31. 1. 2018 Leadership Lectures: Visit of Steven Vallas

On January 24 2018, we had the great honor of welcoming Prof. Steven Vallas from the Northeastern University, to the Frankfurt Goethe University for his speech on “Precarious Work – Why Has it Risen? What Does it Mean? And What are Some Alternatives?” This event was organized by the Center for Leadership and Behavior in Organizations and it was the second in the new annual Leadership Lectures series. In his lecture, the American sociologist Steven Vallas talked about the precarization trend and tried to answer a number of questions: How can we explain these trends? What are their consequences, not only for individual workers but also for the societies in which we live? And how can the gnawing uncertainty that now shapes so much of everyday life best be addressed? Steven Vallas is Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University in Boston,  and currently International Francqui Chair, hosted by the University of Leuven (Belgium). He has studied a host of issues centering on the shifting nature of work and employment during the post-1975 period. Among these issues are the complex relation between new technologies and business organizations; tensions within team-based systems of workplace authority; racial and ethnic boundaries among employees; and the shifting contours of “knowledge work” in science-intensive fields. Prof. Vallas partook in the recent workshop at the Center for Leadership and Behavior in Organizations on January 26 2018, while meeting with PhD students and professors from our departments during his stay. You can find the slide from the lecture here and the slides from the workshop here.