Sociology · Political Economy · China
Eileen M. Otis
Associate Professor of Sociology and International Affairs
Northeastern University
I study the labor through which commodities realize their value.
My research examines labor, globalization, gender, and political economy through ethnographic studies of workplaces in contemporary China. I investigate the workers who move, stock, display, explain, and sell commodities, transforming goods into value through exchange.
Through research on service work, retail capitalism, and consumer markets, I develop the concepts of realization labor and the internal supply chain to understand labor at the point where commodities encounter consumers.
Made in China
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Featured Book
Walmart: Made in China
Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Walmart stores across China, the book examines how commodities move through internal supply chains and how distinct labor regimes shape workers' experiences of control, consent, resistance, and inequality.
Rather than treating retail stores as simple endpoints of global commodity chains, Walmart: Made in China follows goods through receiving docks, stockrooms, sales floors, checkout counters, and fulfillment systems to show how value is realized through labor.
Current Work
Forthcoming: "From the Factory Floor to the Retail Aisle: Reconstructing Burawoy's Labor Politics in the Age of Merchant Capital." Critical Sociology.
- Walmart: Made in China, Stanford University Press, 2026.
- Graduate Program Director, Department of Sociology, Northeastern University.
- Editor-in-Chief, Work in Progress.