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Kim Voss (born 1952) is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley whose main field of research is social movements and the American labor movement.

Education and career

Voss received her bachelor's degree from Catawba College in Salisbury, North Carolina in 1974.

She obtained a master's of science degree in sociology from Cornell University in 1977, and a doctorate in sociology from Stanford University in 1986.

Since the fall of 1986, Voss has taught at the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1988, she was a visiting scholar at the Center for Studies of Social Change at the New School for Social Research.

Voss served as the chair of the Sociology Department at the University of California, Berkeley, from 2004-2007. She was the first female chair of the department.

Research focus

Voss' research focus is the American labor movement, the nature and culture of work, social movements, and comparative sociology.

Much of Voss' early work analyzed why American labor unions were conservative and weak vis-a-vis their European counterparts. In The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century, Voss argued that the formative period for the American labor movement was the 1870s and 1880s, and that the creation and collapse of the Knights of Labor was a critical factor in determining the future of the American labor movement. Voss examined whether American exceptionalism was the cause of or an outcome of the collapse of the Knights. She concluded the latter, and argued that strong business resistance to unions, weak government and legal protections for worker rights (two sides of the same coin) explained the subsequent politics and culture of unions in America. Voss also argued, however, that the Knights had adopted an ideology which was not resilient in the face of organizational collapse.

More recently, Voss has explored the factors which cause the rise of transnational social movements. She is also studying the power of story-telling and narrative song in social movements.

Published works

Solely authored books

• The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993.

Co-authored books

• Fischer, Claude; Hout, Michael; Jankowski, Martin Sanchez; Lucas, Samuel R.; Swidler, Ann; and Voss, Kim. Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996. ISBN 0-691-02899-0
• Voss, Kim and Fantasia, Rick. Hard Work: Remaking the American Labor Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. ISBN 0-520-24013-8

Co-edited books

• Milkman, Ruth and Kim Voss, eds. Rebuilding Labor: Organizing and Organizers in the New Union Movement. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-8014-4265-6

References

• Kim Voss, professor and chair, Dept. of Sociology, UC-Berkeley
• Kim Voss C.V.

External links

• Dept. of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley

• Writers from Berkeley, California
• University of California, Berkeley faculty
• Cornell University alumni
• Stanford University alumni
• Labor historians
• 21st-century American historians
• Historians of the United States
• American sociologists
• American women sociologists
• 1952 births
• Living people
• Catawba College alumni
• American women historians
• 21st-century American women writers
• Historians from California