Search

Johannes Schmieder is Associate Professor of Economics at Boston University. His fields of study are Labor Economics, Health Economics, Industrial Organization, and Environmental Policy and Regulation. He holds a PhD and M.A. in Economics from Columbia University. His undergraduate degree in Philosophy and Economics is from University of Bayreuth, Germany.

His current research projects include the following: “Domestic Outsourcing in the United States,” with David Dorn, Jim Spletzer, and Lee Tucker; and “The Effects of Franchising on Workers: Evidence from the United States,” with Rosemary Batt and Andrew Green. His prior research on outsourcing includes “The Rise of Domestic Outsourcing and the Evolution of the German Wage Structure” with Deborah Goldschmidt.

Chris Tilly is professor of Urban Planning and Sociology at UCLA. Tilly holds a joint Ph.D. in Economics and Urban Studies and Planning from MIT. For over thirty years, he has conducted research on low-wage and precarious work and policies to improve conditions and reduce inequalities in the workplace. His books include Half a Job: Bad and Good Part-Time Jobs in a Changing Labor Market;  The Gloves-Off Economy: Labor Standards at the Bottom of America’s Labor Market; and most recently, Where Bad Jobs are Better: Retail Jobs across Countries and Companies. His work on outsourcing includes Under construction: The continuing evolution of job structures in call centers, and the book chapters “When firms restructure: Understanding work-life outcomes” in Work and Life Integration: Organizational, Cultural, and Individual Perspectives (Ellen Ernst Kossek, Susan J. Lambert, eds.) and “Too many cooks? Tracking internal labor market dynamics in food service with case studies and quantitative data” in Low-Wage America: How Employers Are Reshaping Opportunity in the Workplace (Eileen Appelbaum, Annette Bernhardt, and Richard Murnane, eds.).  

Janet Vertesi is Associate Professor of Sociology at Princeton University.  Her area of specialization is the sociology of science, knowledge, and technology.  She has conducted major ethnographic studies of NASA's robotic spacecraft teams. Her books, Seeing like a Rover: Images and Interaction on the Mars Exploration Rover Mission (Chicago, 2015) and Shaping Science: Organizations, Decisions, and Culture on NASA's Teams (Chicago, 2020) draw on her ethnographic studies of missions to Mars, Saturn, and the outer planets and examine how organizations matter to scientific discovery.

Vertesi is also a leader in digital sociology, whether studying computational systems in social life, shifting research methods online, or applying social insights to the building of technologies.  She has been awarded top prizes for her work from the American Sociological Association and the Society for Social Studies of Science.  In 2019, The Sloan Foundation awarded her a grant to “investigate an as-yet undertheorized link between outsourcing and automation.”

Steve Viscelli is an economic sociologist who studies work, labor markets, automation, and public policy. He is currently a Faculty Fellow at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy and Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Steve’s first book The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream explains how deregulation of trucking and the rise of independent contracting turned trucking from one of the best blue-collar jobs in the US into one of the toughest. His current research looks at the impact of self-driving trucks on truckers and ecommerce on last-mile delivery workers. In addition to his academic research, Steve works with a range of public and private stakeholders to make the trucking industry more efficient, safer and a better place to work.

You can learn more about his work here. 

David Weil is Dean and Professor of the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. Prior to joining Brandeis, he was the Peter and Deborah Wexler Professor of Management at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. In 2014, he was appointed by President Barack Obama to be the Administrator of the Wage and Hour Division of the U.S. Department of Labor and was the first Senate confirmed head of that agency in a decade. He led the Wage and Hour Division until January 2017.

His area of expertise is employment and labor market policy; regulation; transparency policy and digital empowerment; and the impacts of industry restructuring on employment and work outcomes and business performance.  David was a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Committee on Contingent Work and Alternative Work Arrangements.  The Committee (which included Susan Houseman, Chair, and Katharine Abraham) published its report, Measuring Alternative Work Arrangements for Research and Policy in 2020. His highly influential book, The Fissured Workplace, and the website that has grown from it may be viewed here.  He is widely sought in the US and abroad as an advisor on public policy questions.