Professor Rosemary Batt is a distinguished scholar and rising star in the areas of industrial relations and human resource studies. Her research interests include strategic human resource management, service sector productivity and competitiveness, work organization and teams, and labor market analysis. She has written extensively on service management strategies and the restructuring of the telecommunications services industry, including co-authoring the well known book, The New American Workplace (1994), which examines high performance work systems cross-nationally. She is extremely adept at integrating ideas from diverse fields and breaking new ground in her research, which often focuses on the wages and working conditions of women and minorities in low wage service work.

Rose has won numerous awards and accolades. The most recent recognition of the quality of her research was being named recipient of this year’s Scholarly Achievement Award from the Human Resources Division of the Academy of Management for the best publication in human resources. Her awardwinning paper is “Managing Customer Services: Human Resource Practices, Quit Rates, and Sales Growth,” published by the Academy of Management Journal 45: 587-597. She will be IRRA program Co-chair for 2004.

Rose grew up in Buffalo and first came to campus when she was ten years old. She eventually decided that Cornell was where she wished to attend college. “Cornell has a long tradition in our family,” explains Rose. Her father, a ’43 grad of the Hotel School, was captain of the hockey team when they still played on Beebe Lake. Her brother and several other family members are also Cornell grads. Rose earned her degree from the College of Arts and Sciences.

She describes her experiences postcollege as a winding road with unexpected turns that eventually led her back to Cornell. After earning her A.B., Rose set out to try to understand different communities. “I wanted to help overcome economic and social inequality in this and other countries.” Pursuing this goal, she worked in the civil rights movement, with women’s and community organizations, and with the health care workers union in Appalachia. “I learned that these movements are vital to creating better lives. So are the choices that employers make. Management has much more leeway to create good jobs than we are often led to believe.”

Rose lived and worked for a few years in Latin America. She also worked and studied in Mexico to understand the economic conditions pushing migrants to the US. “I did not have a plan for a career, but rather pursued the issues I felt were most compelling. The people I worked with and experiences I had in my twenties were radically different from my middle class background and up bringing. They helped me become grounded as an individual.” If asked to describe a defining moment in her upbringing or her education, Rose’s anthropological research in Mexico comes first to mind. It really helped her develop that belief in following her passion. “It fundamentally changed me,” she says. The result is a unique blend of interests. These have been refined over the years in combination with and as a result of her own personal experiences. Few would disagree that she has a broad-minded ability to speak to a range of issues from the perspective of differing occupational groups.

In her 30s, Rose went on to study the anthropology of work at the University of Kentucky and later, human resource studies and industrial relations at MIT, where she earned her Ph.D. from the Sloan School of Management in 1996.

When Rose came to Cornell in 1995, Alice Cook was in Ithaca, working on her autobiography. “I tried to get out to see her as much as possible.” She knew and benefited directly from close contact with Cook and has a deep understanding of her legacy. Now she is part of that legacy at ILR and in the broader community, having recently been appointed the Alice Cook Professor of Women and Work for a five-year term. Dean Lawler said of the appointment, “Rose has many of the qualities that made Alice Cook so special. She is a particularly appropriate first occupant of the professorship, which was designed to nurture faculty research and teaching on women and work, and is for faculty at any career stage.”

Rose’s current research focus is a major study of the telecommunications industry with grant support from the Sloan Foundation. A key focus of this research is the employment and working conditions of low-level service employees. She has extended this study of call centers to a variety of customer service and sales organizations. Among the topics she is examining are human resource practices, workplace changes, and work/ family issues, always with an eye for trying to improve the workplace for people in these positions. “I have worked with management and unions not only to improve the quality of their work situation but also the quality of the jobs they do. The result is often improvements in their own service.”

Rose recently received a Russell Sage Foundation grant to study management practices and related outcomes in global call centers involving firms and workers across eleven countries. “We are witnessing the emergence of a new industry, one that primarily employs women workers. There is potential to create good jobs but also downward pressure on wages and job security.”

Rose’s advice to students is to follow your passion. By doing so you will discover and improve your ability to really engage in the work. Think critically about the work in your own arena. She laments that current students face such pressure these days to get a job because of the sacrifice required of them and their families to get their degree. Parents worry about their kids getting jobs; kids worry about getting jobs. Her words of advice to students and parents are: “If it takes a bit longer to find a job that engages your passion, it is time well spent. Ultimately, the outcome is better.”

Rose describes ILR as a fantastic institution, in part because it houses interdisciplinary social science education. “We have top notch faculty in economics, social psychology, industrial relations, human resource studies, and statistics.” She finds that range of disciplines in concert, all focused on management and workplace issues, very powerful. “In order to understand how to do the best research on equality and quality of work life, we need this interdisciplinary focus.” However, Rose adds that it has been important in her development not to get locked into a narrow disciplinary track. Additionally she feels that ILR is becoming increasingly international and needs to continue to build upon our successes since global issues will affect the workplace of the future.

Rose enjoys the outdoors and physical activities; among her favorites are hiking, backpacking, and cross country skiing. While these activities provide balance and enjoyment, understanding and connecting with other cultures is what keeps her going. She regularly travels and enjoys experiencing other cultures and observing how people live. She describes these opportunities as humbling and inspiring. “I come home to appreciate not only what we have but what we can learn from other people.”

—ILR Connections, Winter 2004