CASBS Summer Institute:
Organizations are all around us: not just firms, plants, and work groups, but also hospitals, schools, and governments. Furthermore, construing an “organization” as something that can be first organized and then managed, one can also include certain contractual relationships—not only between firms (such as some hand-in-glove supply relationships, joint ventures, and alliances) but also between a government and a firm (such as some regulatory relationships and public-private partnerships). Indeed, noting that the examples above are all opportunities to collaborate, one can move beyond formal organization charts and formal contracts to include communities, networks, and other informal institutions as organizations.
If organizational effectiveness is so important, one might think that academics would be studying the issue actively. To some extent, this is true, but the field is badly fragmented: different disciplines operate mostly in isolation; many professional schools focus on only their own kind of organization (e.g., hospitals, schools, public agencies); social science departments often regard organizational effectiveness as outside their purview; and doctoral training in professional schools often lacks the depth available in social-science departments. The collaborative, interdisciplinary nature of the CASBS Summer Institute, run by co-directors Bob Gibbons (MIT) and Woody Powell (Stanford), provides an important opportunity to integrate, broaden, and deepen the study of organizations and their effectiveness outside of such traditional methodological and institutional constraints.
To learn more about the CASBS Summer Institute fellowship click here.
Videos:
Powell and Sandholtz on Amphibious Entrepreneurs (Click Here)
The Civic Life of Cities (Click Here)
The Problem of Emergence (Watch YouTube Video – Click Here)
Why do life science cluster form in some regions and not others? University of Hamburg lecture (Watch Video – Click Here)
Recent Interviews
"Networks, Organizations, Institutions: An Interview with Walter W. Powell, Stanford University"
In this interview, Walter W. Powell and Helmut K. Anheier review the evolution of organizational sociology and institutionalism over the last thirty years, including the formation of new organizational forms such as network organizations. They also touch upon nonprofit and civil society research, and discuss the state of sociology and the social sciences more generally. Click here to read.
Israeli Sociology, 2021
The following is the transcribed and edited version of an interview held with Prof. Woody Powell, from Stanford University, for the purpose of commenting on this special issue of Israeli Sociology. The interview was held on 16 June 2020. Conducting the interview were Amalya Oliver and Gili Drori, guest co-editors of this special issue. Click here to read.
Woody Powell: "La sociedad empieza a preguntarse si está bien que haya personas tan ricas como Jeff Bezos"
Para uno de los intelectuales claves de la Universidad de Stanford, la pandemia cambió definitivamente las maneras de comportarse. Cambia la normalidad, pero también varía el vínculo de toda la sociedad respecto de los ultramillonarios. El sociólogo señala los riesgos de una humanidad desacoplada y plantea la necesidad de un “pensamiento anfibio”: manejarse con la misma inteligencia y creatividad en más de un área. Click here to read.
Podcasts
Talking About Organizations Podcast
How (and why) to foster dialogue and productive exchanges across disciplines?
Human Centered Podcast
Toward a Society of Shared Recognition (Episode 67)