Kirsten Sehnbruch

Biography

Sehnbruch was born in Oberhausen, Germany, but raised in London (where she attended to the German School London), and in Kirchen, Germany (where she completed her Abitur at the Gymnasium Am Löhrtor).

Sehnbruch studied Modern and Medieval Lenguages at Jesus College, Cambridge. During her graduate degree, she worked as an trainee auditor for Price Waterhouse in Buenos Aires, where she gained firsthand experience of development issues. After graduating from Cambridge, she worked as an equity analyst for Goldman Sachs Asset Management in London and qualified for Associate Membership of the Institute of Investment Management and Research (IIMR), the British equivalent of the North American Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) qualification.

In 1997, she moved to Brussels to work at the European Commission on the Mexico Desk of the Directorate-General for External Relations with the team that negotiated the Global Agreement and FTA with Mexico. That year, she also returned to the University of Cambridge to undertake a Masters in Philosophy (MPhil) in Latin American Studies, focussing on economics and sociology.

She subsequently undertook a PhD in Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cambridge, which analysed the quality of employment in the Chilean labour market, and was published as the book The Chilean Labor Market: A Key to understanding Latin American Labor Markets by Palgrave Macmillan in 2006.

After her PhD, Sehnbruch worked as a Lecturer and Senior Scholar at the University of California at Berkeley, where she taught courses and research seminars on Latin American development and public policy, and as a research fellow at the University of Chile.

Research

Sehnbruch has consistently worked on the subject of the quality of employment. Her work argues that employment conditions such as income levels, job stability, occupational status, social security contributions, and access to quality vocational training are extremely important to an individual's capabilities and well-being. Still, these conditions are often neglected by labour market experts and policy makers in developing countries, who tend to focus mostly on the quantity of available jobs. Influenced by Amartya Sen's capability approach and by the design of human development and multidimensional poverty indicators by the United Nations Development Programme, Sehnbruch argues that conceptualising and measuring the quality of employment, preferably by means of a composite indicator, is essential to attracting more policy attention to employment issues in developing countries.

In addition to her work on the quality of employment, Sehnbruch has written many articles on Chilean politics and public policy. Her most recent book, co-edited with Peter Siavelis, professor of political science and Director of the Latin American and Latino Studies program at Wake Forest University, is Democratic Chile: The Politics and Policies of a Historic Coalition, 1990–2010. The book examines how the political and institutional legacy of the Pinochet dictatorship shaped both the political and policy development led by the Concertación between Chile's transition to democracy, and the first government of Michelle Bachelet after which the coalition lost the elections to the centre-right candidate Sebastián Piñera.

Since 2011, Sehnbruch leads the team of researchers from the University of Chile for NOPOOR proyect, founded by the 7th Framework Programme (FP7) of the European Commission.

New Development Thinking

Sehnbruch is the director and co-founder of the Centre for New Development Thinking at the Faculty of Economics and Business at the University of Chile. The centre, nicknamed "Dev-Out" for its motto "Development out of the box," was established in order to question traditional approaches to development problems which systematically neglect certain areas of public policy, such as inequality, labour markets, environmental sustainability and industrial policy. The neglect of these issues in particular has led to the persistent multidimensional inequalities that still distinguish the Latin American region, as well as to increasingly serious environmental problems, which make current natural resourced based growth strategies unsustainable.

She was instrumental in coordinating a significant grant from the Chilean government to set up the Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion (COES), also based at the Faculty of Economics and Business at the University of Chile as well as at the Pontifical Catholic University. COES undertakes multidisciplinary research on subjects related to social conflict and cohesion in Chile. It brings together a group of 30 researchers from all social science disciplines as well as a network of international researchers from around the world. Sehnbruch is a board member of COES and specifically focuses on the Centre’s international relations.

Media

For several years, Sehnbruch wrote a blog for one of Chile's principal newspapers, La Tercera. She has also written for the satirical newspaper The Clinic, for The Washington Post's Monkey Cage, Open Democracy, and the Inter-American Dialogue. She is regularly interviewed by the international press and television on Chilean politics and development issues.

Refereed journal articles

- Ocampo and Sehnbruch. 2015. "The Quality of Employment in the Development Literature". The International Labour Review, 154 (2), 165-170.

- Ramos, Sehnbruch and Weller. 2015. "Quality of employment in Latin America: Theory and evidence". International Labour Review, 154(2), 171-194.

- Ruiz-Tagle and Sehnbruch. 2015. "The Quality of Employment in Chile". The International Labour Review, 154(2), 227-252.

- Sehnbruch et al. 2015. “Human Development and Decent Work: Why somo Concepts Succeed and Others Fail to Make an Impact”. Development and Change 46 (2), 197–224.

- Burchell et al. 2013. "The Quality of Employment and Decent Work: Definitions, Methodologies, and Ongoing Debates". Cambridge Journal of Economics (2014) 38 (2), 459–477.

- Sehnbruch. 2012. "Do the Poor Count? A Review". Social Forces 91.

- Sehnbruch. 2006. "Individual Savings Accounts or Unemployment Insurance?". International Social Security Review 1, 27–48.

Books

- Sehnbruch and Siavelis (Eds.). 2014. El balance: Política y políticas de la Concertación 1990–2010. Santiago: Catalonia.

- Sehnbruch and Siavelis (Eds.). 2013. Democratic Chile: The Politics and Policies of a Historic Coalition, 1990–2010. Lynne Rienner Publishers.

- Sehnbruch. 2006. The Chilean Labor Market: A Key to Understanding Latin American Labor Markets. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Book chapters

- Sehnbruch. 2014. "La calidad del empleo". En Transformaciones del Trabajo, Subjetividad e Identidades. Lecturas psicosociales desde Chile y América Latina. Editado por Antonio Stecher y Lorena Godoy. RIL editores. (Páginas).

- Sehnbruch and Siavelis. 2013. "Political and Economic Life under the Rainbow". In Democratic Chile: The Politics and Policies of a Historic Coalition, 1990–2010. Kirsten Sehnbruch y Peter Siavelis (Eds.). Lynne Rienner Publishing. (Páginas).

- Contreras y Sehnbruch. 2013. "From Social Debt to Welfare State?". In Democratic Chile: The Politics and Policies of a Historic Coalition, 1990–2010. Kirsten Sehnbruch and Peter Siavelis (Eds.). Lynne Rienner Publishing. (Páginas).

- Borzutsky, Sanhueza and Sehnbruch. 2013. "Reducing Poverty: Real or Rhetorical Success?". In Democratic Chile: The Politics and Policies of a Historic Coalition, 1990–2010. Kirsten Sehnbruch and Peter Siavelis (Eds.). Lynne Rienner Publishing. (Páginas).

- Sehnbruch. 2013. "The Labour Market under the Concertación" In Democratic Chile: The Politics and Policies of a Historic Coalition, 1990–2010. Kirsten Sehnbruch and Peter Siavelis (Eds.). Lynne Rienner Publishing. (Páginas).

- Sehnbruch and Siavelis. 2013. "The Future of the Rainbow Coalition" In Democratic Chile: The Politics and Policies of a Historic Coalition, 1990–2010. Kirsten Sehnbruch and Peter Siavelis (Eds.). Lynne Rienner Publishing. (Páginas).

- Sehnbruch. 2013. "La calidad del empleo en Chile: Entre teoría y medición". In La Calidad del Empleo en América Latina. Stefano Farné (Ed.). Colombia: Universidad Externado de Colombia, pp. 263–302.

- Sehnbruch. 2012. "Una metodología para medir la calidad del empleo en Chile". En ¿Qué significa el Trabajo Hoy? Cambios y Continuidades en una sociedad global. Ana Cardenas, Felipe Link y Joel Stillerman (Eds.). Santiago: Universidad Diego Portales/Organización Internacional del Trabajo, Catalonia, (Páginas)

- Ruiz-Tagle y Sehnbruch. 2010. "Desigualdad y condiciones laborales: desafíos futuros del mercado laboral chileno". En Ideas para Chile: Aportes desde la Centro-Izquierda. Clarisa Hardy (ed.). Santiago : LOM Ediciones, (páginas).

- Sehnbruch. 2010. "Unresolved Conflict within the Consensus: Bachelet's Inheritance of Labor and Employment Issues". In The Bachelet Government. Silvia Borzutzky and Gregory Weeks (eds.). Florida: University Press of Florida, (páginas).

- Sehnbruch. 2007. "From the Quantity to the Quality of Employment". In The Capability Approach in Human Development: Concepts, Applications and Measurement. Sabina Alkire, Flavio Comim and Mozaffar Qizilbash (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (páginas).