Dr. Guðmundur Oddsson is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Akureyri (UNAK) in Iceland, and was an Assistant Professor at Northern Michigan University from 2014 to 2017. He earned his PhD in Sociology from the University of Missouri in 2014, and is a broadly trained Sociologist whose research focuses on class inequality (particularly the subjective dimensions of class), social control and deviance. Oddsson currently serves as Program Director of Social Sciences at the Department of Social Sciences at UNAK. He is also Co-Editor-In-Chief of Íslenska þjóðfélagið, the journal of the Icelandic Sociological Association and Book Reviews Editor of Acta Sociologica, the journal of the Nordic Sociological Association.

Since August 2021, Oddsson has been a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Department of Sociology at LSE and will be on the LSE campus in May and June 2022. His work as a class analyst is mainly inspired by Pierre Bourdieu and his research program focuses on critical and multi-faceted investigations of class awareness and social change. Oddsson uses mixed methods (e.g., surveys, content analysis and interviews), and during his stay in London, he will work on a project funded by UNAK’s Science Fund where he utilizes qualitative content analysis of class discourses from various media outlets to study how taken-for-granted ideas of relative classlessness in Iceland are culturally constructed. This study expands his previous work examining class discourse (e.g., Oddsson, 2016) and speaks directly to LSE’s Social Inequalities research cluster and work at the International Inequalities Institute. Oddsson is also writing as the lead author of an introductory textbook under contract with Oxford University Press: Grasping Our Unequal World: The Power of Sociology.

Oddsson’s research focuses on Iceland, arguably the world’s most egalitarian modern democracy until the mid-1990s since gaining independence in 1944. However, in the 1990s, Iceland’s government embarked on neoliberal reforms that significantly increased income inequality and concentrated wealth. Neoliberal globalization was marked by the rise of transnational capitalist elites and the immigration of low-wage foreign workers, undermining taken-for-granted ideas of relative classlessness (i.e., classlessness as doxa). These developments foreshadowed Iceland’s 2008 economic collapse – the biggest financial crisis ever, relative to economic size – after the country’s banking system imploded during the Great Recession.

Iceland’s boom, bust, and recovery from an egalitarian base offers a compelling case – a microcosm – for class analysts, and examining comparatively homogeneous and less differentiated societies can offer new understandings. Oddsson details this and more in a forthcoming review article of class research in Iceland in Current Sociology, and advances the argument that the strength and trajectory of class awareness in late modernity vary by welfare regime and that theorists overgeneralize declining class awareness based on highly differentiated, liberal welfare states. This argument is developed by considering the question of class structure, class politics, class inequality, class awareness and class culture in Icelandic class research (Oddsson, forthcoming).

Publications 

Oddsson, Guðmundur. Forthcoming. “Class in Iceland.” Current Sociology. OnlineFirst.

Oddsson, Guðmundur, Andrew Paul Hill and Thoroddur Bjarnason. 2021. “Jacks (and Jills) of All Trades: The Gentle Art of Policing Rural Iceland.” Nordic Journal of Criminology, 22:2, 129-148.

Oddsson, Guðmundur. 2018. “Class Imagery and Subjective Social Location during Iceland’s Economic Crisis, 2008-2010.” Sociological Focus 51(1): 14-30.

Oddsson, Guðmundur and Jón Gunnar Bernburg. 2018. “Opportunity Beliefs and Class Differences in Subjective Status Injustice During the Great Recession in Iceland.” Acta Sociologica 61(3), 283–299.

Oddsson, Guðmundur. 2016. “Neoliberal Globalization and Heightened Perceptions of Class Division in Iceland.” The Sociological Quarterly 57(3): 462–490.

Oddsson, Guðmundur. 2010. “Class Awareness in Iceland.” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 30(5/6): 292-312