Bryan Boyle

I am a Post-Doctoral Researcher in Sociology at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies and a Voluntary Fellow at BRISPO here at the VUB. Before moving to the Max Planck, I was a Doctoral Researcher and Guest Professor at the VUB, where I specialised in teaching courses on social inequalities and sociological theory. My research tends to lie at the intersection of the study of labour, culture, and elites, and is generally driven by the aim to understand and address issues pertaining to social class. Methodologically, I am specialised in qualitative methods and ethnographic research.

For my doctoral thesis, I conducted an ethnography of the ‘butler’ profession, a profession that has experienced a surprising revival as wealthy groups and other elites again seek their expertise in private service. In the spirit of a carnal ‘enactive ethnography’, I actually trained at a butler school and worked as a butler in the UK. As I illustrate through the notion of ‘the labour of distinction’, studying butlers allows us to see how the most powerful in our society depend on the efforts of others to cultivate a lifestyle that brings them status.

My research has been published in two of the discipline’s leading journals: the American Sociological Review and The Sociological Review. In public media, I have written for The Sociological Review Magazine and Knack, and my research on butlers has recently been covered in outlets such as The Economist, The Times, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine.