Thomas A. Kochan came to MIT in 1980 from Cornell University, where he had been on the faculty of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations. From 1988 to 1991 he served as Head of the Behavioral and Policy Sciences Area at the Sloan School of Management.
Professor Kochan received his Ph.D. in Industrial Relations from the University of Wisconsin in 1973. He has served as a third-party mediator, fact finder, and arbitrator and as a consultant to a variety of government and private sector organizations and labor-management groups. He was a consultant for one year to the Secretary of Labor in the Department of Labor's Office of Policy Evaluation and Research.
Professor Kochan has conducted research on a variety of topics related to industrial relations and human resource management in the public and private sector. He is past president of both the International Industrial Relations Association and the Industrial Relations Research Association (IRRA).
Some of Professor Kochan's recent books include: Restoring the American Dream: A Working Families' Agenda for America; Management: Inventing and Delivering its Future; Working in America: A Blueprint for the Labor Market, Learning from Saturn; Managing for the Future: Organizational Behavior and Processes, 3rd edition, 2004; An Introduction to Collective Bargaining and Industrial Relations, 3rd ed. 2003; In 1988 his book, The Transformation of American Industrial Relations received the annual award from the Academy of Management for the best scholarly book on management.