Juliet B Schor
Biographic Data
| ID | 165786 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Juliet B Schor |
| GIVEN NAMES | Juliet B |
| FAMILY NAME | Schor |
| SIGNATURE | SCHOR J B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Boston College |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9635-1232 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 64 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1352 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 61 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 18 |
Post-growth: The science of wellbeing within planetary boundaries
Distinction at Work: Status Practices in A Community Production Environment
While it is well established that bureaucratic organizations channel status competitions into formal hierarchies, status competitions in nonhierarchical organizational contexts are less well understood. Using a Bourdieusian analysis of practices of status distinction, we analyze the case of an organization that is structurally flat, in order to investigate how status hierarchies and ascribed inequalities are produced and reproduced in a context w…
Do economists think about climate change and inequality? Semantic analysis and topic modeling of top five economics journals
The Four-Day Workweek: Possibility or Pipe Dream
Work time reduction via a 4-day workweek finds improvements in workers' well-being
Labour platforms as mechanisms of class reproduction: Middle-class interests as the basis of worker consent
Expansion of the platform economy has given rise to a paradox in the literature on gig work: Given capital’s imposition of algorithmic controls, why do so many platform workers express support and appreciation for gig work, viewing it as enhancing their autonomy? Approaches toward this question have advanced numerous explanations, such as gamification, neoliberal norms, and entrepreneurial culture. We find these efforts only partially successful,…
Employment status and the on-demand economy: A Natural Experiment on Reclassification
This article uses data from a natural experiment to address one of the most contentious issues in the on-demand platform economy-whether gig work is compatible with standard employment. We analyze a US-based package delivery platform that shifted a subset of its workers from independent contractors to employees, thereby creating a natural experiment that allowed us to exploit variation over time and across locations. We examine the impact of empl…
"Commercialization on "Sharing Platforms: The Case of Airbnb Hosting
An underdeveloped theme in scholars' understanding of the personal services sector of the platform economy-also known as the "sharing economy"-is change. Most research on ride-hail, food delivery, accommodations, and other personal services has offered largely essentialist accounts. In this paper, we focus on how platforms have become increasingly "commercialized." In labor-intensive services, commercialization occurs as a growing fraction of the…
Consent and Contestation: How Platform Workers Reckon with the Risks of Gig Labor
How do gig workers respond to the various financial, physical, and legal risks their work entails? Answers to this question have remained unclear, largely because previous studies have overlooked structurally induced variations in the experience of platform work. In this article, we develop a theory of differential embeddedness to explain why workers' orientations toward the risks of gig work vary. We argue further that because platforms define t…
Delivering difference: ‘Unbelonging’ among US platform parcel delivery workers
This paper explores a neglected aspect of platform work: how the spatial mobility that app-based couriers must perform requires them to violate taken-for-granted assumptions that define who belongs where. By assigning tasks during atypical hours and requiring gig workers to use their personal clothing, tools and vehicles, platforms strip delivery workers of signifiers that legitimate their presence in consumers’ neighbourhoods. The result is a co…
Degrowth can work — here’s how science can help
‘God Is Protecting Me … And I Have Mace’: Defensive Labour In Precarious Workplaces
Since the 1970s, welfare cuts and market deregulation have made jobs increasingly precarious and workers have been made responsible for their own safety. In this context, technological developments have recently paved the way for the gig economy, in which tasks and services are distributed on digital platforms. Drawing on interviews with 32 Uber and Lyft drivers in New York City and Boston, we document how the intersecting forces of precarity, re…
On digitalization and sustainability transitions
Between mutuality, autonomy and domination: Rethinking Digital Platforms as Contested Relational Structures
This Special Issue advances a new understanding of digital platforms as dynamic and relational. An archetypal transaction platform, we argue, is comprised of three canonical social relationships which exist in tension with each other. The first is mutuality-the practices of sharing and reciprocity which animated the early days of the 'sharing economy'. The second is autonomy-representing the desire for freedom and independence attracting many ear…
The Sharing Economy: Rhetoric and Reality
The sharing economy is transforming economies around the world, entering markets for lodging, ride hailing, home services, and other sectors that previously lacked robust person-to-person alternatives. Its expansion has been contentious and its meanings polysemic. It launched with a utopian discourse promising economic, social, and environmental benefits, which critics have questioned. In this review, we discuss its origins and intellectual found…
Chapter 8. Cooperative Networks, Participatory Markets, and Rhizomatic Resistance: Situating Plenitude within Contemporary Political Economy Debates
Chapter 8. Cooperative Networks, Participatory Markets, and Rhizomatic Resistance: Situating Plenitude within Contemporary Political Economy Debates was published in Sustainable Lifestyles and the Quest for Plenitude on page 233.
Sustainable Lifestyles and the Quest for Plenitude: Case Studies of the New Economy
How small, innovative grassroots groups are discovering a new kind of economy and a richer quality of life Many of today’s most troubling environmental and economic issues have come to seem insoluble: carbon emissions, overshoot, inequality, joblessness, and a dysfunctional food system. Can we change direction, move away from business as usual, and achieve a more sustainable, empowering, and humane economy? Through a fascinating array of illumina…
Domesticating the market: Moral Exchange and the Sharing Economy
The 'sharing economy' is a contested realm, with critics arguing it represents a further development of neoliberalism, as platforms such as Airbnb and TaskRabbit, monetize previously uncommodified realms of life via renting of bedrooms, possessions, space and labor time. To date, this debate has largely ignored participants' views. Using data from 120 in-depth interviews with providers in two for-profit and three not-for-profit sites, we find tha…
What Do Platforms Do? Understanding the Gig Economy
The rapid growth of the platform economy has provoked scholarly discussion of its consequences for the nature of work and employment. We identify four major themes in the literature on platform work and the underlying metaphors associated with each. Platforms are seen as entrepreneurial incubators, digital cages, accelerants of precarity, and chameleons adapting to their environments. Each of these devices has limitations, which leads us to intro…
Dependence and precarity in the platform economy
Social science perspectives on drivers of and responses to global climate change
This article provides a review of recent anthropological, archeological, geographical, and sociological research on anthropogenic drivers of climate change, with a particular focus on drivers of carbon emissions, mitigation and adaptation. The four disciplines emphasize cultural, economic, geographic, historical, political, and social‐structural factors to be important drivers of and responses to climate change. Each of these disciplines has uniq…
Homemade Matters: Logics of Opposition in a Failed Food Swap
A rich literature on commensuration and standards of evaluation has yielded important findings on how items are valued. Over the course of a two-year ethnography, we witnessed one effort to create a new economic practice—a monthly swap of “homemade food”—start promisingly but ultimately fail as participants were unable to reach consensus on valuations. They rejected each other’s offerings on numerous grounds, including proximity to industrial foo…
Working Hours and Carbon Dioxide Emissions in the United States, 2007–2013
The well-established association between economic output and carbon emissions has led researchers in sociology and related disciplines to study new approaches to climate change mitigation, including policies that stabilize or reduce GDP growth. Within this degrowth approach, working time reduction is a key policy lever to reduce emissions as well as protect employment. In the United States, the abdication of responsibility for mitigation by the f…
Income Inequality and Carbon Emissions in the United States: A State-level Analysis, 1997–2012
Wealth Inequality and Carbon Emissions in High-income Countries
This study contributes to the emerging literature on connections between climate change and economic inequality by investigating the relationship between domestic wealth inequality and consumption-based carbon emissions for 26 high-income countries from 2000 to 2010. Results of the two-way fixed effects longitudinal models indicate that the effect of wealth inequality, measured as the wealth share of the top decile, on per capita emissions in hig…
What Do Platforms Do? Understanding the Gig Economy
The rapid growth of the platform economy has provoked scholarly discussion of its consequences for the nature of work and employment. We identify four major themes in the literature on platform work and the underlying metaphors associated with each. Platforms are seen as entrepreneurial incubators, digital cages, accelerants of precarity, and chameleons adapting to their environments. Each of these devices has limitations, which leads us to intro…
Putting the sharing economy into perspective
An emerging eco-habitus: The reconfiguration of high cultural capital practices among ethical consumers
Bourdieu's concept of habitus describes a set of tastes and dispositions operating according to a class homology - for example, a working-class preference for utility, or a bourgeois orientation toward luxury. In the United States, Holt found that high cultural capital consumers were characterized by their cosmopolitanism, idealism, connoisseurship, and affinity for the exotic and authentic. In this article, we use Holt's analysis as a comparativ…
Dependence and precarity in the platform economy
The "sharing" economy: Labor, Inequality, and Social Connection on for-Profit Platforms
For social analysts, what has come to be called the "sharing economy" raises important questions. After a discussion of history and definitions, we focus on 3 areas of research in the for-profit segment, also called the platform economy: social connection, conditions for laborers, and inequalities. Although we find that some parts of the platform economy, particularly Airbnb, do foster social connection, there are also ways in which even shared h…
Public Sociologies: A Symposium from Boston College
This symposium brings together the theory and practice of public sociology. The introduction sets out the meanings of public sociology, emphasizing its plurality and its relation to multiple publics. From there, it frames public sociology in relation to policy, professional, and critical sociologies. This constellation of the division of sociological labor varies over time and between countries. We argue for a normative model of antagonistic inte…
Could working less reduce pressures on the environment? A cross-national panel analysis of OECD countries, 1970–2007
The Sharing Economy: Rhetoric and Reality
The sharing economy is transforming economies around the world, entering markets for lodging, ride hailing, home services, and other sectors that previously lacked robust person-to-person alternatives. Its expansion has been contentious and its meanings polysemic. It launched with a utopian discourse promising economic, social, and environmental benefits, which critics have questioned. In this review, we discuss its origins and intellectual found…
Does the sharing economy increase inequality within the eighty percent: Findings from a qualitative study of platform providers
The sharing economy has generated controversy for its effects on labour conditions, wages and the distributions of income and wealth. In this article, we present evidence for a previously unrecognized effect: increased income inequality among the bottom 80% of the distribution. On the basis of interviews with US providers on three for-profit platforms (Airbnb, RelayRides and TaskRabbit), we find that providers are highly educated and many have we…
Does Changing a Light Bulb Lead to Changing the World? Political Action and the Conscious Consumer
As the prevalence of "conscious" consumption has grown, questions have arisen about its relationship to political action. An influential argument holds that political consumption individualizes responsibility for environmental degradation and "crowds out" genuine forms of activism. While European and Canadian empirical research contradicts this perspective, finding that conscious consumption and political engagement are positively connected, no s…
In Defense of Consumer Critique: Revisiting the Consumption Debates of the Twentieth Century
In the past twenty-five years, the literature on consumption has gained analytic power by positioning itself against the consumer critics of the twentieth century (Veblen, Adorno and Horkheimer, Galbraith, Baudrillard), arguing that these accounts were totalizing, theorized consumers as too passive, and simplified motives. The literature moved to micro-level, interpretive studies that are often depoliticized and lack a critical approach to the su…
Consent and Contestation: How Platform Workers Reckon with the Risks of Gig Labor
How do gig workers respond to the various financial, physical, and legal risks their work entails? Answers to this question have remained unclear, largely because previous studies have overlooked structurally induced variations in the experience of platform work. In this article, we develop a theory of differential embeddedness to explain why workers' orientations toward the risks of gig work vary. We argue further that because platforms define t…
Between mutuality, autonomy and domination: Rethinking Digital Platforms as Contested Relational Structures
This Special Issue advances a new understanding of digital platforms as dynamic and relational. An archetypal transaction platform, we argue, is comprised of three canonical social relationships which exist in tension with each other. The first is mutuality-the practices of sharing and reciprocity which animated the early days of the 'sharing economy'. The second is autonomy-representing the desire for freedom and independence attracting many ear…
Domestic Inequality and Carbon Emissions in Comparative Perspective
Drawing from multiple bodies of literature, the authors investigate the relationship between consumption‐based carbon emissions and domestic income inequality for 67 nations from 1991 to 2008. Results of two‐way fixed‐effects longitudinal models indicate that the relationship between national‐level emissions and inequality changes through time and varies for nations in different macroeconomic contexts. For high‐income nations, the relationship sh…
Domesticating the market: Moral Exchange and the Sharing Economy
The 'sharing economy' is a contested realm, with critics arguing it represents a further development of neoliberalism, as platforms such as Airbnb and TaskRabbit, monetize previously uncommodified realms of life via renting of bedrooms, possessions, space and labor time. To date, this debate has largely ignored participants' views. Using data from 120 in-depth interviews with providers in two for-profit and three not-for-profit sites, we find tha…
Paradoxes of openness and distinction in the sharing economy
The Underdog Effect: The Marketing of Disadvantage and Determination through Brand Biography
We introduce the concept of an underdog brand biography to describe an emerging trend in branding in which firms author a historical account of their humble origins, lack of resources, and determined struggle against the odds. We identify two essential dimensions of an underdog biography: external disadvantage, and passion and determination. We demonstrate that such a biography can increase purchase intentions, real choice, and brand loyalty. We …
On digitalization and sustainability transitions
Empirical tests of status consumption: Evidence from women's cosmetics
The Golden Age of Capitalism: Reinterpreting the Postwar Experience
Journal Article The Golden Age of Capitalism: Reinterpreting the Postwar Experience. The Theory of Economic Breakdown. Capitalism since 1945. Get access The Golden Age of Capitalism: Reinterpreting the Postwar Experience. Edited by Marglin (Stephen) and Schor (Juliet). (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1990. Pp. xiv+256. £27.50 hardback. ISBN 0 198286775.)The Theory of Economic Breakdown. By Cornwall (John) . (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Ba…
Wealth Inequality and Carbon Emissions in High-income Countries
This study contributes to the emerging literature on connections between climate change and economic inequality by investigating the relationship between domestic wealth inequality and consumption-based carbon emissions for 26 high-income countries from 2000 to 2010. Results of the two-way fixed effects longitudinal models indicate that the effect of wealth inequality, measured as the wealth share of the top decile, on per capita emissions in hig…
Global equity and environmental crisis: An argument for reducing working hours in the North
Climate discourse and economic downturns: The case of the United States, 2008–2013
Critical and Moral Stances in Consumer Studies
Delivering difference: ‘Unbelonging’ among US platform parcel delivery workers
This paper explores a neglected aspect of platform work: how the spatial mobility that app-based couriers must perform requires them to violate taken-for-granted assumptions that define who belongs where. By assigning tasks during atypical hours and requiring gig workers to use their personal clothing, tools and vehicles, platforms strip delivery workers of signifiers that legitimate their presence in consumers’ neighbourhoods. The result is a co…
Changes in the Cyclical Pattern of Real Wages: Evidence From Nine Countries, 1955-80
Journal Article Changes in the Cyclical Pattern of Real Wages: Evidence From Nine Countries, 1955-80 Get access Juliet B. Schor Juliet B. Schor Harvard University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 95, Issue 378, 1 June 1985, Pages 452–468, https://doi.org/10.2307/2233220 Published: 01 June 1985
Employment Rents and the Incidence of Strikes
A new measure of labor market tightness on workers' behavior--the employment rent--is modeled as a determinant of workplace conflict. An empirical estimate of the employment rent--workers' expected cost of job loss--is calculated. It is argued that the cost of job loss affects strike incidence. This relationship is tested by estimating an econometric model of strike incidence for the United States from 1955 to 1983. The cost of job loss is shown …
Global equity and environmental crisis: An argument for reducing working hours in the North
The Golden Age of Capitalism: Reinterpreting the Postwar Experience
Lal Jayawardena: Preface Stephen A. Marglin: Lessons of the golden age: an overview Andrew Glyn, Alan Hughes, Alan Lipietz, & Ajit Singh: The rise and fall of the golden age Gerald Epstein, & Juliet Schor: Macropolicy in the rise and fall of the golden age Stephen A. Marglin & Amit Bhaduri: Profit squeeze and Keynesian theory Samuel Bowles, & Robert Boyer: A wage-led employment regime: income distribution, labour discipline, and aggregate demand …
The Golden Age of Capitalism: Reinterpreting the Postwar Experience
For some twenty years after the Second World War, Keynesian economic policies in countries of the capitalist West were successful in generating rapid growth with high employment. This ‘golden age of capitalism’ did not survive the economic traumas of the 1970s; nor has the more recent emphasis on monetarist policies and supply-side performance succeeded in regenerating comparable growth rates. Blending historical analysis with economic theory, th…
The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure
The Golden Age of Capitalism: Reinterpreting the Postwar Experience
Journal Article The Golden Age of Capitalism: Reinterpreting the Postwar Experience. The Theory of Economic Breakdown. Capitalism since 1945. Get access The Golden Age of Capitalism: Reinterpreting the Postwar Experience. Edited by Marglin (Stephen) and Schor (Juliet). (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1990. Pp. xiv+256. £27.50 hardback. ISBN 0 198286775.)The Theory of Economic Breakdown. By Cornwall (John) . (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Ba…
The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure
Journal Article The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure. By Juliet B. Schor. (New York: BasicBooks, 1991. xx + 247 pp. $21.00, ISBN 0-465-05433-1.) Get access Myra Dinnerstein Myra Dinnerstein University of Arizona Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 79, Issue 4, March 1993, Pages 1691–1692, https://doi.org/10.2307/2080359 Published: 01 March 1993
The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure
What's wrong with consumer capitalism?The joyless economyafter twenty years
The Joyless Economy seeks to explain the paradox of rising consumption and pervasive dissatifaction, and is thus often cited as a critique of consumer society. Yet it is rather ambivalent as critique. A less ambivalent critique would be predicated on the existence of biases toward private consumption as against public consumption, savings, free time, and the environment. These biases result from two sources: the importance of social comparison an…
Capital, the State and Labour: A Global Perspective
Introduction - after the golden age, Juliet B. Schor and Jong-Il You capital labour relations in the OECD countries - from the Fordist golden age to contrasted national trajectories, Robert Boyar co-operative employment relations and Japanese economic growth, William Lazonick capital-labour relations in South Korea - past, present and future, Jong-Il You new unionism and the relations among capital, labour and the ..... in Brazil, Edward J. Amade…
Empirical tests of status consumption: Evidence from women's cosmetics
Time, Labour and Consumption: Guest Editor's Introduction
Public Sociologies: A Symposium from Boston College
This symposium brings together the theory and practice of public sociology. The introduction sets out the meanings of public sociology, emphasizing its plurality and its relation to multiple publics. From there, it frames public sociology in relation to policy, professional, and critical sociologies. This constellation of the division of sociological labor varies over time and between countries. We argue for a normative model of antagonistic inte…
Sustainable Consumption and Worktime Reduction
This article argues that in the global North a successful path to sustainability will entail a stabilization of consumption through reductions in hours of work, a solution that neither ecologists nor economists have addressed seriously. The article presents data on the slowdown of hours reductions in many countries and discusses the need for policy intervention to counter firm‐level disincentives to reducing hours of work. It then discusses the p…
The new consumers: The influence of affluence on the environment
Prices and quantities: Unsustainable consumption and the global economy
Point of Purchase: How Shopping Changed American Culture
In Defense of Consumer Critique: Revisiting the Consumption Debates of the Twentieth Century
In the past twenty-five years, the literature on consumption has gained analytic power by positioning itself against the consumer critics of the twentieth century (Veblen, Adorno and Horkheimer, Galbraith, Baudrillard), arguing that these accounts were totalizing, theorized consumers as too passive, and simplified motives. The literature moved to micro-level, interpretive studies that are often depoliticized and lack a critical approach to the su…
Conspicuous Consumption
The term conspicuous consumption entered the sociological lexicon via Thorstein Veblen's biting analysis of the spending patterns of the rich and nouveau riches in the late nineteenth century. The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) is an account of how these groups spent enormous energy and money constructing an ostentatious style of life. They built and decorated ornate homes, adorned their persons with clothing and jewelry, designed elaborate c…
Tackling Turbo Consumption1
Juliet Schor is Professor in Sociology at Boston College. She is author of The Overspent American, The Overworked American, Born to Buy and a new collection, forthcoming in 2009, Consumerism and Its Discontents. She is co-editor of The Consumer Society Reader and Sustainable Planet; and co-founder of South End Press and The Center for a New American Dream, an organisation which ‘helps Americans consume responsibly to protect the environment, enha…
Critical and Moral Stances in Consumer Studies
Combating Consumerism and Capitalism: A Decade of No Logo
WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 38: 3 & 4 (Fall/Winter 2010) © 2010 by Juliet Schor. All rights reserved. Critiques of global capitalism are hardly new. Since Marx’s own analyses in the late-nineteenth century, each generation of left-wing intellectuals has produced devastating accounts of the operation of the capitalism system. The 1950s brought us Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy on monopoly power and John Kenneth Galbraith on advertising and affluenc…
The Consumer Society Reader
The Underdog Effect: The Marketing of Disadvantage and Determination through Brand Biography
We introduce the concept of an underdog brand biography to describe an emerging trend in branding in which firms author a historical account of their humble origins, lack of resources, and determined struggle against the odds. We identify two essential dimensions of an underdog biography: external disadvantage, and passion and determination. We demonstrate that such a biography can increase purchase intentions, real choice, and brand loyalty. We …
Economics (41 works) · Political science (33 works) · Sociology (31 works) · Law (19 works) · Business (18 works) · Digital Economy and Work Transformation (16 works) · Sharing Economy and Platforms (15 works) · Social science (15 works) · Engineering (13 works) · Psychology (12 works)