About

Elizabeth A. Hoffmann is a Professor of Sociology at Purdue University, where she joined the faculty in 2001. Her research focuses on the sociology of law, legal consciousness, sociology of organizations, and gender and work. She has published works including her 2021 book, Lactation at Work: Expressing Milk, Expressed Concern, and the Expressive Value of Law, published by Cambridge University Press. Dr. Hoffmann's academic background includes a J.D. and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, earned in 1998 and 2001 respectively. Her work has been recognized with honors from several institutions, including the American Bar Foundation, the Law and Society Association, the Midwest Sociologists for Women in Society, the Industrial Relations Research Association, and the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. She has received research funding from both internal grants and external sponsors such as the National Science Foundation and the Clifford Kinley Trust. Dr. Hoffmann has presented her research at numerous regional, national, and international conferences, including the Midwest Sociological Society, the American Sociological Association, and the International Sociological Association's Research Committee on the Sociology of Law.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Engineering
• Public relations
• Business
• Law
• Psychology
• Economics
• Biology
• Management
• Medicine
• Mechanical engineering

Selected publications

• Worker Co-operatives and the Hiding Hand: How Limited Foreknowledge Facilitates Greater Worker Co-Operative Participation

  2026-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Marginalized Identity and Active Resistance: Milwaukee Socialists and German-Americans During World War I

  Law & Social Inquiry · 2025-04-23

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract When the USA entered World War I, Socialists, German immigrants, and German-Americans in southeastern Wisconsin went from being generally accepted and influential members of their communities to being marginalized and vilified. German immigrants who had been well integrated into conventional society became enemy aliens. Socialists and German-Americans faced new restrictions on their movement and speech. Scholarship on groups faced with this level of repression finds that they often either withdraw from mainstream society and acquiesce to their mistreatment or fight back through violent or other extralegal tactics. Socialists and German-Americans in Milwaukee did neither. Instead, they embraced their marginalized status and continued to use the law to advance their interests. They resisted their vilification by the law by uniting around those very shared identities that the law was used to marginalize them.

  PublisherDOI

• Accommodations for US lactating workers: employment law, breastfeeding women workers, and variations in management responses

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-04-03

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Women face many hurdles in the workplace. Women who try to combine full-time employment and ongoing breastfeeding face particular struggles. They must express milk several times throughout their workdays, which requires various accommodations. To support these efforts, the United States passed legislation mandating workplace accommodations: private space and breaktime. Organisational responses to the Lactation at Work Law were mixed, with lactating women workers experiencing varying degrees of success in expressing milk at work. Sometimes, this was due to accommodations meshing with pre-existing organisational structure and culture; other times, success was due to support by allies; yet other times the lactating workers created advocate-managers through ongoing educational discussions. While this US law is praised as pro-woman, it also shifts the discussion away from the United States’ lack of sufficient maternity leave, on-site childcare, and other accommodations that could make the need to express milk at one's workplace unnecessary.

  PublisherDOI

• Letter Writing and Legal Consciousness during World War I

  American Journal of Legal History · 2024-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article explores how ordinary Americans thought about law during World War I by examining 119 letters to Congress regarding charges under the Espionage Act. These letters are a product of their time and shed new light on our understanding of the first Red Scare. This lens of legal consciousness explains how people remain within established modes of engagement, rather than either withdrawing or becoming violent, as is found in the extant literature. Despite opposing goals, the letter writers’ shared master frame enabled them to ‘speak to’ the other side, rather than ‘past’ those with opposing views. This article explains how individuals who opposed and supported seating Berger rallied under the same master frame of Americanism. Yet, the two groups displayed strikingly different legal consciousness. These disparate groups not only conceptualized the law itself differently, but engaged the law as a tool for different agendas. At a time when violence was on the rise, these people eschewed violent means and maintained the most conventional, peaceful means of protest: letter writing. How they managed this was by embracing the law as their key, nonviolent tool.

  PublisherDOI

• Emotional Labor, Worker Solidarity, and Safety Concerns Among Police and Nurses

  Midwest Social Sciences Journal · 2024-09-18

  article1st authorCorresponding

  To understand the connections among emotional labor, solidarity, and safety, this study interviewed 19 police officers and 20 nurses. Data analysis with words as the unit of analysis engaged both deductive and inductive processes. This qualitative study demonstrates that, despite numerous differences, both nursing and police have a professional focus on safety. However, while nurses’ safety concerns are first for their patients, police offers’ first concern of safety must be for themselves and their co-workers. Additionally, nurses and police differ in why they perform emotional labor. Nurses engaged in emotional labor in order for their charges to feel closer to them, while police engaged in emotional labor in order to create distance between themselves and the community members they encountered. For both professions, solidarity and teamwork increased nurses’ and police officers’ abilities to engage in the necessary emotional labor, handle challenges, and better succeed in securing safety.

  PublisherDOI

• Taxation, Lactation, and Validation: The Symbolic Power of Tax Law to Legitimize Breast Milk Expression

  Law & Social Inquiry · 2023-07-10

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In 2011, the Internal Revenue Service reversed a previous regulation that excluded lactation supplies, including breast pumps, from medical care tax benefits. This policy change was met with joy by some working mothers. Often torn between family needs and workplace duties, these lactating employees struggled with trying to be a “good worker” and a “good mother.” They saw the new tax law as validation of their efforts to express milk at work and legitimation for the accommodations they required. They felt that even an area of law as technical and complex as tax law could recognize their commitment to combining breastfeeding and employment. However, the women recognized that the law only facilitated greater ability to lactate but not more time with their babies, which they greatly wanted. Indeed, this article asks if breast pumps and supplies would even be an issue for many women if the United States provided women with the more extensive maternity leave that workers in other developed countries receive.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Law, compliance, and variation: Proximity and preferences regarding workplace lactation accommodations

  Law & Policy · 2022-04-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Federal law mandates that employers accommodate lactating workers who wish to express breast milk at work. Lactation's physical demands set lactating employees apart from their coworkers, as lactation requires regular breaks and private rooms to express milk. Although longer breaks and convenient lactation accommodations make for more successful workplace milk expression, many lactating workers lack one or both. During their lactation breaks, some lactating workers wish to maintain workplace productivity, while others seek to relax and reconnect with their nurslings. Although the law mandates basic lactation accommodations, additional consideration must be given to location as well as to the preferences of lactating employees.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Moralizing the law: Lactating workers and the transformation of supervising managers

  Law & Society Review · 2022 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Public relations
  • Business

  Abstract The Lactation at Work Law amended the Fair Labor Standards Act to mandate employer accommodation of employees' breast milk expression. Interviews with employees, human resource specialists, and supervising managers in nine industries found that some organizations' supervising managers, who initially perceived accommodations only as a legal mandate furthering managerial goals, over time changed to understanding lactation accommodations through a children's-health lens that created morality-driven motivations for legal compliance–a “moralization of the law.” Educational discussions with lactating employees not only provided these supervising managers with insights into lactation at work, but also sensitized them to ethical issues surrounding lactation accommodations.

  PublisherDOI

• Interior Design decisions and legal compliance with the Lactation at Work Law

  Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal · 2022 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Business
  • Medicine
  • Economics
  PublisherDOI

• Lactation at Work: Expressed Milk, Expressing Beliefs, and the Expressive Value of Law

  2021-07-29

  book1st authorCorresponding

  In recent decades, as women entered the US workforce in increasing numbers, they faced the conundrum of how to maintain breastfeeding and hold down full-time jobs. In 2010, the Lactation at Work Law (an amendment to the US Fair Labor Standards Act) mandated accommodations for lactating women. This book examines the federal law and its state-level equivalent in Indiana, drawing on two waves of interviews with human resource personnel, supervising managers, and lactating workers. In many ways, this simple law - requiring break time and privacy for pumping - is a success story. Through advocacy by allies, education of managers, and employee initiative, many organizations created compliant accommodations. This book shows legal scholars how a successful civil rights law creates effective change; helps labor activists and management personnel understand how to approach new accommodations; and enables workers to understand the possibilities for amelioration of workplace problems through internal negotiations and legal reforms

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Danielle Ewen

  3 shared

• Marı́a Cecilia Puppo

  Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo en Criotecnología de Alimentos

  3 shared

• Laura Beth Nielsen

  American Bar Foundation

  2 shared

• Patricia Alejandra Boeri

  Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas

  2 shared

• Kimberly D. Richman

  University of Bristol

  2 shared

• Idit Kostiner

  2 shared

• Frank Rudy Cooper

  Boston University

  2 shared

• Daniel Alejandro Barrio

  Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• American Bar Foundation honors
• Law and Society Association honors
• Midwest Sociologists for Women in Society honors
• Industrial Relations Research Association honors
• Upjohn Institute for Employment Research honors