Arne L. Kalleberg

Biosketch

Arne L. Kalleberg is a Kenan Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Born in Norway, he attended Stuyvesant High School in NYC and received his BA from Brooklyn College in 1971 (from which he received a Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2009). He obtained his MA (1972) and PhD (1975) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to joining the faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill in 1986, he was a Professor of Sociology at Indiana University-Bloomington. He has been a visiting professor at universities in Germany, Norway, South Korea, and Sweden. Kalleberg’s research has been supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Japan Foundation, and the Norwegian Research Council. He served as Secretary of the American Sociological Association from 2001-2004 and as its President in 2007-2008. He has received career achievement awards from two sections of the American Sociological Association (Inequality, Poverty and Mobility; and Organizations, Occupations, and Work). In addition to the National Academy of Sciences, Kalleberg is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Labor and Employment Relations Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and The Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters. Since 2010, Kalleberg has been the editor of Social Forces, An International Journal of Social Research.

Research Interests

Kalleberg’s research focuses on three main topics related to work, organizations, occupations and industries, labor markets, and social stratification. First, he has studied the fit between persons and jobs, represented by his comparative studies of organizations and work attitudes in Japan and the United States (e.g., his 1990 book with James Lincoln, Culture, Control, and Commitment, and his 2007 book, The Mismatched Worker). Second, he has documented how different kinds of work structures (occupations, organizations, industries, unions, classes) generate inequalities in economic and noneconomic job rewards (e.g., his 1996 book with David Knoke, Peter Marsden, and Joe Spaeth, Organizations in America). Third, he has studied transformations in employment relations—especially the causes and consequences of nonstandard work arrangements such as temporary, contract, and part-time work—in the U.S., Asia, and Europe. Kalleberg’s 2011 book, Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: The Rise of Polarized and Precarious Employment Systems in the United States, 1970s to 2000s, received best book awards from the Academy of Management and the American Sociological Association. In Precarious Lives: Job Insecurity and Well-Being in Rich Democracies (2018) and Precarious Asia (2022, with Kevin Hewison and Kwang-Yeong Shin) he showed how precarious work is shaped by institutional and cultural contexts. In current work, Kalleberg is examining the structure of careers and intragenerational mobility in the U.S. (with Ted Mouw and Michael Schultz), and the role of corporations in capitalism.