Q&A with CISS Pilot Grant Faculty Mentor Dr. Makarand Mody
Makarand Mody, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Hospitality Marketing at the Boston University School of Hospitality Administration (SHA). He currently serves as the Chair of Undergraduate Programs at SHA, and the School’s first-ever Director of Research. With CISS funding, Dr. Mody is leading the 2021-22 Pilot Grant project, “Moving from Precarity Towards Prosperity: An Abductive Analysis of Precarity Management in Service Sector Employment.” The grant supports the investigation of strategies that workers in precarious service occupations in the hospitality and long-term care sectors develop and implement to combat the adverse outcomes of precarious employment (PE) for worker well-being and quality of life. Dive further into this project and Dr. Mody’s work in an exclusive interview with CISS communications intern Lily Belisle.
Why does social science matter to you?
Social science is perhaps more important today than it ever has been. As a society, we have made so much progress in the last century or two (technologically, economically, in healthcare), owing to developments in the physical or hard sciences. However, to tackle many of the issues and challenges that the world faces today–from climate change and economic precarity to wars and the refugee crisis–we desperately need the work of social scientists. Beyond these challenges though, social science also has a critical role to play in informing how we as humans achieve our highest potential, for everything ranging from artistic endeavor to the hedonic and eudaimonic experiences that add value to our lives are enhanced by the work of social scientists.
What is your research project about? What piqued your interest in this?
Simply put, our research project aims to understand what makes those working in the service sector flourish, or thrive. Individuals who work in the service sector (which includes industries like hospitality and senior care, which we are studying) comprise the majority of the workforce today; yet, while corporate profits have soared and the number of billionaires in the world has grown exponentially, the majority of folks who do the everyday jobs in these sectors have been neglected. We live in a world where in a city like New York, people working in services are expected to live and support a family for $15 an hour. In this project, we are attempting to understand what creates adversity for the everyday service sector worker, and how we can move the needle towards these employees living their best lives possible.
What is the most compelling finding you’ve encountered thus far?
We have observed that despite the challenges they face and under the shadow of “economic precarity” that is seen to characterize the service sector, individuals exercise significant agency in charting the course of their lives. They are not “helpless victims” as they are often portrayed, but instead active, resilient decision-makers that go about their everyday making choices that work for them, within the confines of the system in which they operate.
How has the CISS funding affected your work?
CISS funding has been invaluable to the project itself and the project team. It allowed us to hire two undergraduate student RAs who now have the opportunity to gain direct research experience on an important social science topic. They can put their theoretical research skills into practice through primary data collection in the form of interviews, and then in analyzing the data and writing up the results.
What do you hope your student research assistants will learn from this experience?
It’s an amazing experience for students to hone their research skills on the job, so to speak. But I most hope that they gain a deeper appreciation of the importance of their work as social scientists, and how, at the end of the day, at the heart of all good social science inquiry is the people that we study and that our work impacts.