“Relax a little, be flexible, and go with your gut instincts!” This is advice Dean Harry C. Katz gives to ILR students who, he says, tend to “overprogram themselves.” Katz is concerned that the students don’t allow enough flexibility in their plans to take courses of general interest, thus foreclosing experiences and options, such as those that led him to change his own career plans.

Katz’s school experiences led him haphazardly to economics. Initially a biology major, he looked for liberal arts classes at registration, but sociology, psychology, and political science were full. He looked down the list of available classes and Economics 101 was open, so he signed up. The same thing happened a year later, and Katz ended up taking—and liking—microeconomics. It was not until his senior year that he realized he had been enjoying economics and that “cutting up frogs was not such fun.” This realization led him to apply to economics Ph.D. programs.

Katz, whose Ph.D. is from the University of California–Berkeley, taught at MIT before coming to Cornell. He is an expert on the auto and telecommunications industries, trade unions, and worker participation programs and has authored numerous books and articles on workplace issues. His publications include Converging Divergences: Worldwide Changes in Employment Systems with Owen Darbishire; An Introduction to Collective Bargaining and Industrial Relations with Tom Kochan; and The Transformation of American Industrial Relations. The latter was awarded the Terry Book Award by the Academy of Management in 1988 as the most significant contribution to the field.

He was the coordinating editor for seven papers that provide industry-based analyses on income inequality; they appeared as a symposium collection in the ILR Review. His recent research activity includes the completion of a three-year telecommunications project funded by the Sloan Foundation, on which he worked with Rose Batt, Jeff Keefe, and Alex Colvin. The final project report has been circulated widely throughout the telecommunications industry. Katz also has been working on a research project that analyzes how the function of human resources and industrial relations management has been reorganized within multinational corporations.

Katz’s other activities include consulting for organizations such as Colgate–Palmolive and the UAW. He has given lectures in Japan and Germany as well as for the ILR NYC Institute for Workplace Studies.

Harry’s wife, Jan Katz, is a senior lecturer and the Suter-Staley Director of Global Business Education at JGSM. Their daughter, Ariel, is a junior in the College of Human Ecology and their son, Joshua, is a junior at Ithaca High School. Katz’s sports interests have been influenced by his children, who are enthusiasts in such areas as horseback riding, ski racing, fencing, and tennis.

—ILR Connections, Winter 2006

See Also

• A Challenge and an Honor