Western named Wiener Center director

Sociologist Bruce Western has been named faculty director at Harvard Kennedy School’s Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy. Western will succeed Julie Wilson, who has served as director since 1993, beginning on Aug. 1. Wilson will remain an integral part of the center and its work as she will continue to serve the School as Harry Kahn Senior Lecturer in Social Policy.

Western is professor of sociology at Harvard College. His research interests are in the field of social stratification and inequality, political sociology, and statistical methods, and he is currently studying the social impact of rising income inequality in the United States. Western is the author of “Punishment and Inequality in America,” analyzing the role of incarceration on American economic inequality, and “Between Class and Market,” an examination of the development and decline of labor unions in the postwar industrialized democracies.

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