Juliet Schor is an economist and sociologist at Boston College. Schor’s research focuses on work, consumption, and climate change. Schor received her Ph.D. in economics at the University of Massachusetts and taught at Harvard University for 17 years. Since 2011 Schor has been studying the “sharing” and “gig” economies. Her most recent book is a collaboration titled After the Gig: how the sharing economy got hijacked and how to win it back (2020), which won the Porchlight Management and Workplace Culture Book of the Year. Schor and her collaborators have written more than twenty-five articles and chapters on this topic.
Schor’s previous books include the national best-seller The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (1992) and The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need (1998) and True Wealth: How and Why Millions of Americans are Creating a Time-Rich, Ecologically Light, Small-Scale, High-Satisfaction Economy (2011). The Overworked American is widely credited for influencing the national debate on work and family. The Overspent American was also made into a video of the same name, by the Media Education Foundation (2003).
Schor is a former Guggenheim Fellow and was the Matina S. Horner Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University in 2014-15. She has received many awards and prizes, including the 2014 American Sociological Association’s award for Public Understanding of Sociology, the 2011 Herman Daly Award from the US Society for Ecological Economics, the 2006 Leontief Prize from the Global Development and Economics Institute at Tufts University for expanding the frontiers of economic thought, and the George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contributions to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language from the National Council of Teachers of English. She has served as a consultant to the United Nations, at the World Institute for Development Economics Research, and to the United Nations Development Program. She is also a former Brookings Institution fellow.
Schor is a cofounder of the Center for a New American Dream (newdream.org), a national sustainability organization where she served on the board for more than 15 years. She chairs the board of the Better Future Project, a Massachusetts-based climate justice organization. She is a co-founder of the South End Press and the Center for Popular Economics. She has also served as a Trustee of Wesleyan University, and as an occasional faculty member at Schumacher College. Schor has lectured widely throughout the United States, Europe and Japan to a variety of civic, business, labor and academic groups. She appears frequently on national and international media, and profiles on her and her work have appeared in scores of magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and People magazine. She has appeared on 60 Minutes, the Today Show, Good Morning America, The Early Show on CBS, numerous stories on network news, as well as many other television and radio news programs.