Michal Frenkel is a professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she recently served as a department chair (2018-2022).

Her research focuses on power relations and gender intersectionality in and around organizations.

As a public sociologist, she applies insights from her and others’ studies to help public and private organizations implement more inclusive employment practices and become more family-friendly and egalitarian in their approach toward marginalized groups. Michal is a frequent commentator on questions of work, organization, and gender equity in the Israeli media. She enjoys mentoring up-and-coming scholars and has worked closely with more than 50 graduate and post-doctoral students in developing their studies and academic careers.   

  • "The task for sociology is to come to the help of the individual. We have to be in service of freedom. It is something we have lost sight of."

    Zygmunt Bauman

  • "When we have to think strategically, we also have to accept our complicity: we forgo any illusion of purity; we give up the safety of exteriority. If we are not exterior to the problem under investigation, we too are the problem under investigation. Diversity work is messy, even dirty, work."

    Sara Ahmed

Research

In her research, Michal Frenkel examines power relations in and around organizations. In other words, she looks at how organizations and people within them exert and legitimize their right to control others based on social hierarchies. At the same time, she also studies how less powerful parties resist and challenge those with more control, demonstrating their agency and legitimacy in organizations, along with their ability to push back on the more dominant group.

Particularly, she explores how power relations affect the production of managerial knowledge and practices, and how the latter are institutionalized, transferred, and implemented across national boundaries. Additionally, she studies the role of such knowledge and practices in reproducing gender-, ethnicity-, race-, and religiosity-based social hierarchies.

Michal studies the multilayered nature of power and theorizes the interrelations between the global, national, organizational, and interpersonal power dynamics and how these shape organizational control and members’ compliance, agency, and resistance in organizations.

Her current research focuses on gender-religiosity intersectionality at work and the intersection of gender and age in shaping academic careers.

Publications

Select academic publications. For more, see CV.

Teaching

Introduction to Sociology

Advanced Sociological Theory

Sociology of Gender

Gender and Diversity in Organizations

Israeli State and Society

Media

Featured in Maariv, Kol HaIr, Zman Israel, and The Marker.

Select publications: