Academy Fellow

Lisa Adkins is an internationally distinguished sociologist, whose conceptual innovations and empirical research have shaped the direction of the discipline of sociology.  

Adkins’ research focuses on the dynamics of post-industrial societies. She has expanded the tools of economic sociology to address societal problems, including the growth of the service economy, transformations to work, new forms of wealth generation, and the rise of finance in shaping everyday lives.  

In her most recent work Adkins has developed new understandings of finance and assets and their role in shaping societal dynamics. She is central to the development of the asset economy thesis and the associated program of research. This program rests on the conceptual innovation that the asset is replacing the commodity as the predominant economic form and documents the consequences of this shift. Adkins’ empirical research has mapped how income from assets, especially homeownership, is outstripping income from wages, how pathways to homeownership are increasingly precarious, and how these dynamics are producing new patterns of inequality.  

Prior to her work on the asset economy, and through consecutive projects, Adkins’ research mapped adjacent features of post-industrial societies. This has included the changing dynamics between work and unemployment, the emergence of the austerity state, and the changing role of reproductive labour in finance-dominated economies. Taken together, this broad program of research reformulates established understandings of labour, finance, capital, time, and gender in ways that have opened out productive new insights and lines of investigation.  

Over her career, Adkins’ research has driven several significant scholarly debates. She is a leading voice in questioning how finance is shifting societal dynamics, most recently catalyzing debate concerning the role of housing assets in shaping the dynamics of inequalities in Australia. Here, key ideas from Adkins’ work have reframed understandings of social class and housing affordability and continue to be widely cited and applied in research both nationally and internationally.  

Adkins’ interventions from earlier in her career also continue to shape the field. Her conceptualization of service labour as incorporating attributes of the person remains pivotal to studies of economic life and has been highly influential in research on work and employment, with particular reference to questions of class and gender. Her socio-theoretical work on the significance of different forms of capital for understanding gender inequalities, particularly in their intersection with work and labour, continue to generate debate and frame research on transformations to the economy, including the boundaries of work and home.          

Taken in its totality, Adkins’ scholarship is marked by its consistency in delivering conceptual and empirical innovation to the discipline and for offering frameworks for understanding some of the defining societal changes and challenges of the new century.  

Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Sydney 

1. Lisa Adkins, Gareth Bryant and Martijn Konings (2023) Asset-Based Futures: A Sociology for the 21st Century. Sociology 57(2): 348-365.  

2. Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings (2020) The Asset Economy: Property Ownership and the New Logic of Inequality. Cambridge: Polity Press. 

3. Lisa Adkins (2019) Social Reproduction in the Neoliberal Era: Payments, Leverage and the Minskian Household. Polygraph (27):19-33. 

4. Lisa Adkins (2018) The Time of Money. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. 

5. Lisa Adkins (2017) Speculative Futures in the Time of Debt. The Sociological Review 65(3): 448-462.