Andrew Ross (sociologist)


Andrew Ross is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, and a social activist and analyst. He has authored and edited numerous books, and written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, Newsweek, and Al Jazeera. Much of his writing focuses on labor, the urban environment, and the organisation of work, from the Western world of business and high-technology to conditions of offshore labour in the Global South. Making use of social theory as well as ethnography, his writing questions the human and environmental cost of economic growth. Outside his field, Ross is known as a recipient of the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize for literature for his part in the Sokal hoax.

Life and education

Ross was born and educated in the lowlands of Scotland. After graduating from the University of Aberdeen in 1978, he worked in the North Sea oil fields. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Kent at Canterbury in 1984. He joined the faculty at Princeton University in 1985, and left in 1993 to become Director of the Graduate Program in American Studies at NYU. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in 2001-2002. and has held research positions at Cornell University and Shanghai University.

Early writing

His doctoral dissertation, about modern American poetry, was published as The Failure of Modernism in 1986. Several subsequent books established his reputation as one of the leading practitioners of cultural studies, particularly in the fields of popular culture, ecology, and the history of technology.

Later writing

Increasingly, his writing focused on urban sociology, labour, and the organisation of work. A scholar and activist associated with the anti-sweatshop movement, he published No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers in 1998 and Low Pay, High Profile: The Global Push for Fair Labor in 2002. In 1997, he took up residence for a year in Disney's new town of Celebration, Florida, and wrote The Celebration Chronicles, based on his participant observation of the town's residents, the first ethnography of a New Urbanist community.
Two further books were based on field work with employees: No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs, about employees in Internet companies during the New Economy boom and bust, and Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade, about skilled Chinese employees of foreign firms in Shanghai and other Yangtze Delta cities. The latter book, written on the ground in China, is a frank alternative to Thomas Friedman's pro-outsourcing views on corporate globalisation. In 2009, Ross published Nice Work if You Can Get it: Life and Labor in Precarious Times, an analysis of changing patterns in the nature of creative work and contingent employment.
In several of his books, Ross has pioneered a method he calls Scholarly Reporting, which is a blend of ethnography and investigative journalism. In Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World's Least Sustainable City, Ross draws on his fieldwork in Phoenix, Arizona. Focusing on areas such as water supply, metropolitan growth, renewable energy, downtown revitalisation, immigration policy, and patterns of pollution, the book argues that urban managers have to base policy on combating environmental injustices to avoid replicating the condition of "eco-apartheid" that prevails in Phoenix and other major urban areas.
His most recent book, Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal, analyses, and proposes solutions to, the massive household debt burden that has accumulated over the last two decades. The book considers some of the legal and moral principles of the Jubilee South movement–aimed at repudiating external debts of developing countries–and adapts them to the situation of household debtors in the North. Creditocracy engages with ideas and actions from the Occupy movement of debt resistance to Wall Street's creditor class.
In Richard Posner's 2003 study, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, Ross was ranked among the top 100 public intellectuals in the US.
From 1986 to 2000, Ross served on the editorial collective of Duke University Press's journal Social Text. In 1996 he was one of the journal's editors who published a paper by Alan Sokal professing to show connections between physics and post-modern theory, and which was later revealed by Sokal to be a hoax meant to expose the low academic standards of "post-modernism". Ross was among the editors of Social Text who were awarded the 1996 for Literature for his part in being taken in by the hoax.
Ross's involvement in the Sokal hoax gave rise to criticism from outside the area of his academic specialisation. In an article in Nature, Richard Dawkins said "Ross has the boorish, tenured confidence to say things like, "I am glad to be rid of English departments. I hate literature, for one thing, and English departments tend to be full of people who love literature"; and the yahooish complacency to begin a book on 'science studies' with these words: "This book is dedicated to all of the science teachers I never had. It could only have been written without them."

Activism

Ross has been active in the anti-sweatshop movement since the mid-1990s. From the late 1990s, he has turned his attention to the academic labour movement, both in the national AAUP, and at NYU as a vocal supporter of the graduate student union, and as a founding member of Faculty Democracy. In 2007, his co-edited volume, The University Against Itself, documented and analysed the long strike at NYU in 2005 by GSOC-UAW. A founder of the Gulf Labor Coalition, he has helped to organise campaigns to raise migrant labour standards in the United Arab Emirates. In 2015, he edited an anthology of art and writing from Gulf Labor entitled, The Gulf: High Culture/Hard Labor. An early participant in Occupy Wall Street, he helped found the Occupy Student Debt Campaign and has been an integral member of the Occupy Debt Assembly and Strike Debt—a coalition formed in the summer of 2012 to help build a debtors' movement. Strike Debt produced the Debt Resisters' Operations Manual and organised the Rolling Jubilee. He is an active member of the Debt Collective, a prototype debtors' union. He also serves on the board of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.
Ross has been critical of labor conditions in Abu Dhabi and similar fast-growth environments for a number of years.

Books