Seán Ó Riain is Professor of Sociology at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. His research interests are in the sociology of work and employment, comparative political economy, inequality and social change and the global information economy. Seán is the author of The Politics of High Tech Growth: Developmental Network States in the Global Economy (Cambridge, 2004) and of The Rise and Fall of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger: Liberalism, Boom and Bust (Cambridge, 2014). He is currently directing New Deals in the New Economy, a five year study of workplace bargains in Europe, incorporating survey analysis of the EU27 countries from 1995-2015 and a comparative case study analysis of three different sectors in each of Ireland and Denmark. This research is funded by a European Research Council Consolidator Grant, awarded in 2011. Seán earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1999 and taught at the University of California, Davis from 1999-2003 before joining NUI Maynooth.