UMass Boston

Françoise Carré joined UMass Boston in 2003. She specializes in applied labor economics and comparative employment relations. She writes about non-standard work and informal employment in developed and developing countries as well as about institutional and organizational factors that shape the quality of retail and other service jobs in the USA and cross-nationally.

Her cross-national work on employment structures enables her to contribute to international consultations on statistical standards for employment classification and quality of employment held by UN statistical agencies. In particular, she participates in consultations about informal employment and dependent contracting as part of a collaboration with the Statistics Program of the global research-action network WIEGO (Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing).

PhD Urban and Regional Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

BA, Wellesley College, Economics

DEUG, Université Paris IX Dauphine (France), Economics

Member of Editorial Committee, Industrial Relations/Relations Industrielles (since 2022)

2022 Academic Fellow – Labor and Employment Relations Association

Member of international scientific council for GESTES, a French multi-university and cross-disciplinary research cluster focused on work (since 2012).

Books:

Where Bad Jobs Are Better: Retail Jobs across Countries and Companies (Russell Sage Foundation, (2017) co-authored with Chris Tilly is recipient of the 2017 William G. Bowen award for outstanding book on labor and public policy (Princeton University Industrial Relations Section) and of the American Sociological Association 2019 Distinguished Monograph Award of the Labor and Labor Movements Section as well as finalist for Academy of Management 2018 George R. Terry Book Award.

The Informal Economy Revisited: Examining the Past, Envisioning the Future. 2020. Martha Chen and Françoise Carré, eds. London: Routledge.

Nonstandard Work Arrangements and the Changing Labor Market. Françoise Carré, Marianne A. Ferber, Lonnie Golden, and Stephen Herzenberg, eds. 2000. Champaign, Ill: Industrial Relations Research Association/Cornell University Press.

Digital Technology Implementation in US Retail Stores: Trends, Potentials, and Contingencies,” Carré, Françoise, and Chris Tilly. 2022. in “A Forum on Emerging Technologies” Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Vol 75, no. 2 (May).

Profile on ResearchGate website

“So Far From God, So Close to the United States, and yet…: Unexpected Differences in Modern Retail Jobs between Mexico and the United States,” 2013. Françoise Carré and Chris Tilly. Revue Interventions Economiques (Papers in Political Economy). 47.February.

“Strength in Networks: Employment Rights Organizations and the Problem of Co-ordination,” 2006. Charles Heckscher and Françoise Carré. British Journal of Industrial Relations 44:4, December, vol. 44, no.4, pp. 605-628.

"Designing Organizational Solutions to Integrate Work and Life." Paula Rayman, Lotte Bailyn, Jillian Dickert, and Françoise Carré. With the assistance of Maureen. Harvey, Robert Krim, and Robert Read. Women in Management Review. Vol. 14, no. 5, September-October 1999, pp. 164-176.

Selected book chapters and reports

“Dependent Contractor”: Towards the Recognitions of a New Labor Category,” Françoise Carré. 2022. In Social contracts and informal workers in the global South, Sophie Plagerson, Marty Chen, and Laura Alfers, Eds. Edward Elgar.

“Retail Jobs: What Pathways for Improvement.“ Françoise Carré and Chris Tilly. 2020. In Paul Osterman, Ed. Creating Good Jobs: an Industry-based Strategy. Cambridge, MIT Press.

“Informal Employment in Developed Countries: Relevance and Statistical Measurement,” Françoise Carré. 2020. In Chen and Carré, Eds. The Informal Economy Revisited: Examining the Past, Envisioning the Future. London: Routledge, pp. 52-59.

Change and Uncertainty, Not Apocalypse: Technological Change and Store-Based Retail Françoise Carré and Chris Tilly, with Chris Benner and Sarah Mason. 2020. Berkeley: UC Berkeley Labor Center and Working Partnerships USA.

”Collective Bargaining by informal workers in the global South: where and how it takes place.” 2020. Françoise Carré, Pat Horn and Chris Bonner. In Jacques Charmes, Ed. Research Handbook On Development and The Informal Economy.Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: E. Elgar, pp. 285-316.

“Employment Change and Economic Vulnerability in the US.” Françoise Carré and James Heintz. 2013. In Sophia Parker, Ed. The Squeezed Middle: The Pressure on Ordinary Workers in America and Britain. Bristol, UK: The Policy Press.

“Retail Jobs in Comparative Perspective.” 2010. Françoise Carré, Chris Tilly, Maarten van Klaveren, and Dorothea Voss-Dahm. In Low-Wage Work in the Wealthy World. Jerôme Gautié and John Schmitt, Eds. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, pp. 211-68.

“Nonstandard Work Arrangements in France and the United States.” Françoise Carré. 2003. In Susan Houseman and Machiko Osawa, eds. Non-standard Work Arrangements in Japan, Europe, and the United States. Kalamazoo, MI: Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.