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.
Lab Schedule
Winter 2006
January 6: Katerina Larsen (Royal Institute of Technology) and David Suarez (SUSE)
February 10: Kjersten Bunker Whittington (Sociology) and Hokyu Hwang (GSB)
February 24: Stine Grodal (MSE) and Jarrett Spiro (GSB)
March 17th: Andrew Parker (Sociology) and Kaisa Snellman (Sociology)
Fall 2005
October 21: Jeannette Colyvas (SUSE) and Woody Powell – “Roads to Institutionalization”
November 4: Brandy Aven (Sociology), Kaisa Snellman (Sociology), Jarrett Spiro (GSB)
November 18: Andrew Nelson (MS&E), Chunlei Wang (Sociology)
December 9: Jeannette Colyvas (SUSE), Stine Grodal (MS&E)
wiki
Accessible only by group members.
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
I am a PhD candidate in the Department of
Sociology. My primary interests are in scientific labor markets, and the
role of gender, social networks, and organizational factors in shaping
patterns of productivity and mobility. My dissertation compares the
patenting and publishing activity of male and female scientists from
different disciplines in different occupational settings, ranging from
university labs to small startups to established corporations. I also
study formal organizations and the science economy. With collaborators
Powell and Owen-Smith, I am engaged in a project that examines the
contingent role of inter-organizational networks and regional clustering in
influencing innovative output among science-based firms. Methodology is a
strong side interest of mine, and my research incorporates a variety of
statistical and qualitative methods, including multivariate modeling,
network analysis and visualization, and ethnographic studies. My research
has been supported by fellowships from the National Bureau of Economic
Research (NBER) and the Association for Institutional Research (AIR), and
research funding from the Santa Fe Institute. Prior to coming to Stanford,
I received a BS in Physics at North Carolina State University. My expected
date of graduation is December 2006.
Personal Website: www.stanford.edu/~kcbunker/
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 Assistant Professor of Sociology and Organizational Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
He is interested in institutional and organizational change, innovation, the dynamics of complex social and economic networks, and the commercialization of academic research.
His current project focuses on the intersection of science, technology and commerce in academe with particular emphasis on the ramifications of patenting, licensing, and university-industry collaborations.
Jason pursues these topics across levels of analysis using methods ranging from econometric modeling to observational field work and network visualization.
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
I am a second year doctoral student in sociology at Stanford University.
My interests include organizational theory, non-profit organizations, social networks and economic sociology.
I have conducted applied research in a wide range of Fortune 500 organizations and government agencies.
My research has covered top-level executive teams, functional departments, communities of practice, and recently merged companies.
I have co-authored 7 articles on social network analysis, which articles have appeared in Social Networks, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science,
Sloan Management Review, and California Management Review. I am a co-author of The Hidden Power of Social Networks and co-editor of Networks
in the Knowledge Economy. I hold graduate degrees from Stanford University and the London School of Economics.
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 student 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.
Specifically, I am interested in studying the role of networks in generating inequality and social stratification.
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. My interests in social networks and social stratification conjoin in my work with Professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski (Harvard Business School) on the sources of performance inequality in networks. In our study, we suggest different explanations of why central organizations outperform those on the fringes of the network. We argue that differences in performance of central and peripheral actors can stem from the fact that unlike peripheral actors, who must share their most valuable resources to gain entry to the network, central actors can keep their most valuable resources to themselves only exchanging lesser-valued resources.
Jarrett Spiro
I am currently pursuing a PhD in Organizational Behavior at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business with an expected
completion date of June 2008. 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 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.