Core Department Faculty Member

Shepherd’s research lies at the intersection of organizational sociology, the sociology of work and the regulation of work, social networks, social and cognitive psychology and sociology of culture. Her current work focuses on realizing employment protections for low-wage workers and employee power in low-wage workplaces. She examines how social networks, social norms and culture, and organizational practices shape action, and thus facilitate or impede social change. She has a persistent interest in historical and current attempts at social change including social engineering, social movements, utopian scheming, and policy.

Her forthcoming book with Janice Fine examines what happens after cities pass minimum wage and paid sick leave laws and then set about trying to enforce those laws. The book involves a comparative case study of the four oldest, most resourced offices — San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, and New York City— and tells the story of the politics and organizational dynamics involved in the enforcement of workplace protections. The book provides a detailed exploration of how enforcement happens; an argument about the conditions that gave rise to those approaches to enforcement; and an examination of how the economic justice goals of local employment standards laws might be fully realized.

Shepherd uses a wide range of methods including network analysis, survey and field-based experiments, comparative case studies, digital and computational tools, interviews, and archival research. Shepherd teaches classes in organizations, culture, and how institutions attempt to change individual and group behavior. Her current work is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and WorkRise.

Hana Shepherd's work covers three areas.

1. Organizational Practices: Inequality and Social Transformation
   Given the importance of organizations in distributing resources and opportunities, Shepherd examines how organizational practices amplify or diminish inequality as a way of better understanding non-individual sources of the reproduction of inequality. Her current work focuses on discipline systems and policy implementation in schools; employer practices in retail work; and how government enforces minimum wage and paid sick leave laws. In this final area, Shepherd is working with colleagues at the Workplace Justice Lab to examine state disparities in the enforcement of labor standards and how to equitably enforce labor standards in cities.
2. Social Networks, Group Processes, and Group Culture
   Shepherd’s research examines how people perceive the social norms operating in their social groups, the effects of those perceptions on behavior, and how norm perceptions are shaped by social networks. She is interested in social norms as a central element of culture as they shape larger patterns of behavior in groups. Her current work in this area examines the formation and effects of network ties among low-wage workers, how organizers understand and use workers’ social networks, sources of perceptions of norms regarding racism, how network structures shape our subjective understandings of belonging in a school, and how digital tools can be used to build supportive online communities. Learn more about and access a network dataset of 56 schools that she co-designed and uses for some of this work here.
3. Cognitive and Social Psychological Accounts of Culture
   Shepherd uses tools from social and cognitive psychology, survey experiments, and other analytical methods to investigate the processes of culture and cognition, in particular how we form shared interpretations of the social world, develop shared memories and emotions, and learn about the expectations and behaviors of others. She has a particular interest in the use and interpretation of implicit cognition measures as part of understanding the transmission of culture.