Juliet Schor is Professor of Sociology at Boston College. Schor is also a member of the MacArthur Foundation Connected Learning Research Network. Schor’s research focuses on consumption, time use, and environmental sustainability. She has appeared on national and international media including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and People. She has also appeared on 60 Minutes, the Today Show, Good Morning America, and The Early Show on CBS, among other television and radio news programs.
Schor’s most recent books are After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win it Back (University California Press, 2020), Sustainable Lifestyles and the Quest for Plenitude: Case Studies of the New Economy (Yale University Press, 2014) which she co-edited with Craig Thompson, 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.) As part of her work with the MacArthur Foundation, Schor is currently researching the “connected economy,” via a series of case studies of sharing platforms and their participants. She is also studying the relation between working hours, inequality and carbon emissions.
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). 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).
Schor also wrote Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (Scribner 2004), Do Americans Shop Too Much? (Beacon Press 2000), and co-edited of Consumer Society: A Reader (The New Press 2000), and Sustainable Planet: Solutions for the Twenty-first Century (Beacon Press 2002).
