Ellen Israel Rosen

Areas of Expertise

Sociology of Work; Class and Gender; Class, Status and Power

Email: eirosen@brandeis.edu

Current Project

I will complete my book focusing on labor, women’s, and other issues at Wal-Mart, titled Inside Wal-Mart.

Biography

The basic thrust of Ellen’s research has been on the intersection of class and gender. Her first book, Bitter Choices: Blue Collar Women in and Out of Work was based on a study of over 200 women factory workers who were employed in traditional women’s factory jobs. Bitter Choices examines what happened to these women after they began to lose these jobs.  In her second book, Making Sweatshops: The Globalization of the U.S. Apparel Industry, she researched why these jobs had disappeared.  What she is now beginning to discover is that the process of globalization may also be creating new kinds of sweatshops for women in the U.S.

Ellen’s latest book project is a study of Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is the largest company in the world, the largest employer in the U.S., and they are currently being sued for violating U.S. labor laws.  This new research should explore the kinds of problems facing women employed at Wal-Mart stores today.

Ellen Rosen is a sociologist who has taught at Vassar College and is now Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Nichols College. She has done research at the London School of Economics, at M.I.T, The Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, and at Boston College.

Education

Ph.D., City University of New York

M.A., Hunter College

B.A., Washington University

Representative Publications

Rosen, Ellen. “Wal-Mart: The New Retail Revolution.”  Wal-Mart World: The World’s Biggest Corporation in the Global Economy. Routledge Taylor and Francis, 2006.

Rosen, Ellen. “The New Wal-Mart Compensation Scam.” New Labor Forum. 16.1(2008).