Juliet B. Schor

Juliet Schor is an economist and sociologist at Boston College. Her research focuses on work, consumption and climate change. A graduate of Wesleyan University, Schor received her Ph.D. in economics at the University of Massachusetts. Before joining Boston College, she taught at Harvard University for 17 years in the Department of Economics and the Committee on Degrees in Women’s Studies.

Schor’s latest book, “Four Days a Week: The Life-Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving Well-Being, and Working Smarter” (Harper Business, June 2025), is based on research trials of companies who are implementing four day workweeks. Since the beginning of 2022 these trials, organized by the non-profit 4 Day Week Global have been ongoing. With colleagues, including Professor Wen Fan of the sociology department, the research team has collected data on employee health and well-being, organizational outcomes and carbon emissions.

Since 2011 Schor has also been studying the “sharing” and “gig” economies. Her book “After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win it Back,” (University of California Press, 2020) — a collaboration with a team of seven PhD students — 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.

She is also working on the environmental impacts of Airbnb with colleagues from Northeastern and Fairfield Universities, funded by the Internet Society and Sloan Foundations. Schor is a co-founder of the Center for a New American Dream, 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 and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Schor’s previous books include the national best-seller “The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure” (Basic Books, 1992) and “The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need” (Basic Books, 1998) and “True Wealth: How and Why Millions of Americans are Creating a Time-Rich, Ecologically Light, Small-Scale, High-Satisfaction Economy” (2011 by The Penguin Press, previously published as Plenitude). “The Overworked American” appeared on the best-seller lists of The New York Times, Publisher’s Weekly, The Chicago Tribune, The Village Voice, The Boston Globe as well as the annual best books list for The New York Times, Business Week and other publications. The book 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 (September 2003).

Juliet 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. In 2014 Schor received the American Sociological Association’s award for Public Understanding of Sociology. From 2010-2017 Schor was a member of the MacArthur Foundation Connected Learning Research Network. She is the recipient of the 2011 Herman Daly Award from the US Society for Ecological Economics. In 2006 she received the Leontief Prize from the Global Development and Economics Institute at Tufts University for expanding the frontiers of economic thought. She has also received 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. In 2012 Schor organized the first Summer Institute in New Economics, a week-long program for PhD students in the social sciences, and repeated the program in 2013.

Schor also wrote “Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture” (Scribner, 2004) and “Do Americans Shop Too Much?” (Beacon Press 2000). She has co-edited numerous books including “Sustainable Lifestyles and the Quest for Plenitude: Case Studies of the New Economy” (Yale University Press, 2014 with Craig Thompson), “Consumer Society: A Reader” (The New Press 2000 with Douglas Holt), “Sustainable Planet: Solutions for the Twenty-first Century” (Beacon Press 2002 with Betsy Taylor) and “The Golden Age of Capitalism” (Oxford 1989 with Stephen A. Marglin), among others. Schor’s scholarly articles have appeared in the Economic Journal, The Review of Economics and Statistics, World Development, Industrial Relations, The Journal of Economic Psychology, Ecological Economics, Poetics, Social Problems, The Socio-Economic Review, Theory and Society, Global Economic Change, The Journal of Industrial Ecology, The Journal of Consumer Research, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences and The Journal of Consumer Culture, among others.

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.

Juliet B. Schor is available to advise your organization via virtual and in-person consulting meetings, interactive workshops and customized keynotes through the exclusive representation of Stern Speakers & Advisors, a division of Stern Strategy Group^®.