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Victor Tan Chen is an associate professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University who studies economic inequality. He is the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy, a study of long-term unemployment in America and Canada. For his work on Cut Loose, Chen received the John T. Dunlop Outstanding Scholar Award from the Labor and Employment Relations Association. Chen’s latest book, co-edited with Katherine K. Chen (no relation), is Organizational Imaginaries: Tempering Capitalism and Tending to Communities through Cooperatives and Collectivist Democracy, a peer-reviewed collection of cutting-edge scholarship on worker cooperatives and other decentralized and collectively owned enterprises. Organizational Imaginaries received the Joyce Rothschild Book Prize from the Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations. Chen is also the author of The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America, written with Katherine S. Newman, named by Library Journal as one of the best business books of the year.

Chen’s work has been featured in the Atlantic, the New York Times, BBC News, the Los Angeles Times, Fortune, Next Question with Katie Couric, the Leonard Lopate Show, the Associated Press, Newsday, Times Higher Education, Viewpoints, With Good Reason, Bill Moyers Journal, the Boston Globe, C-SPAN’s Book TV, and NPR. He is also the editor in chief of In The Fray, an award-winning magazine devoted to personal stories on global issues. Chen received his PhD and BA from Harvard University and was a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. He has given talks at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)’s Local Employment and Economic Development (LEED) Programme, Cornell University, MIT, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago, and he has been interviewed by news outlets in the U.S. and abroad.

Chen is the lead author of a free and Creative Commons-licensed sociology methods textbook, The Craft of Sociological Research: Principles and Methods of Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Social Science Data, which is currently being piloted and has been funded by the Virtual Library of Virginia (a program of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia) and VCU. With Jesse Goldstein, he is currently finishing a book on entrepreneurship and its relationship to the labor market. With funding from the Russell Sage Foundation, he is also working on a book about the opioid epidemic.

[Pronunciation note: Chen’s middle name is pronounced like the color “tan.”]

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