Peter Yeager

Professor Yeager presently teaches courses in the sociology of law, crime and punishment, and deviancy and social control. He has also taught courses in medical sociology, social issues, and white-collar crime, and has additional interests in the sociology of the professions, organizational sociology, and environmental sociology. Professor Yeager’s research projects are linked by his enduring interest in systems of rules, from persons’ codes of ordinary morality and basic norms of social interaction to the informal expectations of bureaucracies and the formalized laws of governments. He is especially interested in ways in which these various rule systems intersect with each other, requiring individuals and groups to navigate between often inconsistent or even contradictory expectations for their behavior.

Recently, Professor Yeager has become interested in questions regarding professional ethics, in particular the ways in which the special obligations in such professions as law, medicine, science, engineering and accounting are either realized or confounded as professionals carry out their work in organizations. In this area he has spent a year as a Faculty Fellow in Ethics in Harvard University’s Program in Ethics in the Professions, and has advised the U.S. government on its initiative in recent years to build a policy-advising research agenda to examine misconduct in scientific research.