Andrew Ross (born 1956) is currently a professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University.[1] A writer for Artforum, The Nation and The Village Voice, he is also the author and/or editor of numerous books. Much of his writing focuses on labor, the urban environment, and the organization of work, from the Western world of business and high-technology to conditions of offshore labor in the Global South. Making use of social theory as well as ethnography, his writing questions the human and environmental cost of economic growth, has an activist, alternative globalization approach, and emphasizes principles of sustainability.
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Ross was born and educated in the lowlands of Scotland. After graduating from the University of Aberdeen in 1978, he worked in the North Sea oil fields. His graduate studies were undertaken at the University of Kent at Canterbury, Indiana University, and the University of California, Berkeley. He joined the faculty at Princeton University in 1985, and left in 1993 to become Director of the Graduate Program in American Studies at NYU. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in 2001-2. His doctoral dissertation, about modern American poetry, was published as The Failure of Modernism in 1986. Several subsequent books (No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture; Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits; and The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature's Debt to Society) established his reputation as one of the leading practitioners of cultural studies, particularly in the fields of popular culture, ecology, and the history of technology.
Increasingly, his writing focused on urban sociology, labor, and the organization of work. A scholar and activist associated with the anti-sweatshop movement, he published No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers in 1998 and Low Pay, High Profile: The Global Push for Fair Labor in 2002. In 1997, he took up residence for a year in Disney's new town of Celebration, Florida, and wrote The Celebration Chronicles, based on his participant observation of the town's residents, the first ethnography of a New Urbanist community.
Two further books were based on field work with workers: No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs, about employees in Internet companies during the New Economy boom and bust, and Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade, about skilled Chinese employees of foreign firms in Shanghai and other Yangtze Delta cities. The latter book, written on the ground in China, is a frank alternative to Thomas Friedman's pro-outsourcing views on corporate globalization. In 2009, Ross published Nice Work if You Can Get it: Life and Labor in Precarious Times, an analysis of changing patterns in the nature of creative work and contingent employment. In several of his books, Ross has pioneered a method he calls Scholarly Reporting, which is a blend of ethnography and investigative journalism.
In Richard Posner's 2003 study, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline,[2] Ross was ranked among the top 100 public intellectuals in the U.S. From 1986 to 2000, Ross served on the editorial collective of Duke University's Social Text journal, which has published some of the most influential essays in social and cultural analysis. In 1996 he was one of the journal's editors who published a paper by Alan Sokal professing to show connections between physics and post-modern theory, and which was later revealed by Sokal to be a hoax meant to expose the low academic standards of "post-modernism" (see Sokal affair).
He has been active in the academic labor movement since the late 1990s, both in the national AAUP, and at NYU as a vocal supporter of the graduate student union, and as a founding member of Faculty Democracy. In 2007, his co-edited volume, The University Against Itself, documented and analyzed the long strike at NYU in 2005 by GSOC-UAW (The Graduate Student Organizing Committee).
His most recent book Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World's Least Sustainable City, draws on his fieldwork in Phoenix, Arizona. Focusing on areas such as water supply, metropolitan growth, renewable energy, downtown revitalization, immigration policy, and patterns of pollution, the book argues that urban managers have to base policy on combating environmental injustices in order to avoid replicating the condition of "eco-apartheid" that prevails in Phoenix and other major urban areas.