Sarah Ashwin

Sarah is a sociologist with research interests in industrial relations, international labour standards, corporate social responsibility, as well as gender and work, both paid and unpaid. She is currently serving as Deputy Head of the Department of Management (Teaching).

Sarah graduated from Oxford with first class honours in History, before taking an MSc in Russian Government and Politics at LSE. Her doctoral research in Sociology at Warwick examined workers' organisation during Russia's political and economic transformation in the 1990s.  Many of her subsequent publications focused on Russian workers’ responses to economic collapse and the attempts of Russian trade unions to adapt to their new environment.

Her interest in the experiences of women workers led her to develop a second theme of research focused on the (post) Soviet gender order and its consequences for women's employment and the gender division of domestic labour.

Sarah continues to research these themes, developing different aspects of gender theory by interrogating Russia’s stalled gender revolution. For example, a recent article analyses and theorises gender differences in the wellbeing implications of pensioner employment. Sarah’s gender research has been published in American Journal of Sociology, Gender & Society and Journal of Marriage and Family, with two articles nominated for the prestigious Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for Excellence in Work-Family Research in 2015 and 2019.  Sarah was honoured to join the editorial board of Gender & Society in January 2019.

The latest stream of Sarah’s research focuses on the governance of global supply chains in the garment industry. As part of international research project, her work analyses global labour governance through corporate social responsibility within the firm and transnational industrial relations agreements beyond it. Her article analysing the emergence of transnational industrial relations agreements, published with her research partners, won the 2021 James G. Scoville International/Comparative Industrial Relations Best Paper Award.  A report on research project findings to date can be found here.

Expertise Details

Labour Conflict; Gender; Trade Unions; Employment; Corporate Social Responsibility; International Labour Standards