Want to buy sex, bribe a politician, or get your dumb kid into an Ivy League school? I discuss how to get away with taboo trades with Gabriel Rossman, an Associate Professor of Sociology at UCLA, and my co-host, UVA Law 3L Autumn Adams-Jack.

Rossman studies cultural industries (such as radio and film) and economic sociology (including diffusion and disreputable exchange). He is interested in how people structure immoral exchanges like bribery to make them more subtle and therefore less obviously immoral.

I’ve been an admirer of Rossman’s work for a number of years and was so happy to have this opportunity to talk to him about his research that I kept him longer than normal and have divided his podcast into two parts. In this part, we talk about sugar babies, college admissions, Bill Cosby, and Islamic finance. We also discuss a forthcoming book manuscript on the obfuscation of disreputable exchange that Gabriel generously shared, currently titled “How to Get Away With Paying Bribes, Buying Sex, and Selling Corpses.

Suggested Readings

·      “It’s Only Wrong If It’s Transactional.” 2018. (with Oliver Schilke) American Sociological Review.

·      “Obfuscatory Relational Work and Disreputable Exchange.” 2014. Sociological Theory.

·      “The Diffusion of the Legitimate and the Diffusion of Legitimacy.” 2014. Sociological Science.

· Climbing the Charts: What Radio Airplay Tells Us about the Diffusion of Innovation. Princeton University Press. 2012.