Skip to content
Illustrative Picture for the IAB event Series
Special Lecture Series

The IAB Special Lecture Series invites outstanding international researchers across the Social Sciences to present their current work. Guest lecturers are selected on excellent academic merit and typically have made significant contributions to their respective fields and continue to actively shape international research agendas.

Moving from Individual to Relational Models of Inequality, and the important role of linked employer-employee data

Special Lecture Series with Prof. Don Tomaskovic-Devey, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

Conventional models of inequality focus on the attributes of individuals and their connection to important inequality markers such as occupations and earnings. These models focus on the supply side of the labor market but are ill equipped to deal with employers as actors in the inequality generation process.

Relational Inequality Theory explicitly theorizes this joint supply and demand process as one of actors – employees and employers and other potential stakeholders – making claims on organizational resources. The outcomes of those claims are understood to lie in the relative power and status of actors in the claims making process.

To produce evidence consistent with this theoretical account requires data on both sides or the employment relationship. It is here that linked employer-employee data have become a crucial tool, complementing evidence from more qualitative work. This talk will outline this theoretical development, provide some key methodological developments, and suggest where fruitful lines if new work might develop.

Date

23.6.2025

, 10.00 a.m. until 11.30 a.m.

Speaker

Prof. Don Tomaskovic-Devey  (University of Massachusetts-Amherst)

Donald Tomaskovic-Devey is Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the Director of the Center for Employment Equity. He also convenes the Comparative Organizational Inequality Network (COIN), which includes thirty-plus scientists from fifteen countries exploring organizational inequalities with longitudinal linked employer-employee data. He is currently doing research on organizational inequalities, intersectional wage gaps, and developing theoretical and empirical models based on relational inequality theory. Recent publications from these projects have appeared in Nature, Human Behaviour, PNAS, Socio-Economic Review, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, the American Sociological Review, and the American Journal of Sociology. He has published four monographs, including Recapitalizing America: Alternatives to the Corporate Distortion of National Policy (Routledge, 1983), Gender and Racial Inequality at Work: The Sources and Consequences of Job Segregation (Cornell, 1993), Documenting Desegregation: Racial and Gender Segregation in Private Sector Employment since the Civil Rights Act (Russell Sage Foundation, 2012). His most recent monograph, with Dustin Avent-Holt, Relational Inequalities: An Organizational Approach (Oxford, 2019), won the best book awards from two sections of the American Sociological Association. He is currently co-Editor of the American Sociological Review. Tomaskovic-Devey has been recognized with career awards from the Organizations, Occupations, and Work and Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility sections of the American Sociological Association.

Venue

Institute for Employment Research
Regensburger Straße 104
90478 Nürnberg
Room Re100 E10

or online via MS Teams

Registration

Researchers who like to participate, please send an e-mail to eveeno