Pia Furkan, University of Massachusetts-Amherst