Recent Writing & Other Resources
Bruce Western
Professor of Sociology
Biographical Note
BRUCE WESTERN is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
Western’s work has focused on the role of incarceration in social and economic inequality in American society. He shows the link between incarceration and unemployment, which therefore leads to inequality. With a strong background in statistics and quantitative methods, Western has widely utilized Bayesian analysis in his work. Western’s first book Between Class and Market: Postwar Unionization in the Capitalist Democracies (Princeton University Press, 1997) concerned the growth and decline of unions in capitalist democracies. In this volume, Western argues that unions declined in countries without centralized labor markets, union control over the administration of unemployment policies, and strong working class parties. His research includes extensive quantitative and qualitative methodologies. In his second book Punishment and Inequality in America (Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), Western asks what role incarceration plays in the increasing class stratification of American society. He shows that the elevated numbers of incarcerated African Americans in the 1990s have caused a rift in African American society, and that those with less education are increasingly separated from those with higher education. The book also explicates further economic ramifications of the trend towards mass incarceration: by removing large numbers of poorly educated young men from the labor market, statistics on wages and unemployment were artificially skewed.
Western received his B.A. in government from the University of Queensland, Australia, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Western was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2005, and a Jean Monnet Fellow with the European University Institute between 1995 and 1996. He received the James F. Short Jr. distinguished article award, Crime, Law and Deviance Section of the American Sociological Association in 2006 for his article “Black-White Wage Inequality, Employment Rates, and Incarceration.” His book Punishment and Inequality in America won the 2007 Albert J. Reiss Award from the Crime Law and Deviance Section of the American Sociological Association. He is on the Board of Overseers for the General Social Survey and the Technical Review Committee of the National Longitudinal Survey, as well as the Council of the American Sociological Association. In 2007, he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
08/14/2008
Courses Offered This Academic Year
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Government 2340a ( Fall ) |
Proseminar on Inequality and Social Policy | To Course Website |
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Sociology 171 ( Spring ) |
Sociology of Crime and Punishment | Catalog #9922 |
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Sociology 98W ( Fall ) |
Urban Problems and Criminal Justice | To Course Website |
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