Colloquium Speaker - Dr. Sarah Mosseri

In this talk, Sarah Mosseri draws on findings from her book, Trust Fall: How Workplace Relationships Fail Us (University of California Press, 2026) to explain the paradox of high workplace trust amid declining societal trust.  Drawing data from stratified workplaces across traditional and "new economy" industries, she elucidates how structural and cultural pressures in the US labor market make workplace trust feel indispensable. 

 

Situated in the context of unequal organizations and minimal labor protections, Mosseri shows how interpersonal trust functions as a mechanism of coercion, stratification, and organizational obfuscation. She argues that trust not only helps organizations operate under conditions of insecurity; it also reinforces a profoundly uneven social contract of work, binding workers more tightly to institutions that routinely fail them.

 

Sarah Mosseri is a sociologist who studies labor, inequality, and the hidden dynamics of workplace culture.  Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Australian Research Council and has been published in New Media & Society, Work, Employment & Society, Community, Work & Family, and the British Journal of Management. Mosseri earned her PhD in sociology from the University of Virginia, and she currently lectures part-time in the sociology departments at Clemson University and the University of Georgia.