Adam Reich is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. He received his PhD in sociology from Berkeley in 2012 and was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar between 2012 and 2014. Reich is interested in how people understand their class and status positions, the ways these understandings are mediated by the organizations of which they are a part, and how such understandings preserve and, occasionally, unsettle existing inequalities. His work thus sits at the intersection of economic sociology, cultural sociology, and the sociology of social movements.
Reich is the author of three books. Hidden Truth: Young Men Navigating Lives In and Out of Juvenile Prison (2010, University of California Press) explores the ways in which young men’s economic exclusion allows them partial insights into political and economic systems, and yet simultaneously how such insights deepen their own marginalization. With God On Our Side: The Struggle for Workers’ Rights in a Catholic Hospital (2012, Cornell University Press) examines a unionization campaign in a Catholic hospital as a case of contestation for moral legitimacy within what Fourcade and Healy call a “moralized market.” Selling Our Souls: The Commodification of Hospital Care in the United States (2014, Princeton University Press) demonstrates how practitioners within different hospital organizations—ancillary staff, nurses, and doctors—think about their own work in ways that reflect the moral-market contradictions salient at each hospital’s founding. Reich is also the author of several peer-reviewed articles, which have appeared in journals such as the American Journal of Sociology and Social Science & Medicine.