The Work and Occupations symposium issue on “The New Labor Activism” is published on “online first.”
The Work and Occupations symposium issue on “The New Labor Activism” is published on “online first.” Vanderbilt sociology Professors Dan Cornfield and Larry Isaac, and recent graduates of the Vanderbilt sociology doctoral program Jonathan Coley (PhD 2016), Oklahoma State University and Rachel Skaggs (PhD, 2018), Ohio State University, are among the diverse authors of the fifteen symposium essays. The symposium presents a new generation of labor sociology research for comprehending and sustaining the contemporary labor mobilization in the U.S., the largest labor mobilization since the 1930s. The essays focus on the themes of “history,” “intersectionality,” “worker agency,” and “hierarchy” and continue the post-World War II transition of the field from a union-centered toward a worker-centered labor sociology. The symposium essays are written in dialogue with the June, 2022 report on U.S. labor organizing issued by the Worker Empowerment Research Network, a new network of labor market researchers associated with the MIT Sloan School of Management, Cornell, Rutgers, and Columbia Universities, and other universities and colleges. The symposium issue can be accessed from the “online first” section of the Work and Occupations website.