Research in the Sociology of Organizations

I am honored to contribute to this volume on the Stanford Organization Theory Renaissance, though I must admit that I am a bit sheepish about being listed as a faculty member. I was indeed on the Stanford faculty, from 1997 to 2001. However, the experience for me was more of a developmental one in which I learned from my colleagues, who consisted of the leading lights in the sociology of organizations and organization theory generally. This period was as formative for me as was the prior period, when I was a student in the formal sense. I find it easy to point to specific ideas that I encountered during my stay at Stanford and to trace how they shaped my perspective on key questions of social and economic organization. In the following, I will discuss one example of this Stanford influence. In particular, I build on ideas developed at Stanford during the 1970s and 1980s (and which I came to appreciate during the 1990s) to make progress on a puzzle that did not occupy center stage there and then. Nothing testifies to the value of a theory or approach than its ability to generate insight well beyond the original questions for which it was originally developed.