CV (pdf)

Gender and Work

Institutional Change

Youth, Education, and Work in Postindustrial Societies

New Projects

Articles and Book Chapters

Teaching

Biographical Note

Professor Mary Brinton is the Reischauer Institute Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. Brinton is a Faculty Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and a member of the Executive Committee of the Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies. She joined the Harvard faculty in 2003, having previously taught at the University of Chicago for 12 years and at Cornell University for 4 years.

Brinton’s research and teaching focus on gender inequality, education, labor markets, economic sociology, Japanese society, and comparative sociology. Her research combines qualitative and quantitative methods to study institutional change and its effects on individual action, particularly in labor markets and in education. Brinton generally engages in primary data collection for her research projects, and has designed social surveys, interviews, and observational studies in Japan and Korea. Brinton studied sociolinguistics as an undergraduate at Stanford University, and earned an MA in Japanese Studies and an MA and PhD in Sociology at the University of Washington.

For more information on Professor Brinton's current research, go to her Reischauer Institute of Japanese webpage.

CV(pdf)

Her research projects span three principal areas:

Gender and Work

Brinton has produced three books and numerous articles and book chapters in the area of gender inequality in the labor market. Her books include:

Women and the Economic Miracle: Gender and Work in Postwar Japan (University of California Press, 1993) examines why Japanese society exhibits the strongest degree of gender inequality across industrial and postindustrial societies. Drawing on original quantitative and qualitative data as well as a variety of secondary data sources, she shows how the institutional context of Japanese labor markets, the educational system, and the family set constraints and opportunities for individual action that culminate in strongly gendered work patterns and a high degree of gender inequality in the workplace.

Women’s Working Lives in East Asia (Stanford University Press, 2001) is an edited volume that presents research from a number of Brinton’s East Asian graduate students and collaborators on the comparison of gender inequality patterns across three East Asian economies: Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Brinton and her collaborators demonstrate that Japan and Korea cluster together in exhibiting similarly strong patterns of gender inequality in the labor market, with Taiwan exhibiting more rapid change towards gender-egalitarian patterns of work. The book includes chapters ranging from the purely qualitative to the highly quantitative, and chapters focusing exclusively on one country case as well as those that compare two or all three of the country cases with each other.

The Declining Significance of Gender? (Russell Sage Foundation, 2007) draws together original essays by leading American sociologists and labor economists who examine contemporary patterns of gender inequality in American labor markets and households to make theoretically informed predictions about whether we are headed for a gender-egalitarian future or not. In collaboration with David Grusky (Stanford University) and Francine Blau (Cornell University), Brinton traces the dominant theoretical paradigms governing our understanding of gender inequality in the introductory chapter of the book, and examines the engines of change or stasis inherent in each theoretical approach.

Institutional Change

The New Institutionalism in Sociology (Russell Sage Foundation,1998; paperback edition published by Stanford University Press, 2001) is a volume co-edited with Victor Nee that examines rational choice-derived perspectives and empirical research on institutional change. The book includes chapters by sociologists and economists who examine the social embeddedness of key institutions in capitalist economies and who consider the role of norms and cultural beliefs in economic development and institutional formation and change.

Youth, Education, and Work in Postindustrial Societies

Brinton’s recent work focuses on the transformation of labor markets in postindustrial societies and the implications for young workers, especially those with less education. Her forthcoming book, Lost in Transition: Youth, Education, and Work in Postindustrial Japan is being published first in Japanese (in fall 2008; NTT Press) in order to reach a broad audience in Japan interested in the difficulties faced by young Japanese men trying to “make it” in an economic environment vastly different from what their fathers faced. The rapid increase in contingent employment and employers’ diminished commitment to “lifetime employment” have produced higher rates of part-time employment and unemployment among Japanese young men than have been seen for many decades. Using original survey data, interviews with urban high school teachers, original data sets on the high school-work transition, and in-depth interviews with a sample of male high school graduates who finished school in the depth of the Japanese recession, Brinton argues for a structural interpretation of the social malaise afflicting 21st-century Japan. She is currently revising the manuscript for an American audience.

New Projects

Down and Out in Tokyo and New York. Brinton is working on a comparative study of less-educated youths’ employment strategies in New York and Tokyo (with Katherine Newman, Princeton). The project draws on in-depth interviews with comparable samples of graduates from less-advantaged high schools in the late 1990s in the two metropolitan areas, and follows their progress through the labor market as they move into their late twenties.

Social Rigidities in the “Lowest-Low” Fertility Societies. This project examines the puzzle of why fertility rates in a number of postindustrial societies (Japan, Italy, Spain) have dipped well below replacement level. The project focuses on the rigidity of social norms surrounding the transition to adulthood and surrounding definitions of appropriate gender roles. Principal work on this project will commence in 2008-09.

Selected Publications

“Gendered Offices: A Comparative-Historical Examination of Clerical Work in Japan and the U.S.” In Frances McCall Rosenbluth, editor, The Political Economy of Low Fertility: Japan in Comparative Perspective. 2007. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Chapter 1 in The Declining Significance of Gender? (with Francine D. Blau and David B. Grusky). 2006. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

“Trouble in Paradise: The Youth Labor Market and School-Work Institutions in Japan’s Economy.” 2005. Pp. 419-444 in The New Economic Sociology of Capitalism, edited by Richard Swedberg and Victor Nee. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

“Education and the Economy.” 2005. In The Handbook of Economic Sociology, edited by Neil Smelser and Richard Swedberg. New York: Russell Sage Foundation (with Princeton University Press).

“Social Capital in the Japanese Youth Labor Market: Labor Market Policy, Schools, and Norms.” 2000. Policy Sciences 33, 4 (also in Social Capital as a Policy Resource, edited by John D. Montgomery and Alex Inkeles. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001.

“Women’s Labor in East Asian Economies.” 2001. In Women’s Working Lives in East Asia, edited by Mary C. Brinton. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

"Institutional Embeddedness in Japanese Labor Markets" (with Takehiko Kariya). 1998. In The New Institutionalism in Sociology, edited by Mary C. Brinton and Victor Nee. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

"Productive Activities and Support Systems of Single Mothers" (with Lingxin Hao). 1997. American Journal of Sociology 102, 5: 1305-1344.

"Elite Education and Social Capital: The Case of the Korean Elite" (with Sunhwa Lee). 1996. Sociology of Education: 69, 2: 177-192.

"Married Women's Employment in Rapidly Industrializing Societies: Examples from East Asia" (with Yean-Ju Lee and William Parish). 1995. American Journal of Sociology 100, 5: 1099-1130.

"Age and Sex in the Occupational Structure: A United States-Japan Comparison" (with Hang-Yue Ngo). 1993. Sociological Forum 8: 93-111.

"Gender Stratification in Contemporary Urban Japan." 1989. American Sociological Review 54: 542-557.

"The Social-Institutional Bases of Gender Stratification: Japan as an Illustrative Case." 1988. American Journal of Sociology 94: 300-334.

04/11/2008

Courses Offered This Academic Year

A Sampling of Courses Offered in Other Years

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