Increasingly, his writing focused on urban sociology, labour, and the organisation of work. A scholar and activist associated with the
anti-sweatshop movement, he published
No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers in 1998 and
Low Pay, High Profile: The Global Push for Fair Labor in 2002. In 1997, he took up residence for a year in Disney's new town of
Celebration, Florida, and wrote
The Celebration Chronicles, based on his participant observation of the town's residents, the first ethnography of a
New Urbanist community. Two further books were based on field work with employees:
No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs, about employees in Internet companies during the New Economy boom and bust, and
Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade, about skilled Chinese employees of foreign firms in Shanghai and other Yangtze Delta cities. The latter book, written on the ground in China, is a frank alternative to
Thomas Friedman's pro-outsourcing views on corporate globalisation. In 2009, Ross published
Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times, an analysis of changing patterns in the nature of creative work and contingent employment. In several of his books, Ross has developed a method he calls Scholarly Reporting, which is a blend of ethnography and investigative journalism. In ''Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World's Least Sustainable City'', Ross draws on his fieldwork in Phoenix, Arizona. Focusing on areas such as water supply, metropolitan growth, renewable energy, downtown revitalisation, immigration policy, and patterns of pollution, the book argues that urban managers have to base policy on combating environmental injustices to avoid replicating the condition of
eco-apartheid that prevails in Phoenix and other major urban areas. One of his books,
Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal, analyses, and proposes solutions to, the massive
household debt burden that has accumulated over the last two decades. The book considers some of the legal and moral principles of the Jubilee South movement–aimed at repudiating external debts of developing countries–and adapts them to the situation of household debtors in the North.
Creditocracy engages with ideas and actions from the Occupy movement of debt resistance to Wall Street's creditor class. In Richard Posner's 2003 study,
Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, Ross was ranked among the top 100 public intellectuals in the US. From 1986 to 2000, Ross served on the editorial collective of
Duke University Press's journal
Social Text. In 1996 the journal published a paper by
Alan Sokal professing to show connections between
physics and
post-modern theory, which was later revealed by Sokal to be a hoax meant to expose the low academic standards of "post-modernism" (see
Sokal affair).
Social Text was awarded the 1996 for Literature for being taken in by the hoax. One of Ross's books,
Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel, tells the story of the Palestinian stone industry, along with its stonemasons and construction workers. Based on extensive field interviews, the book documents the conditions and challenges of workers in quarries and factories in the West Bank and it follows their movement across the Green Line to work on Israeli construction sites. Stone Men won the Palestine Book Award for Social History in 2019. In his book,
Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing, he assesses the national housing crisis through the lens of
Central Florida, one of the most difficult places for low income people to find affordable housing. Taking up residence in the region's budget motels, where a variety of households live in a permanent basis, he reports on the challenges faced by residents in these single room domiciles, as well as in tent encampments in the woods. In 2015, Ross helped to launch NYU's Prison Education Program Research Lab, The Lab's faculty and formerly incarcerated students do research on carceral debt. ==Activism==