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For the past six decades, Berkeley’s Sociology Department has consistently been ranked among the world’s top sociology departments. Our graduate program is ranked #1 in the latest U.S. News and World Report, and our undergrad degree is currently the best in the US according to College Factual and features on Grad Reports’ Best College List 2020.
Prof. Einstein served graduate students as a model of prudence in remaining unfashionably true to the grand…
The Outsourced Self
With the rise of the service sector, more middle class Americans are living their personal lives on a “market frontier.” More people hire—and take up jobs as—nannies, childcare center workers, eldercare workers, eldercare managers, pet care workers, on-line dating services, life coaches, wedding planners, party animators, funeral service providers and even “rent-a-friends.” Through an on-line service called TaskRabbit, one woman hired a person to cheer for her at a marathon. What constellation of trends underlie this shift, the book asks, and what con...
Departmental Colloquium Series
Michael McCarthy Dismantling Solidarity: Capitalist Politics and American Pensions since the New Deal Monday
Monday, April 19, 2-3:30pm via Zoom
Michael McCarthy
Dismantling Solidarity: Capitalist Politics and American Pensions since the New Deal
What explains the decades long marketization of retirement security in the US since the New Deal period? This talk explores two key transformations, which both had profound demonstration effects around the world. First, the adoption of private collectively bargained pensions after World War Two as an alternative to expanding the public Social Security system. And second, the replacement of these defined-benefit plans with riskier defined-contribution plans, such as 401(k)s. It makes three interlocking arguments about these changes to develop a theory of structural contingency. First, state intervention in labor-management relations triggered marketization. Second, policymakers intervened to manage perceived crises in capitalism – a structural condition. And third, how they intervened and how their policy choices caused marketization was a result of historical contingencies. Drawing from archival research, the talk will argue that the structural constraints of capitalist democracy established a range of possible policy paths available to policymakers, but contingent factors channeled policy selection within that range. It argues that this has important implications for how we conceptualize capitalist democracy.
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Michael A. McCarthy is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Social and Cultural Sciences at Marquette University and an incoming Berggruen Research Fellow at the University of Southern California’s Center on Science, Technology and Public Life. His book, Dismantling Solidarity, was awarded the American Sociological Association's Paul Sweezy Book Award and the Labor and Labor Movements' Distinguished Book Award Honorable Mention. He currently has two book projects underway. The first is on democratizing finance and the second is on sociological Marxism.