G: Labor Markets, Education, and Human Resources

London School of Economics

David Marsden

The SASE community is deeply saddened by the death of Professor David Marsden. Professor Marsden worked at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) since 1980, where he was Professor of Industrial Relations. 

We will remember David as an inspirational colleague, mentor and friend.  His contribution to SASE is immeasurable.  He served as SASE President in 2002-2003.  He was the organizer for Network G: Labor Markets, Education, and Human Resources over several decades, where he personally welcomed generations of young scholars into SASE.  David helped  SASE to host its annual conference twice at the LSE, in 2000 and most recently in 2015.  Together with Alex Hicks, David was the founding editor of Socio-Economic Review (SER) and held this position from 2001-2006.

David Marsden was an excellent scholar, whose exemplary vision of academic dialogue went beyond both disciplinary and national borders.  In their inaugural SER editorial, Alex Hicks and David wrote, “With the Review, we launch an enterprise that we hope will address and create dialogue among a wide and inclusive range of the various communities interested in the economy.”  David practiced this in his own research, his mentorship of generations of faculty and students at LSE, as well as his contributions to numerous journals and academic associations. He was a founding editor of Industrielle Beziehungen (the German Journal of Industrial Relations), an editor of Travail et Emploi (a research journal published by the French ministry of labour), and general editor of the British Journal of Industrial Relations.  His scholarly work on labor markets, industrial relations, and human resource management was always informed by insights from cross-national comparison and his guiding concern with understanding the role of politics and institutions in shaping the economy. These themes were reflected in numerous articles, as well as his major work A Theory of Employment Systems: Micro-Foundations of Societal Diversity (1999, Oxford University Press).  Starting from the economics of the employment relationship, David developed a novel interdisciplinary theory of managerial authority in organizing work that took account of how institutions shaped and limit such authority in very different ways across countries.

Through his service, David contributed to both the organizational development and international visibility of SASE.  He was quite simply also one of the nicest persons in the profession: energetic, engaging, and supportive, especially for younger and emerging scholars.

David Marsden died on August 10, 2021 after a sudden and short illness. We have lost a truly extraordinary colleague and miss him very dearly. Our sympathy goes to his family and loved ones. 

You can share your memories of David in a digital condolence book created by his LSE colleagues: here.

Paderborn University

Martin Schneider

Martin Schneider is Professor for Personnel Economics at Paderborn University, Germany, where he acted as Dean as well as Dean for Study Affairs of the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration. He is an Editor of the journal Industrielle Beziehungen and an Editor-in-Chief of the German Journal of Human Resource Management. His socio-economic approach to personnel is chrystallized in Personalökonomie und Personalpolitik, a textbook published in 2020 of which Martin Schneider is the first author. His current research interests include the digitalization of work, the configurational analysis of (leadership) competencies, cross-country comparisons from a configurational perspective, gender pay gaps on executive boards, and the depiction of aspects of work in fictional films.

Martin Schneider is an economist who studied in Trier and Birmingham (Aston University). He finished his PhD (1998) and his habilitation (2003) at the University of Trier, Germany, was a visisting scholar at the Boalt School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley in 2001, where he conducted a project which was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and compared the US and the German jurisdictions of employment and labor law. His published research covers a range of topics and approaches such as the economic analysis of labor law, the varieties-of-capitalism approach, qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) and competency-based approaches. He published, for example, in Socio-Economic Review, Journal of International Business Studies, Organization Studies, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, German Journal of Human Resource Management, and Industrielle Beziehungen.

University Duisburg-Essen

Karen Shire

Karen Shire holds the Chair in Comparative Sociology and Japanese Society at the University Duisburg-Essen, Germany where she is also a member of the Institute of East Asian Studies and directs the Essener College for Gender Research. She is a member of the faculty of the International Max Planck Research School on the Social and Political Construction of the Economy, and in the past few years has held guest appointments in the research group In Search of Global Labor Markets, at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, Bielefeld University, at the Institute for Global Leadership, Ochanomizu Women’s University in Tokyo, and at the Violence and Society Centre, City, University of London. Currently she is Vice-President of RC02 Economy & Society in the International Sociological Association. Her research has contributed to developing inter-regional and historical comparisons of the transformation of work and employment, social institutional changes in the nexus between work and welfare, and changes in class and gender-based social inequalities in Europe and East Asia. Recently her interest has turned to studying the transnationalization of labor markets in the context of migration and global production networks. This research has received funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft(DFG) and the European Commission Anti-Trafficking Coordinator. 

A selection of Shire’s latest publications include Transnationalisierung der Arbeit (2018, co-edited with Sigrid Quack, Ingo Schulz-Schaeffer and Anja Weiß, VS Springer), Labour Subcontracting in Cross-Border Labour Markets (2019, with Ines Wagner, in N. Lillie and J. Arnholz Posted Work in the European Union, Routledge), The Social Order of Transnational Migration Markets (2020, in Global Networks) and the forthcoming volume The Dynamics of Welfare Markets: Private Pensions and Domestic/Care Services in Europe (co-edited with Clémence Ledoux and Franca van Hooren, Palgrave). She is a corresponding editor of the International Review of Social History, a member of the editorial boards of Work, Employment and Society, the European Journal of East Asian Studies, and Contemporary Japan, and a member of the Jury for the International Research Prize of Max Weber Foundation.

Shire began presenting her work and organizing panels at SASE Meetings in the 1990s. At the annual meetings in Kyoto she organized the Mini-Conference, The Making of Transnational Labor Markets: Reordering of Actors, Institutions, and Policies? (with Ursula Mense- Petermann), she has served as a reviewer for the SASE Early Career Workshop, and is a rank-and-file member of the SASE Gender Forum. Together with David Marsden, she coordinates the SASE Network G: Labor Markets, Education and Human Resources.

Eunmi Mun

Eunmi Mun is an Assistant Professor in the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research investigates corporate responses to anti-discrimination laws and family policies in Japan. She is most interested in understanding how those policies are implemented at the workplace level, as well as their impact on gender inequality. Developing this stream of research, she is currently working on a comparative project to examine the implementation of parental leave policies across different policy contexts. She has also investigated the local interpretation of global pressures. Specifically, she examines how large Japanese firms respond to the global norm of corporate social responsibility and the rising pressure to adopt practices from liberal market economies, and whether and to what extent they modify traditional Japanese corporate governance and employment practices. Finally, she has been actively participating in international collaboration with scholars from different countries. In particular, she is part of Comparative Organizational and Institutional Network (COIN), which is composed of scholars from 15 countries, who analyze the patterns of inequality using employer-employee linked data. COIN’s on-going projects examine cross-national variation in gender wage gap and the growing segregation between top earners and bottom earners at workplaces.

She received her BA in sociology from Seoul National University, South Korea, and her PhD in sociology from Harvard University.