She is a Chancellor's Professor in the Department of Sociology, Associate Vice Provost for faculty development, and co-director of the Center for Organizational Research at the University of California, Irvine (UCI).
Her dissertation titled Embedded Economies: Foreign Direct Investment in Central and Eastern Europe was awarded the Seymour Martin Lipset Prize from Society for Comparative Research.
[8] Bandelj's research primarily focuses on two areas of inquiry: economic sociology and social change, with a specific emphasis on the transformations that have occurred in Central and Eastern Europe in the context of globalization.
[11] In her book From Communists to Foreign Capitalists: The Social Foundations of Foreign Investment in Postsocialist Europe, which Doug Guthrie for Administrative Science Quarterly called "an outstanding piece of work on the postsocialist transformation", she identified that politics, states, and path dependency play a crucial role in how markets are created and how they operate.
[13] In a related study, she highlighted that foreign globalization may be framed both in favor as well as against national interests, with multiple and contradictory views due to uncertain economic consequences shaped by social identities and postsocialist macro conditions.
[3] In related research, her collaborative study with Lanuza and Kim examined the role of gender in shaping money attitudes and indicated that while young women report a greater concern about money than men when considering the present, there are no notable gender differences when considering the future scenarios such as the likelihood of supporting a family financially or having a job with a good salary.