Valeria Pulignano

Research interests: Economic Sociology, Sociology of Work and Employment & Employment Relations with particular focus on Inequality, Class, Precarious Work, Job quality, Labor Market & social and economic processes and dynamics of change, Unpaid labour, Digital technologies & AI & Work, Platform Work, Workers’ Voice and Democracy at Work, Labour unions, and Collective bargaining. 

Bio: Valeria Pulignano is Professor of Sociology at the Centre for Sociological Research (CESO), KU Leuven, and Head of the TRANSFORM research group. She holds a Francqui Research Professorship and is a member of Leuven.AI at KUL. She is also affiliated with the Weizenbaum Institut, DIGIT (Universities of Leeds and Essex), IRRU (University of Warwick), LISER and CRIMT (University of Montreal and Laval). She is Principal Coordinator of the European Sociological Association’s (ESA) Research Network on Work, Employment and Industrial Relations and serves on the Executive Committees of ILERA and SASE. She is Editor of Work, Employment and Society and Associate Editor of the Journal of Industrial Relations. She has led an ERC Advanced Grant, ResPecTMe, and is leading an ERC Proof of Concept, ReSTLess, examining precarious and unpaid labour across the platform economy, creative industries and care. These projects have also produced a harmonised cross-national database on unpaid labour in the UK, Netherlands, Sweden and France. She is author and co-author of several books, including The Politics of Unpaid Labour (with Markieta Domecka, Oxford University Press, 2025), Reconstructing Solidarity (with Virginia Doellgast and Nathan Lillie, Oxford University Press, 2018), and Shifting Solidarity (with I. Van Hoyweghen and G. Meyers, Palgrave, 2020).

Research summary: At Harvard, Valeria Pulignano will build on her ERC-funded research on unpaid labour by completing a set of comparative publications emerging from the ReSTLess project. The first strand develops a cross-national analysis of task-based unpaid labour time, examining the relationship between work-related activities performed beyond paid working time and work–life balance across a set of European countries included in the ReSTLess database. A further publication analyses unpaid overtime, extending the project’s broader argument that the boundaries of remunerated (and not) of working time are themselves an important dimension of job quality. Alongside these publications, Valeria will provide dedicated time to develop a competitive research grant on AI and work. Harvard’s interdisciplinary environment will be particularly valuable for connecting these strands of research.

This information is accurate as of the affiliate year indicated. (last updated 09.01.2026)