Selected research
A wider body of work
The book is one study among many. Across fifteen years, the through-line has held: how work really works — and who quietly pays for the gap between effort and reward. Each of these is also a room she can speak to — voice and psychological safety, the future of work, flexibility and burnout, algorithmic management.
Trust Fall
Embedded inside four workplaces — a restaurant, a marketing firm, a tech startup, and the NYC rideshare circuit — on how trust at work both holds people up and holds them down.
Book · University of California PressHow research earns trust
Written with Allison Pugh: how ethnographic research earns trust and credibility — not by claiming certainty, but by staying reflexive and surfacing the complexity and contradiction in how people really live and work.
Frontiers in SociologyWomen & technology at work
How women actually experience digital technology on the job — caught between frustration and invigoration — drawn from a national study of Australian women workers.
Work, Employment and SocietyBeing watched vs. being seen
How NYC ride-hail drivers experience constant measurement and metrics — and how they push back. Front-line research on monitoring and algorithmic management, newly urgent in the age of AI at work.
New Media & SocietyWho actually gets to speak up
Why “speak-up culture” fails for structural reasons, not personal ones: a multilevel study of gender and voice at work showing whole organizations, not just individuals, go quiet.
British Journal of ManagementWorking mothers & the double bind
How working mothers craft work-family strategies under contradictory cultural expectations — the quiet calculations they make to manage judgment at work and at home.
Community, Work & FamilyThe Downtime project
Current research on how elite professionals experience time — who gets to rest, who has to look busy, and what that reveals about status and inequality.
In progressProgram evaluation & impact
Quasi-experimental impact studies, surveys, and data dashboards for serious institutions — from California’s statewide anti-tobacco programs to a national racial-equity assessment for AmeriCorps and a workforce well-being study for the YMCA of Metro LA. The same rigor, pointed at your organization.
LPC Consulting