Political scientist and social critic Frances Fox Piven lectures Oct. 4

Frances Fox Piven, Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York, will give a public lecture, "Discipline and Seduction: The Contemporary Campaign to Regulate American Labor," Friday, Oct. 4, at 4 p.m. in 305 Ives Hall on campus.

Piven's talk, which is a University Lecture co-sponsored by the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, will focus on the current efforts by big business to pressure American workers to work harder and complain less and to discourage unionism and cut back on social benefits. She will draw parallels between this campaign and the late 19th century campaign by big business to forge a disciplined industrial working class.

A well-known political scientist, social critic and activist, Piven has expertise ranging from social welfare, public health and public policy to voting behavior, comparative labor parties in industrial democracies and women's politics. Her work, in particular, focuses on the uses of political science to promote democratic reform.

As a scholar and writer, Piven has co-authored with Columbia University sociologist Richard Cloward a number of books, including Regulating the Poor, a landmark analysis of the role of welfare policy in the economic and political control of the poor and working class, Why American's Don't Vote, Why Americans Still Don't Vote and The Breaking of the American Social Compact, among others.

As an activist for the poor and women's and voters' rights, Piven was instrumental in helping liberalize welfare in the 1960s, which helped reduce extreme poverty in the United States, and co-founding Human SERVE (Service Employees Registration and Voter Education), an organization that established motor-voter programs in selected states as precedents for the federal legislation.

She is the recipient of many honors, including an honorary doctor of human letters from Adelphi University, a Fulbright distinguished lectureship at the University of Bologna, the 2001 Distinguished Career Award from the Council of Social Work Education and the 2000 Distinguished Career Award for the Practice of Sociology from the American Sociology Association.