Katharina Hecht is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the International Business and Strategy Group at the D'Amore-McKim School of Business and a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities.

Her research relates to perceptions of income and wealth inequality, the temporal aspects of wealth, conceptualizations of richness, and geographic mobility and social mobility into higher managerial and professional occupations. Her doctoral research focused on perceptions of top incomes and wealth.

Previously Katharina Hecht held fellowships at the 'Politics of Inequality’ cluster at the University of Konstanz, Germany and at the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of Pennsylvania. She completed her PhD in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and is a Visiting Fellow at the LSE’s International Inequalities Institute (III).

Her work has been published in the Socio-Economic Review, Sociology, Journal of Social Policy, Social Policy and Administration, among other journals, and has featured in The Guardian, Financial Times, The New Statesman and the BBC.

Education

  • PhD Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science

Selected Publications

  • Hecht, K. (2021). ‘It's the value that we bring': performance pay and top income earners' perceptions of inequality. Socio-Economic Review. https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwab044.
  • Hecht, K., Burchardt, T., & Davis, A. (2022). Richness, Insecurity and the Welfare State. Journal of Social Policy, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047279422000617.
  • Hecht, K., & McArthur, D. (2022). Moving on up? How Social Origins Shape Geographic Mobility within Britain's Higher Managerial and Professional Occupations. Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380385221113669.
  • Hecht, K., & Summers, K. (2021). The long and short of it: The temporal significance of wealth and income. Social Policy & Administration, 55(4), 732–746. https://doi.org/10.1111/spol.12654.
  • Savage, M., Hecht, K., Hjellbrekke, J., Cunningham, N., & Laurison, D. (2018). The anatomy of the British economic “elite.” In O. Korsnes, J. Heilbron, J. Hjellbrekke, F. Bühlmann, & M. Savage (Eds.), New Directions in Elite Studies. Routledge.
  • Summers, K., Accominotti, F., Burchardt, T., Hecht, K., Mann, E., & Mijs, J. (2022). Deliberating Inequality: A Blueprint for Studying the Social Formation of Beliefs about Economic Inequality. Social Justice Research. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-022-00389-0.