Patrick Sheehan is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Center for Work, Technology, and Organizations at Stanford University. In the fall, he will be an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boston University.

He is an ethnographer who studies social life at the intersection of work, culture, inequality, and technological change. His research has been published in American Journal of Sociology, Annual Review of Sociology, Work & Occupations, and Contexts and has won awards from the ASA sections on Culture; Organizations, Occupations, and Work; and Economic Sociology.

His research agenda focuses on transformations to professional work in contemporary capitalism and examines how workers and organizations respond to technological change, shifting cultural expectations, and the heightened uncertainties that characterize economic life today.

Patrick is currently working on two research projects. The first examines “hype culture” in Silicon Valley, showing how tech start-ups cultivate fantastical imagined futures as a means of managing, motivating, and manipulating young workers. A second ongoing project examines the puzzling rise of self-styled life and career coaches to explain the changing dynamics of expertise in contemporary life.

Patrick earned his PhD from the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and his BA from the University for California, Santa Barbara. He has also been a Visiting Scholar in the Economic Sociology research group at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Society in Cologne, Germany. Before graduate school, Patrick taught 2nd grade in Detroit, Michigan, and worked as a labor organizer for the United Teachers Los Angeles.

You can find Patrick’s CV in the navigation bar on the left side.

You can contact Patrick at sheehan5@bu.edu