In Profile: Suzanne Berger
Amid an economic slowdown, the United States is facing crucial questions about its manufacturing sector. Can manufacturers stage a comeback? Will manufacturing jobs stay in the United States, instead of moving elsewhere?One of the country’s leading authorities on these issues, perhaps surprisingly, is a historically minded political scientist who first built her academic reputation in the 1970s by studying French peasants. Over the last three decades, Suzanne Berger, the Raphael Dorman-Helen Starbuck Professor of Political Science at MIT, has increasingly focused on globalization and its effects on the economy — and, currently, on manufacturing, which now accounts for fewer than 10 percent of U.S. jobs, compared to more than 30 percent in 1950.Berger is now co-chair of MIT’s new Production in the Innovation Economy (PIE) project, which analyzes manufacturing. And she has played a key role in two Institute-wide research teams that produced influential books on the subject: 1989’s Made...