Profile
Rachel Sherman is the Michael E. Gellert Professor of. She is broadly interested inhow and why unequal social relations are reproduced, legitimated, and contested, and in how these processes are embedded in cultural vocabularies of identity, interaction, and moral worth.Empirically, she uses ethnography and in-depth interviewingto investigate service work, entitlement and lifestyle, and redistributive movements in the contemporary U.S.Her teaching includes courses on qualitative methods, class, work and labor, social movements, culture, and consumption.
Her first book,(University of California Press, 2007), draws primarily on participant observation research to analyze how workers, guests, and managers in these hotels make sense of and negotiate the class inequalities that mark their relationships.
Her second book,(Princeton University Press, 2017), uses in-depth interviews to explore the lived experience of privilege among wealthy and affluent New York parents.The book has been covered or reviewed by the,ٳ, the,, the,,Books in Brief, and the. An adapted excerpt appeared at.Sherman's essay for theNew York TimesSundayReview, published in conjunction with the book,.
As a 2018-2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, she conducted research for her current book project, titledClass Traitors. Here she explores the world ofwealthy progressives who are challenging the unequal social systems that have enabled their wealth--analogous to, and often overlapping with, white antiracists striving to dismantle systems of white supremacy. Class traitors work against accumulation and toward redistribution through social justice philanthropy and investing, partnering with grassroots social movements, and pushing policy alternatives such as higher taxes on the rich, as well as organizing other wealthy people. An early essay from that work is .
She has also conducted research on the contemporary U.S. labor movement; on expert service work, especially the "lifestyle management"industry; the interactive artwork of Tino Sehgal; and food services in the airline industry.
Degrees Held
AB 1991, Brown University
PhD 2003, University of California, Berkeley
Recent Publications
Books
2017 . Princeton: Princeton University Press.
2007 . Berkeley: University of California Press.
Selected Articles
2021 “.” Sociologica 15(2): 117-142.
2020 “.” Recherches anthropologiques et sociologiques 1: 61-86.
2020 With Jussara Raxlen. “Labor, Lifestyle, and the ‘Ladies Who Lunch’: Work and Worth Among Elite Stay at Home Mothers.” Research in the Sociology of Work 34: 195-220.
2018 "'." Socio-Economic Review 16(2): 411-433.
2017 “.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology5(1-2): 1-33/
2015 “Caring or Catering? Emotions, Autonomy and Subordination in Lifestyle Work.” In, edited by Mignon Duffy, Amy Armenia, and Clare Stacey, Rutgers University Press.
2014 “.”Public Culture26(3): 393-418.
2011."Qualitative Sociology34(1): 201-219.
2011 “.”Work, Employment and Society25(1): 19-33.
2010 “.”Work & Occupations37(1): 81-114.
2005 “.” Ethnography 6(2): 131-158.
2000 “,” with Kim Voss. American Journal of Sociology 106(2): 303-349, September/October. (Reprinted in Amy Wharton, ed., The Sociology of Organizations: An Anthology of Contemporary Theory and Research, Roxbury, 2007.)
-Winner of the Distinguished Article Award, Society for the Study of Social Problems, Labor Studies Division, 2001.
1999“.” Theory and Society 28 (6): 835-878.
Addditional Publications
2017 "."Items: Insights from the Social Sciences (SSRC),April 17, 2017.
Media
2020 Quoted in "," The New Republic, July 20, 2020.
2020Quoted in "," The Atlantic, March 2, 2020.
2019 "," The New York Times, April 27, 2019.
2019 "," Christian Science Monitor, April 11, 2019.
2017 "," The New York Times, September 8, 2017.
Research Interests
Social class, culture, service work, social movements,qualitative methods
Awards And Honors
Carnegie Fellowship, 2018-2020
Portfolio