About the lab

The Stanford Organizations and Networks Group (SONG) is devoted to interdisciplinary research on the co-evolution of networks and organizational fields. Participants are involved in theoretical and empirical research that examines relationships among networks, organizations, and institutions. More concretely we study the role of networks in transforming knowledge, and the processes through which networks mediate interactions among organizations, either rendering organizations more resilient or exposing them to obsolescence. Members are PhD students and postdoctoral fellows from the Schools of Education, Engineering, and Business, and the Departments of Sociology and Communication, as well as a number of visiting European scholars. Members of the lab have received fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the Kauffman Foundation's entrepreneurship program, NSF/Association for Institutional Research program, and grants from the NSF. Graduates of the group have taken faculty positions at the Universities of Michigan, Chicago, and Queens in Canada, and continue to be actively involved in collaborative research with us. The group, numbering approximately 15 participants, is organized by Professor Woody Powell, and all of the members work with him in some fashion.

Founded in 2000, SONG operates as both a lab and a community. Consequently, there are strong norms of collaboration, and research projects, while developed independently, are shaped within an open context that emphasizes rich debate, joint work, and active support and sharing. There are bi-weekly meetings where participants present work-in-progress, share data and methods, a Friday afternoon wine hour, and an occasional formal seminar where visiting faculty from other universities present. A sample of current research projects include multi-level networks that link public and private science, social and political transformations captured by corporate boards of directors, artistic labor markets, the stratification system of science, the early origins of nanotechnology, venture capital syndication networks, high-tech industrial districts, cross-national software development teams, and the evolving structure of academic and commercial research and development in the life sciences.

Members

Brandy Aven

I began the Sociology PhD program at Stanford in 2003. Presently, I am researching the effects of reputations and reputation systems. My interests also include: social psychology, social exchange, organizations, network analysis, group processes, and economic sociology. In addition, I am helping to develop online experiments to understand the effects on trust on exchange at Stanford's Center for Social Research.

Personal website: http://www.stanford.edu/~baven

Helena Buhr

I am a student at Uppsala University in Sweden with interest in organizations, institutions and economic sociology. I hold an undergraduate degree from the same university with a major in business administration and minors in economics and German. My present work focuses on the role of inter-organizational partnerships in shaping organizational fields. I have also been working in projects on the formation and spread of management knowledge

Kjersten Bunker Whittington

Kjersten Bunker Whittington is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Reed College. Her research is rooted in the broad areas of gender and work, scientific careers and organizations, and the high-technology knowledge economy. She is particularly interested in how structural and background antecedents of organizations and organizational boundaries influence career trajectories, scientific output, and subsequent innovation and development. Her current research investigates whether and how the durable gender inequality in science careers is affected by the recent changing boundaries between universities and firms, and the increasing trend to commercialize basic research in academia. Her work on this topic examines sex differences in productivity in light of the network structure/ / of inventor collaborations across organizational forms. Whittington also studies formal organizations and the science economy. With collaborators Owen-Smith, Powell, and Porter, she is engaged in projects that examine the contingent role of inter-organizational network structure and regional clustering in influencing innovative output among science-based firms.

Personal Website: http://academic.reed.edu/sociology/faculty/whittington/index.html

Jeannette Colyvas

I am a doctoral candidate in the Stanford University School of Education, currently pursuing a PhD in policy analysis/higher education. I speak four languages (English, Spanish, Japanese, and Greek), hold a B.A. in history from the University of California at Los Angeles, and an M.A. in East Asian Studies and an M.A. in Sociology from Stanford University. My policy and empirical interests include the role of research universities in the organization of R&D in the US and abroad; academic entrepreneurship and the commercialization of university research; and boundary formation and change in university-industrial interfaces. My current work explores the relationship between institutions and networks in scientific collaborations. I also study diffusion processes and how theorized models of entrepreneurship emerge, replicate and even fail as they are shared and transferred.

Ingrid Marlies Erickson

I am currently a doctoral student at the Center for Work, Technology & Organization in the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. My research interests include interorganizational collaboration and interdisciplinary teamwork--especially the ways in which each are enabled and/or hindered by technology. Lately, I've been exploring the dimensions of trust/distrust cycles between network partners by qualitatively analyzing a large product development network in the aerospace industry. I have a masters degree in information (with an emphasis in human-computer interaction) from the School of Information at University of Michigan and a masters degree in religious studies from University of Chicago Divinity School. Prior to coming to Stanford, I worked for ten years in the book industry, and have also been affiliated with the Social Computing Group at IBM's T J Watson Research Center and the Phantom Works research division of Boeing.

James A. Evans

I am an Assistant professor of sociology and in the college at the University of Chicago. I have interests in the sociology of science and of knowledge, social networks and organizations, economic sociology and the sociology of work. My current projects examine the influence of markets on science and work. In science, my central project explores how collaborations with industry influence academic research in an area of molecular plant biology (all research using the popular model organism Arabidopsis thaliana) by analyzing social and funding networks, scientific texts, bio-informatic databases, and interviews. I am also involved in a related project (with Woody Powell) which compares how different industries and their markets differentially shape the sciences they commercialize. In work, my current project examines the influence of IT contract labor markets on the experience of time, the relationship between the development of social and human capital, and the dynamics of labor-brokering (with Stephen Barley and Gideon Kunda). I am coediting a book on the relationship between work, organization and technology (with Steve Barley and Siobhan O'Mahony). Methodologically, I am developing new ways to represent and model fields of knowledge, I support advances in natural language processing and pattern matching that help to reduce the vast corpora of texts that inscribe those fields, and I use quantitative analysis to focus my qualitative investigations.

Personal website: http://home.uchicago.edu/~jevans

Stine Grodal

I am a doctoral candidate in Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. My research interests include industry emergence, innovation, and the role of technology in work processes. My dissertation focuses on the evolution of the nanotechnology field. I am interested in how legitimacy and boundaries are created in an emerging technological field and how entrepreneurial firms position themselves within evolving markets. Prior to coming to Stanford I received a BA and a MA in psychology from the University of Copenhagen.

Personal website: http://www.stanford.edu/~grodal/

Aditya Johri

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Leanring Sciences and Technology Design program at the School of Education at Stanford. In my research I look at how human interaction within work settings, and its outcome such as learning, are transformed through geographic separation between coworkers and their increased reliance on the use of technology. In my dissertation I am examining the process of impression formation in a distributed R&D work setting using a field study and trying to understand the effect of geographic distribution on impression formation among coworkers and how that influences outcomes such as work coordination and knowledge sharing. For my master’s thesis I did a field study of a distributed online class where students from the U.S. and Russia worked together on open-ended projects. I found that lack of interpersonal, contextual and institutional knowledge about project members in the distant location lead to critical breakdowns in communication and coordination. Before starting graduate studies I worked as a member of a distributed software development team with coworkers in the U.S., Europe, and Japan.

Personal website: http://www.stanford.edu/~ajohri

Andrew Nelson

I am a PhD candidate in Management Science and Engineering and am affiliated with the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP) and the Center for Work, Technology and Organization. I completed my Masters at Oxford University and dual bachelors degrees at Stanford. My primary area of research concerns the commercialization of university research. My dissertation focuses on the co-evolution of markets and technologies, and the respective influence of university and firm institutional environments on this process. I also study the growth of commercial logics within academic research groups and network relations between technology transfer and entrepreneurship programs within universities. I serve on the teaching team for the Mayfield Fellows Program and for the AeA/SEI New Ventures Lab. In addition, I maintain a second research stream on work practices, employing ethnographic observation and bibliometric analysis in the study of distributed work groups and telecommuting. This work is supported by Stanford's Center for Work Technology and Organzation.

Personal website: http://www.stanford.edu/~homer/academics/

Jason Owen-Smith

Jason Owen-Smith is a sociologist who examines how science, commerce, and the law cohere and conflict in contemporary societies and economies. Together with collaborators, Jason works on projects that examine the dynamics of high-technology industries, the commercialization of academic research, and the science & politics of human embryonic stem cell research. He seeks to understand how organizations, institutions, and networks can maintain the status quo while generating novelty through social transformations, scientific discoveries, and technological breakthroughs. Findings from this research have been published in outlets including the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, Higher Education, Management Science, Nature Biotechnology, Organization Science, Research Policy, and Social Studies of Science.He was a post-doc in the Powell Lab from 2000-2002 and has worked on the biotechnology network project since graduate school at the University of Arizona.

Personal website: http://www.umich.edu/~jdos

Andrew Parker

Andrew Parker is a doctoral student in sociology. He has conducted social network analysis research in a wide range of Fortune 500 organizations and government agencies. His research has covered top-level executive teams, functional departments, communities of practice, and recently merged companies. Andrew has co-authored more than 10 articles on social network analysis. His articles have appeared in Social Networks, Sloan Management Review, Organizational Dynamics and California Management Review. He is also the co-author of The Hidden Power of Social Networks and co-editor of Networks in the Knowledge Economy. Andrew holds graduate degrees from the London School of Economics and Northeastern University. His main interests are social networks, organizational theory, labor markets, and economic sociology.

Kelley A. Porter

I am currently an Assistant Professor of Strategy & Entrepreneurship at Queen's School of Business, Queen's University. My research is at the intersection of strategy, entrepreneurship and organization theory. I am broadly interested in how career histories of founders may influence firm level outcomes in three related areas of research. In the first stream of work I look at how peoples' prior work experiences, affiliations and their status may interact to help or hinder them in subsequent career decisions. This work is summarized in my dissertation. The second stream of work considers the regional differences in the development of an industry by looking at the diverging patterns of who became involved in the process of founding biotechnology companies in two prominent American regions. Finally, I am studying (with Woody Powell and Kjersten Bunker Whittington) the relationship between people, patent citation records and alliance data, to develop a better understanding of the intricate relationship between different types of connections and their combined impact on the development of an industry in a particular region.

Personal website: http://business.queensu.ca/faculty/member.php?id=78

Brooke Weddle Ricalde

I am a doctoral candidate in Stanford University's School of Education, where I am working on research related to international education and development. I am particularly interested in gender, entrepreneurship, and education/learning in developing countries. Currently, I am exploring the differing effects of social capital and human capital on small business outcomes in the informal sector in Lima, Peru. I am using the networks of entrepreneurs to operationalize the concept of social capital. My other research interests include the networks of Latino immigrants in the U.S., microcredit, and educational technology. I received a B.A. in economics and Spanish from the University of Virginia in 2001 and a M.A. in Spanish from Stanford University in 2003. I have also studied at the Pontificia Catolica Universidad del Peru and the London School of Economics. I conducted research in Peru as a Fulbright Scholar from 2001-2002.

Caroline Simard

I am a researcher at the Stanford graduate School of Business with the Stanford Project on Emerging Nonprofits, and I am a graduate of Stanford's Department of Communication. My research interests include social networks and the circulation of ideas and knowledge, corporate and nonprofit management, regional clusters, and new media. My dissertation investigated the role of inter-organizational networks in the creation and evolution of a regional cluster in wireless communication, and I am currently working on furthering this research.

Kaisa Snellman

I am a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University. My research interests lie within the areas of economic sociology, organizations, and the study of social networks. Together with Professor Walter W. Powell, I have studied the changing role of knowledge production and dissemination in the economy. In our article recently published in the Annual Review of Sociology, we review both sociological and economic research on the knowledge-based economy. Examining the spread of flexible work practices and considering distributional consequences of a knowledge-based economy, in terms of wages, unemployment, and jobs spurred my interest in research on inequality and stratification.

Jarrett Spiro

I am Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD in Singapore. My area of research has covered a number of theoretical arenas including: network emergence, network dynamics, network methodology, complexity theory, the origins of innovation, and organizational form emergence and other dynamics. This work has examined several areas including the U.S. film industry, the Broadway musical industry, and corporate gadflies. My collaborators on this work have included Walter W. Powell, Brian Uzzi (Northwestern University), Michael Hannan (Stanford University), Luis Amaral (Northwestern University), among others. In the past I have been affiliated with the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University and the Santa Fe Institute.

Personal website: http://homepage.mac.com/jspiro/

Chunlei Wang

I am currently a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology Department at Stanford. I hold a B.A. degree in Philosophy from Peking University, and an M.A. in Sociology from the Ohio State University. My academic interests include economic sociology, social network analysis, and organizational behavior. One of my current projects explores implications of competitive imitation for decision making of organizations. I try to find out whether and under what circumstances firms imitate their competitors' decisions. Another project is about tie formation and reproduction in the Venture Capital Industry. I would like to show that associations among organizations are predicated not only on irrational embeddedness but also on rational calculations. Popularity of words or ideas is my newly discovered research topic. I want to understand the role of mass media organizations in diffusion of words or ideas and how our knowledge about ourselves and the society is socially constructed.