Published by the MIT News Office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.

Piore Appointed Skinner Professor

IN ECONOMICS
Piore Suuceeds Kaysen As Skinner Professor

Professor Michael J. Piore, an expert on labor economics, has been 
selected to be the next Skinner Professor at MIT.

An expert on labor economics, Professor Piore's research has focused on 
what he refers to as the social "embeddedness" of economic activity, 
initially in the labor market and, in recent years, in economic 
institutions more broadly. He has written on low-income labor markets, 
international migration, trade unions and other organized economic 
groups, internal labor markets and communities of small, 
intercontracting firms and network organizations.

The appointment was announced by Provost Mark S. Wrighton and Professor 
Philip S. Khoury, acting dean of the School of Humanities and Social 
Science.

Dean Khoury said that Professor Piore "is an unusually broad and 
innovative scholar who is widely recognized as a pioneer in the study of 
internal labor markets (that describe how people advance their careers 
within business firms) and in the analysis of dual labor markets (in 
which some people advance their careers over their lifetime and others 
continue in a static employment situation). He has been interested most 
recently in the nature of effective management, arguing that the mass-
production model used by many American firms should be superseded by the 
Ôflexible specialization' characteristic of many Japanese and European 
enterprises."

Professor Piore has been a member of the Department of Economics faculty 
since 1966 and currently has a joint appointment with the Sloan School 
of Management. Previously, he held a joint appointment with the Program 
in Science, Technology and Society (STS).

The Skinner chair, established in 1974, honors the late David W. 
Skinner, a 1923 graduate of MIT in economics and science. Mr. Skinner 
was vice president, general manager and vice chairman of the board of 
Polaroid Corp. The chair was first held by Carl Kaysen, former head of 
STS, who retired last year, and with whom Professor Piore studied as a 
graduate student at Harvard in the early 1960s.

Professor Piore holds the BA (1962) and the PhD (1966), both from 
Harvard and both in economics. His doctoral dissertation, on the impact 
of technological change on the skill requirements of the labor force, 
was directed by John T. Dunlop. He has been a consultant to various 
international organizations, US government agencies, agencies in 
Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania and Puerto Rico, and to a limited 
number of business and nonprofit organizations including the NAACP Legal 
Defense and Education Fund.

His honors include Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, 1988-89, and 
MacArthur Foundation Fellow, 1984-89.

He is currently a member of the American Economic Association's 
Executive Committee, the Economic Policy Institute's Research council, 
the Executive Board of the Institute for Labour Studies of the 
International Labour Organization, the editorial and advisory boards of 
economic journals in Spain and France and the Stanford Journal of Law, 
Gender, and Sexual Orientation. His professional affiliations include 
the American Economic Association, the Industrial Relations Research 
Association and the Union of Radical Political Economists.

Among the books he has written are The Second Industrial Divide (with 
Charles Sabel), Dualism and Discontinuity in Industrial Society (with 
Suzanne Berger), and Birds of Passage: Migrant Labor and Industrial 
Societies.