Department of Sociology
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720
Telephone: 510-642-4756
kimvoss@berkeley.edu
Kim Voss arrived at Berkeley in 1986 with a Ph.D. from Stanford and considerable real-life experience with inequality in America. She studies labor, work, social movements, and comparative-historical sociology. Her recent work explores the politics of the contemporary American labor movement, and particularly the prospects for its renewal. She has published two books about U.S. labor today: Hard Work: Remaking the America Labor Movement (with Rick Fantasia, University of California Press 2004) and Rebuilding Labor: Organizing and Organizers in the New Union Movement (co-edited with Ruth Milkman, Cornell University Press 2004), along with several articles.
In earlier work, Professor Voss studied the Knights of Labor--the largest American union organization of the nineteenth-century--to shed light on the question of why the U.S. labor movement has traditionally been so weak and politically conservative in comparison to labor movements in Western Europe. Her book on the Knights, The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century (Cornell University Press) was published in 1993. In 1996, she and five of her Berkeley colleagues wrote Inequality By Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth (Princeton University Press 1996).
In addition to her current research on contemporary labor, Professor Voss is also exploring the local and generative dynamics of transnational social movements, is doing a historical investigation of the practical power of narrative in social movements, and is editing a book, Rallying for Immigrant Rights (with Irene Bloemraad), on the immigration protests of Spring 2006.
