Joseph A. Soares was an Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale University, and a Lecturer in Harvard's Social Studies Program before joining the faculty at Wake Forest University in the Fall of 2003. His teaching and research interests include: the social forces that shape, and the stratification effects of, culture; the role of educational institutions in society; and the history of social thought.

Dr. Soares is author of 'The Power of Privilege' (Stanford: 2007) which looks at the myth of meritocracy in higher education. It is widely assumed that admission to elite U.S. universities is based solely on academic merit—the best and brightest are admitted to Harvard, Yale, and their peer institutions as determined by test scores and GPA, and not by lineage or family income. But does reality support those expectations? Or are admissions governed by a logic that rewards socioeconomic status while disguising it as personal merit?

The Power of Privilege examines the nexus between social class and admissions at America’s top colleges from the vantage point of Yale University, a key actor in the history of higher education. It is a documented history of the institutional gatekeepers, confident of the validity of socially biased measures of merit, seeking to select tomorrow’s leadership class from among their economically privileged clientele. Acceptance in prestigious colleges still remains beyond the reach of most students except those from high-income professional families. Ultimately, the author suggests reforms that would move America’s top schools toward becoming genuine academic meritocracies.

The Technical Appendix for The Power of Privilege can be found here.

His thesis won Harvard's De Lancey K. Jay Prize. The book, published by Stanford University Press as The Decline of Privilege: the Modernization of Oxford University, received the Culture Section of the American Sociological Association's "prize for outstanding book of 2000."

As a Krupp Fellow and a Jacob Javits Fellow, he did research in Britain for three years; during that time he was a Visiting Member of the Senior Common Room, Nuffield College, Oxford, and an Associate Member of St. Catherine's College, Oxford.

Before university and graduate school, he spent his adolescence pursuing the eschatological myth of industrial society, Marxism; but disenchantment with messianic politics caused him to move back from Hegel to Kant and forward from Marx to Durkheim. His current research inquiries are on a parallel project to the Oxford book, only this time focused on the United States. His current research inquiries are on leisure activities and social capital in different communities. In addition, he occasionally does disparity studies for city and state governments in evaluating minority and women's "set-asides."

Website
The Social Life of Cities, by Joseph Soares
This website offers a collection of photographs illustrating aspects of public space, collective memory, urban design, and architecture in Boston, New York, New Haven, London, Paris, and other cities. Since one of the central issues of urban life is the distinction between public space for cultural engagements and private space for consumer activities, there is a related series on the evolution of advertising images.