Arne Lindeman Kalleberg (born February 9, 1949) is a Kenan Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Faculty Fellow at the Carolina Population Center. He is also an adjunct professor in the Kenan-Flagler Business School, the Department of Public Policy, and the Curriculum in Global Studies. Kalleberg served as the secretary of the American Sociological Association from 2001 to 2004 and as its president from 2007 to 2008. He has been the editor-in-chief of Social Forces, an international journal of social research for over ten years.
Biography
Kalleberg received his B.A. from Brooklyn College and his M.S. and Ph.D. (in 1975) from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was a faculty member at Indiana University for 10 years, where he served as the director of the Institute of Social Research. He moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1986. Previous administrative roles at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill include chair of the Department of Sociology (1990–2000), senior associate dean of The Graduate School (2001–2004), senior associate vice chancellor for graduate studies and research (interim) (2000–2001), senior associate dean for social sciences and international programs (2004–2007), and director of international programs (2007–2008). He has been a visiting professor at universities in Germany, Norway, South Korea, and Sweden.
Research contributions
Kalleberg studies labor force issues at the interface of sociology, economics, and psychology. Much of his work is cross-national, comparative and multi-level, linking societal and organizational institutions and structures to individual outcomes. His contributions to sociology have focused on three main topics.
The Fit between Persons and Jobs
The degree to which peoples’ jobs “fit” or match their skills has important consequences for individuals, organizations, and societies. When peoples’ jobs match their needs, preferences, and abilities, then they are likely to be relatively happy and satisfied with their work and lives, and workplaces are apt to function fairly smoothly and effectively. On the other hand, when there is a “mismatch” or lack of fit between persons and their jobs, a variety of problems and difficulties are likely to result for the workers, their families, employers and the society more generally. The degree to which jobs “fit” persons depends on their degree of control people have over their employment situations, which in turn reflects their market power and the opportunities available in the labor market.
Kalleberg's research on this topic is represented by his early work on job satisfaction (Kalleberg, 1977), his comparative studies of organizational commitment and job satisfaction in Japan and the United States (e.g., Lincoln and Kalleberg, 1985) and his more recent book on The Mismatched Worker (Kalleberg, 2007).
Work Structures and Inequality
Institutions are central to sociological explanations of social and economic inequality. Kalleberg's research has sought to document how different kinds of work institutions, or work structures (occupations, industries, unions, classes) generate inequalities in economic as well as non-economic (such as autonomy and challenging work) rewards. He provided a conceptual framework of how multiple work structures and market combine to produce inequalities in his book with Ivar Berg, Work and Industry: Structures, Markets and Processes (1987).
Kalleberg's contributions to sociological explanations of labor markets show how institutional structures combine with characteristics of individuals (such as their gender, race, age, education, experience) to produce inequalities. This work is represented by Kalleberg and Sørensen (1979), Althauser and Kalleberg (1981); Sørensen and Kalleberg (1981); Kalleberg, Wallace and Althauser (1981); Kalleberg and Van Buren (1996). His research on occupations shows how they produce differences in wage inequality (e.g., Kalleberg and Griffin, 1980; Mouw and Kalleberg, 2010).
Kalleberg's research has also shown the potential of collecting information on nationally representative samples of organizations for addressing a wide range of outcomes related to inequality, both at the organizational level (e.g., Kalleberg, Knoke, Marsden and Spaeth, 1996; Kalleberg, Reynolds and Marsden, 2003) and for individuals (e.g., Kalleberg and Reskin, 1995).