Isabelle Ferreras

Isabelle Ferreras is recognized as a brilliant academic scholar who has powerfully influenced the scientific community. The scope and penetration of her work have made her a kind of celebrity in the field of industrial relations.

Her PhD in Sociology is from Catholic University of Louvain, where she’s now a professor, having completed her MSc at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a postdoctoral certificate at Harvard University. Today she is one of the world’s most influential researchers in the field of labour and work.

Her research has shown that capitalist firms can best be understood as a political entities and that their place in the history of democracy remains unresolved. The path forward she has suggested is called economic bicameralism. Her work has revealed the connections between firms’ democratic transition, the respect for planetary limits, and the future of political democracy.

Throughout her career she has advocated for the inclusion of workers in how firms are governed. Her work with governments, international organizations, and labour unions has had significant impacts. Recently she was appointed by the Belgian government to its High Committee for a Just Transition, whose report was then picked up by the European Union.

Her keen desire to bridge the gap between research and society has fuelled numerous workplace democracy initiatives, including Endicott and Democratizing Work, whose manifesto on May 16, 2020, brought together more than 6,000 researchers, was published in 43 newspapers, and has been translated into 27 languages.

She was elected to Belgium’s Royal Academy in 2017 and is Senior Tenured Fellow of the Belgian National Science Foundation, Senior Research Associate at Harvard University’s Center for Labor and a Just Economy, and Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence.

Her work has paved the way for a new generation of researchers to step outside the ivory tower and offer new solutions to the problem of corporate sustainability.

Université Laval awards an Honorary Doctorate in Industrial Relations to Isabelle Ferreras in recognition of her research and influence on work and the workplace.