Kim VOSS

Kim Voss arrived at Berkeley in 1986 with a Ph.D. from Stanford. She studies work, social movements, labor, inequality, and comparative-historical sociology.

Her current research explores contemporary social movements, the emergence and institutionalization of a system of professions surrounding college admissions, and worker identities in a new era of immigration. She recently published a coedited book on the 2006 immigration protests (with Irene Bloemraad), Rallying for Immigrant Rights: The Fight for Inclusion in 21st Century America (University of California Press 2011). Earlier this year, she and Michelle Williams published  “The Local in the Global: Rethinking Social Movements in the New Millennium,” in Democratization (Vol. 19, 2012).

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, including, most recently, “Democratic Dilemmas: Union Democracy and Union Renewal,” Transfer: European Review of Labor and Research, 16 (August 2010): 369-382.

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).