Richard Sennett

Why organisations work with Richard Sennett

• A longitudinal sociological lens almost no other living speaker offers. Five decades on the same questions about what work does to people, running from The Hidden Injuries of Class (1972) through The Corrosion of Character (1998) to Building and Dwelling (2018).
• Reframes employee engagement as a question of craft. The Craftsman (2008) advanced the thesis that “making is thinking” and treats the desire to do a job well for its own sake as a workplace asset organisations either nurture or destroy.
• A serious framework for cooperation as a workplace skill. Together (2012) argues that cooperation is a craft learned through structured practice, and shows why short-term teams and constant reorganisation erode the conditions that make it possible.
• Direct involvement in shaping how cities and labour are governed. Sennett wrote the mission statement for UN Habitat III, helped organise COP26 work on cities and climate, and chaired the LSE Cities programme.
• Credentials at a level few corporate speakers reach: the Hegel Prize, the Spinoza Prize, the Centennial Medal from Harvard, an OBE for services to design and Fellowship of the British Academy.

Biography highlights

• Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics; former University Professor of the Humanities at New York University.
• Author of The Hidden Injuries of Class, The Fall of Public Man, The Corrosion of Character, The Craftsman, Together, Building and Dwelling and The Performer.
• Founding director of the New York Institute for the Humanities (with Susan Sontag and Joseph Brodsky); former President of the American Council on Work; founder and chair of Theatrum Mundi.
• Senior Advisor to the United Nations Council on Urban Initiatives; wrote the mission statement for UN Habitat III; helped organise COP26 work on cities and climate.
• OBE for services to design (2018); Fellow of the British Academy; Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; recipient of the Hegel Prize, the Spinoza Prize and the Centennial Medal from Harvard.
• Senior Fellow at the Center on Capitalism and Society, Columbia University; Honorary Professor at UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture and Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose.

Biography

The promise of flexible capitalism was that workers would gain real control of their own time and direction. The Corrosion of Character, published in 1998, showed in granular ethnographic detail what actually happened to dismissed IBM executives, Boston bakers and a barmaid turned advertising executive. The book established a thesis that has only sharpened with time: an economy built around “no long-term” produces people who struggle to sustain identity and craft over a working life.

That argument matured over two decades into a trilogy on what Sennett calls Homo Faber, or “man the maker.” The Craftsman (2008) advanced a single thesis: making is thinking. It treated the desire to do a job well for its own sake as a workplace capacity organisations either nurture or destroy.

Together (2012) extended the argument into the social. Cooperation is a craft, Sennett argued, learned through structured practice and degraded by short-term teams and constant reorganisation. Building and Dwelling (2018) carried the same lens into urbanism, distinguishing the ville (the built city) from the cité (how people actually live in it).

Sennett’s intellectual lineage runs directly through David Riesman, John Rawls and Hannah Arendt at Harvard, where he took his PhD in 1969. Few living sociologists carry that depth of connection to the most serious thought of the twentieth century into corporate and policy conversations of the present. In 2024 he published The Performer: Art, Life, Politics, the opening volume of a new trilogy on performance, narration and image-making.

Key speaking topics

• The future of work in flexible capitalism
• Craftsmanship and the conditions for good work
• Cooperation as a workplace skill
• Character and the personal consequences of “no long-term” employment
• Urbanism and the ethical city
• Public culture and authority in modern organisations

Ideal for

• CHROs and senior people leaders moving past trend diagnostics into the deeper drivers of engagement and workforce design.
• Executive teams contending with the cultural costs of reorganisation, short-term teams and high turnover.
• Boards, CEOs and strategy leaders commissioning long-horizon work on the human foundations of organisational change.
• City leaders, urbanists and real-estate strategists working on the ethics and design of public space.

Audience outcomes

• A vocabulary for what short-termism and perpetual reorganisation actually do to character and craft inside organisations.
• The “making is thinking” framework, which puts employee skill and the conditions for good work at the centre of strategic conversation.
• Cooperation reframed as a workplace craft, built through specific practices and degraded by structures many organisations now treat as normal.
• The ville/cité distinction as a tool for thinking about the human and built dimensions of any large environment, from offices to city districts.
• A historical lens on flexible capitalism that sets present-day workforce challenges in their actual fifty-year arc.