His current research traces the rise and fall of job training in the liberal political imagination, from the end of World War II to the beginning of the twenty-first century. During these years, generations of academics, legislators, union officials, business executives and educators cohered around the idea that structural unemployment—induced by automation, deindustrialization, or shifts in the balance of global trade—was a problem that primarily afflicted the unskilled. The solution, they thought, was to retrain and "upskill" those most vulnerable to dislocation. Johnson-Rogers explores how the logic of job training was conditioned by the imperatives of defense mobilization, how it was operationalized on the shop floor, and ultimately how it was reimagined as a means of individualizing the responsibility for “human capital” investment, rather than as a social democratic instrument for labor market planning.