I am an assistant professor of sociology at Ohio State University. My research is motivated by intersecting theoretical, substantive, and methodological interests. My theoretical interests center on the assignment and consequences of cultural classifications. This is reflected in my research on legitimacy, which examines how legitimacy and illegitimacy are evaluated, established, and invoked, and how these classifications affect socially significant outcomes.
I explore these questions in the context of contentious politics. My published research in this area combines international comparison with a particular focus on the Middle East broadly, and Turkey in particular.
As a comparative historical sociologist, I use a variety of methods including historical research, comparative methods, quantitative network analysis, and statistical analysis, and I am interested in multi- and mixed-methods approaches to social research. These interests also motivate research on new methodologies for comparative and relational analysis.
I build on these themes in my ongoing projects. I am currently completing a book (under contract with Cambridge University Press) co-authored with David Melamed and Ronald Breiger on regression decomposition, and conducting in-depth interviews for research exploring variation across space, time, and context in the relationship between social and symbolic boundaries across Turkey.
A detailed overview of my research and a description of current projects are available under Research. My CV is available here.
Recent Publications:
Schoon, Eric W., Alexandra Joosse and H. Brinton Milward. 2020. “Networks, Power, and the Effects of Legitimacy in Contentious Politics.” Sociological Perspectives. DOI: 10.1177/0731121419896808
Schoon, Eric W. and Scott Duxbury. 2019. “Robust Discourse and the Politics of Legitimacy: Framing International Intervention in the Syrian Civil War, 2011-2016.” Sociological Science, 6: 635-660.
Schoon, Eric W., Ronald L. Breiger, David Melamed, Eunsung Yoon and Christopher Kleps. 2019. “Precluding rare outcomes by predicting their absence.” PLOS One 14(10): e0223239.
Asal, Victor R. Karl Rethemeyer, Eric W. Schoon. 2019. “Crime, Conflict and the Legitimacy Trade-off: Explaining Variation in Insurgents' Participation in Crime.” Journal of Politics 81(2): 399-410.