Philipp Brandt(Assistant professor of sociology – SciencesPo) is looking for a postdoc to join his ERC Starting Grant project, “ReWORCS: Returns to Work in Occupational, Relational, and Corporate Settings,” at Sciences Po Paris for a duration of up to three years (2 + 1). The project aims to recover lived social experiences from large-scale administrative and trace datasets of work activities in different national and organizational settings. It has funding for five years, and the team will include several doctoral students. We will work closely together on the project’s implementation. You will have the opportunity to participate in Sciences Po’s academic life, attend workshops and summer schools, travel to conferences, and be the lead author on articles. The main requirements are a doctoral degree in sociology, coding and quantitative data analysis skills, and broad sociological interests. The Centre de Sociologie des Organisations will be the project’s institutional home, and collaborators worldwide will provide its intellectual foundation. The monthly gross salary is EUR 3500. The position comes with healthcare and other benefits. The start date should be no later than September 01, 2024, and ideally before. 

Tasks: 

– Assembling datasets, designing and implementing analyses, and interpretation of results – A substantial part of the technical work will focus on the design of new measures of work experiences and trajectories 

– Preparation of academic presentations 

– Writing of research articles 

– Coordination of doctoral student researchers and research assistants 

Requirements: 

– Doctoral degree in sociology (recently completed or imminent) 

– Broad sociological interests, including in different research methods and theoretical frameworks 

– Experience coding in R or Python

– Strong English skills 

– Excellent communication and collaboration skills 

Application: 

– Motivation letter (~700 words) 

– CV 

– Academic degree certificates 

– Single-authored writing sample of empirical research 

(advanced draft, published article, or thesis chapter) 

– Contact information for two references 

Submission: 

Please send your application materials to philipp.brandt@sciencespo.fr as a single .pdf or separate .pdfs. Don’t hesitate to reach out in the meantime with any questions you may have. 

APPLICATION DEADLINE: February 01, 2024 at 06.30 CET (a.m.). 

Project description: 

The rise of platforms and remote work has refashioned concerns about work security and flexibility in public debates. Academic studies have documented an increase in non-standard work over decades, including polarization of rewards, shifting occupational boundaries, and winding paths among women and other marginalized groups. These findings had important policy implications but left questions about the unfolding of individual labor market experiences amid the more noticeable changes. This project mobilizes new techniques and data sources and overcomes divisions in research on work to address those problems. 

The project has three parts. Work package 1 (WP1) uses national-level employment datasets of France, Germany, and the US to survey job trajectories in relation to earnings across institutional contexts. It advances analyses of occupational and other categorical effects by drawing attention to job change sequences. WP2 asks how workers organize work. It takes two strategic cases with detailed work records, one involving technical expertise and the other practical tasks. WP3 draws on a unique dataset of career descriptions in two areas of work and two countries to capture institutional and cultural effects on meaning construction to ask how workers redefine established jobs.