Rachel Sherman is Associate Professor of Sociology. She is broadly interested in how and why unequal social relations are reproduced, legitimated, and contested, and in how these processes are embedded in cultural vocabularies of identity, interaction, and entitlement. Empirically, she uses ethnography and in-depth interviewing to investigate service work, consumption, and increasing economic inequality in the contemporary U.S. context.
Her first book, Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels (University of California Press, 2007), draws primarily on participant observation research to analyze how workers, guests, and managers in these hotels made sense of and negotiated the class inequalities that marked their relationships.
Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence (Princeton University Press, 2017), Professor Sherman's second book, uses in-depth interviews to explore the lived experience of privilege among wealthy and affluent New York parents. The book has been covered or reviewed by the New York Times, the New York Post, the Times of London, Vice, the Financial Times, Commentary, Nature Books in Brief, and the BBC World Service. An adapted excerpt appeared at The Guardian. Sherman's essay for the New York Times Sunday Review, published in conjunction with the book, is here.
Professor Sherman has also conducted research on the contemporary U.S. labor movement; on expert service work, especially the "lifestyle management" industry; and the interactive artwork of Tino Sehgal. She has recently received funding from the New School Provost's Office and the Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies to conduct preliminary research on food services in the airline industry.