Announcing the 2024 SASE Honorary Fellow – Juliet Schor

It is a tremendous honor and pleasure to announce this year’s SASE Honorary Fellow: Professor Juliet Schor. She is an economist and sociologist at Boston College. She is in the Department of Sociology and her Ph.D. is in economics. This is a unique combination, and a true example of a practice of socio-economics.

Before joining Boston College, she taught at Harvard University for 17 years, in the Department of Economics and the Committee on Degrees in Women’s Studies.  

Her doctoral dissertation in Economics examined labor issues, the factors that determine how likely workers were to go on strike or to push for higher wages. This means she’s had a longstanding interest in various issues related to work, to the point that she acted as a co-organizer of one of the 2024 mini-conferences: “Working Time Reduction: Toward a more balanced, just and sustainable economic life.”

Indeed, her first bestselling book was about too much work. The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (published in 1992) appeared on bestseller lists such as The New York Times, Publisher’s Weekly, The Chicago Tribune, The Village Voice, The Boston Globe, as well as the annual best book lists for The New York Times, Business Week and other publications. This book is widely credited for influencing the national debate on work and family.

Her other books are The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need (1998), Do Americans Shop Too Much? (2000), Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (2004), and True Wealth: How and Why Millions of Americans are Creating a Time-Rich, Ecologically Light, Small-Scale, High-Satisfaction Economy (2011). Her most recent book, After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win it Back, published by the University of California Press in 2020, won the Porchlight Management and Workplace Culture Book of the Year. She has also edited or coedited a score of volumes, and published scholarly articles in prominent economics, sociology and interdisciplinary
venues.

Professor Schor is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and 2014-15 Matina S. Horner Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. In 2014 she received the American Sociological Association’s award for the Public Understanding of Sociology. From 2010-2017, she was a member of the MacArthur Foundation Connected Learning Research Network. She is the recipient of the 2011 Herman Daly Award from the US Society for Ecological Economics. In 2006 she received the Leontief Prize from the Global Development and Economics Institute at Tufts University for expanding the frontiers of economic thought. She has also received the George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contributions to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language from the National Council of Teachers of English.

She has served as a consultant to the United Nations, the World Institute for Development Economics Research, and to the United Nations Development Program. She is a former Brookings Institution fellow. Schor is a co-founder of the Center for a New American Dream, a national sustainability organization. She chairs the board of the Better Future Project, a Massachusetts-based climate justice organization.

Professor Schor’s most recent research preoccupation is companies who are implementing four day workweeks. Since the beginning of 2022, trials, organized by the non-profit 4 Day Week Global, have been ongoing, collecting data on employee health and well-being, organizational outcomes, and carbon emissions. Her TED talk on this topic has received more than 3 million views.

Bringing it closer to home, Julie’s scholarly work has been inspired by her family. When growing up, her family moved from New York to a small town in Pennsylvania, a little coal mining steel town. Her father was a surgeon and he set up a clinic for mine workers, for the United Mine Workers Union. She has attributed this childhood experience to her interest in labor. She has also co-taught classes with her family, namely, her husband, who is a professor and chair of history, and they have taught a class called Planet in Peril at Boston College.

An eminent expert in issues related to work, consumption, and climate change, Professor Schor epitomizes what the SASE community stands for: its interdisciplinary nature with an amazing breath and depth of topics. (Indeed, Julie could be a co-organizer of several of the SASE networks.)

She is real change maker – helping create more balanced, just and sustainable economic lives.
She is a role model mentor and community builder.
She could be resting, basking in the fruits of her tremendous labor, but she’s active in SASE conferences, joining us on panels and discussions.
Hopefully at least she now has a 4-day work week!
An amazing inspiration to me also personally, it is a pleasure to announce Professor Juliet Schor as the 2024 SASE Honorary Fellow.

-Nina Bandelj (SASE President 2023-2024)