People at ILR

Virginia Doellgast
people / faculty

Virginia Doellgast

Anne Evans Estabrook Professor of Employment Relations and Dispute Resolution
Global Labor and Work (GLW)

Overview

Virginia Doellgast is the Anne Evans Estabrook Professor of Employment Relations and Dispute Resolution in the ILR School at Cornell University. Her research focuses on the comparative political economy of labor markets and labor unions, inequality, precarity, and democracy at work. She is currently studying the impact of digitalization and AI on job quality in in the ICT services industry and ‘just transitions’ to e-mobility in the auto industry, based on comparative research in the US, Canada, Germany, and Norway. Past research projects have compared labor union responses to restructuring and employer collective action in the telecommunications sector; and worker voice and well-being in call centers.

She is author of Exit, Voice, and Solidarity (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Disintegrating Democracy at Work (Cornell University Press, 2012); and co-editor of International and Comparative Employment Relations (Sage, 2021) and Reconstructing Solidarity (Oxford University Press, 2018). She has been co-editor of the ILR Review since 2022, and has served on the editorial boards of the British Journal of Industrial Relations, Industrielle Beziehungen, Socio-Economic Review, Transfer, Work, Employment and Society, and Work in the Global Economy. Her research has been funded by the Fulbright, DAAD (Germany), ESRC (UK), SSHRC (Canada), and the Research Council of Norway, among others.

Professor Doellgast works with diverse international research institutes, policy organizations, and labor unions in her research, teaching, and outreach. She is a Senior Research Fellow at the at the WSI-Hans Böckler Stiftung and has been a visiting scholar at Forskningscenter for Arbejdsmarkeds- og Organisationsstudier (FAOS), Freie Universität Berlin, Laboratoire d'Economie et de Sociologie du Travail (LEST), Max Planck Institute für Gesellschaftsforschung (MPIfG), University of New South Wales (UNSW), and Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB). She was previously a faculty member at the London School of Economics and Political Science and at King’s College London. She has presented her research at over 20 practitioner meetings and conferences, including those organized by the ILO, the European Commission, and UNI-ICTS. She has been interviewed on the BBC, Deutschlandfunk, and NPR, and been quoted in the Guardian, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

Publications

Journal Articles

Books

  • Virginia Doellgast. 2022. Exit, Voice, and Solidarity: Contesting Precarity in the US and European Telecommunications Industries. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.
  • Greg Bamber, Fang Lee Cooke, Virginia Doellgast, Chris Wright. 2021. International and comparative employment relations: Global Crises and Institutional Responses. Sage, 2021.
  • Virginia Doellgast, Nathan Lillie, Valeria Pulignano. 2018. Reconstructing solidarity: Labour unions, precarious work, and the politics of institutional change in Europe. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018.
  • Virginia Doellgast. 2012. Disintegrating Democracy at Work: Labor Unions and the Future of Good Jobs in the Service Economy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012.

Book Chapters

  • Virginia Doellgast, Chris Wright, Fang Lee Cooke, Greg Bamber. 2021. Conclusions: Globalisation, Crises and Institutional Responses. in International and comparative employment relations, 7th Edition. Sage Publications, 2021. G. Bamber, F.L. Cooke, V. Doellgast, C. Wright.
  • Chris Wright, Greg Bamber, Fang Lee Cooke, Virginia Doellgast. 2021. Introduction: Internationally comparative approaches to studying employment relations. in International and Comparative Employment Relations, 7th Edition. Sage Publications, 2021. G. Bamber, F.L. Cooke, V. Doellgast, C. Wright.
  • Virginia Doellgast, Chiara Benassi. 2020. Collective Bargaining. in Edward Elgar Handbook of Employee Voice, 2nd Edition. Edward Elgar, 2020. Adrian Wilkinson, Jimmy Donaghey, Tony Dundon and Richard Freeman.

Book Reviews

  • Virginia Doellgast. 2023. Between Institution Building and Worker Mobilization: Situating Labor Studies in Labor and Employment Relations. Comments on Revaluing Work (ers): Toward a Democratic and Sustainable Future. Labor Studies Journal, 2023.
  • Virginia Doellgast. 2023. Labor in the age of finance: pensions, politics, and corporations from deindustrialization to Dodd-Frank, by Sanford M. Jacoby. Princeton University Press, 2021.. International Labour Review, 2023.
  • Virginia Doellgast. 2023. On Sidney Rothstein’s Recoding Power: Tactics for Mobilizing Tech Workers, New York, Oxford University Press, 2022.. Socio-Economic Review, 2023. (1257-1268)
  • Virginia Doellgast. 2021. Power, Politics and Influence at Work. By Tony Dundon, Miguel Martínez Lucio, Emma Hughes, Debra Howcroft, Arjan Keizer, and Roger Walden. Perspectives on Work, 2021. (96-97)
  • Virginia Doellgast. 2021. Labor power and solidarity in economic bicameralism. in On Isabelle Ferreras’ Firms as Political Entities: Saving Democracy Through Economic Bicameralism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2017. Socio-Economic Review, 2021. (1201-1215)
  • Virginia Doellgast. 2021. Book Review: Transformations of Trade Unionism: Comparative and Transnational Perspectives on Workers Organizing in Europe and the United States, Eighteenth to Twenty-First Centuries, By Ad Knotter. Comparative Labor Law and Policy Journal, 2021.