Notre Dame sociologist examines human interaction to explain organizational dynamics

Timothy Hallett understands interactions — how they create culture, translate to organizational success, and fuel conflict.

Hallett, a professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame, embeds himself in day-to-day operations of public and private organizations to examine “inhabited institutionalism,” or how the institutions that shape our lives are inhabited by people doing things together. He observes and interviews people to determine how their communications affect organizational life.

Focusing on these interactions, he contends, is essential to understanding how organizations operate.

Hallett’s research has covered topics such as the relationship between leadership and teachers in schools. He has researched symbolic power — the ability to define situations so that other people comply without really thinking otherwise — and how it is both created in social interactions and used to shape organizations.

It’s heady and heavy stuff. And his research grabbed the spotlight after a 2009 article he co-authored on a topic — gossip at work — that is as much part of organizational life as it can be therapeutic, draining, and divisive. “Gossip at Work: Unsanctioned Evaluative Talk in Formal School Meetings,” published in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, attracted attention from The New York Times, the Associated Press, Men’s Health, and Redbook.

“I was not expecting that little piece to go public,” Hallett said. “We publish all articles in professional journals and have high citation counts, but the public cares about different things.”

Gossip is something we know when we hear it, and Hallett describes it as informal talk in which people evaluate others who are not present. It can happen in team meetings, where the content of the gossip is typically addressed in three ways: challenged, counteracted with a positive statement, or shifted to another topic.

Hallett offers the example of “if you were to say ‘Tim Hallett was late to this meeting,’ someone could jump in and say ‘Isn’t it really cool how much he loves teaching?’”

Timothy Hallett, professor of sociology, enjoys teaching and will teach an undergraduate course in a sophomore college seminar that takes a nontraditional approach. Photo by Jon L. Hendricks/University of Notre Dame.

Indeed, Hallett enjoys his teaching and research career that began at Indiana University in 2003 and brought him to Notre Dame in fall 2025.

“Teaching has always been the thing that keeps me up at night and wakes me up in the morning — in a positive way,” he said.

In his first semester on campus, Hallett taught a graduate class on culture and organizations, and in the spring, he will teach an undergraduate course in a sophomore college seminar that takes a nontraditional approach. Students will read a range of best-selling autobiographies by a range of authors to learn how they responded to societal challenges. Afterwards, students will be asked to think about their own life stories.

“They will learn and understand how society impacts them and how they impact society so they can interact in the world, and can understand why the world interacts with them in particular ways and how they can act on the world,” Hallett said. “I see this kind of learning as an enlightenment project, and I want to help people to understand their own lives and worlds.”

For his next research project, Hallett will examine students who earn graduate degrees in public affairs, focusing on how they are taught and the resulting impact on the public, private, and nonprofit sectors.

“Those interactions and cultures matter for government,” he said. “They matter for politics.”

Hallett plans to collaborate with his colleagues in sociology and from other disciplines across the university— the type of opportunity that attracted him to Notre Dame in the first place.

“In terms of its specialty in sociology, Notre Dame is very strong in cultural sociology, organization sociology, and interactional sociology,” he said. “There’s a very rich tradition of qualitative research at Notre Dame. And that’s what I do — field observations, field interviews. There are just so many synergies.”

Originally published by Pat Milhizer at al.nd.edu on January 19, 2026.