Yaniv Ron-El

Yaniv Ron-El, Ph.D., LL.B.,

Post-Doctoral Fellow, ChainGE Lab

Yaniv Ron-El is a legally trained sociologist whose research explores how people, especially consumers, organize to affect change in the marketplace for the betterment of workers and consumers. Yaniv’s research interests span economic and political sociology, social movement research, historical sociology and the sociology of law, with special focus on social movements that bridge economic and political aspects.

Yaniv completed his PhD at the University of Chicago’s Department of Sociology, where he wrote a dissertation on the American consumer movement in the 1960s-70s. Before that, he completed his M.A. and a B.A. in sociology and his law degree (LL.B.) at Tel Aviv University. He also holds a B.A. in humanities from the Open University of Israel, and he was a law intern at the Israeli Supreme Court. Before starting his position at ChainGE Lab, Yaniv held post-doctoral positions at the Safra Center for Ethics at Tel Aviv University, and in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Bar Ilan University. There, he has been developing publications and a monograph based on his doctoral research and conducted a study of the Israeli “natural gas fight” protest movement.

During his graduate studies, Yaniv was actively involved in academic labor organizing – serving on the board of the Junior Research and Teaching Staff Union as a graduate student at Tel Aviv University and later joining the Steering Committee of Graduate Students United (GSU) at the University of Chicago as a Ph.D.candidate. In that role, he helped lead efforts to secure union recognition for graduate workers, as part of a wider movement for granting workers’ rights in private universities in the U.S.

At ChainGE Lab, Yaniv is involved in three research projects. He conducts a historical study of consumer-driven initiatives to improve labor conditions, and he leads a research group working on a comparative case study of campaigns using consumer power to fight worker exploitation in global supply chains. In addition, Yaniv is collaborating with ChainGE Research Fellow Tamar Barkay on a research project that proposes alternative governance mechanisms to global value chains through the structural analysis of supply chains and their networked features.