David C. Stark


David Charles Stark is Arthur Lehman Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, where he served as chair of the sociology department and directs the Center on Organizational Innovation. He was formerly an External Faculty Member of the Santa Fe Institute and is currently Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics. He is well-cited in the fields of economic sociology, social networks, science and technology studies, and social change and development.

Biography

He received a B.A. from Princeton in 1972 and a Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard in 1982. Stark was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002. He is the former president of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, and has been a visiting fellow at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, the Institute for Advanced Study/Collegium Budapest, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the Social Science Research Center Berlin, and the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. Stark won the 2009 W. Richard Scott Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the American Sociological Association for his paper, “Social Times of Network Spaces”, which appeared in American Journal of Sociology. In 2013 he received a Doctor Honoris Causa from the École normale supérieure de Cachan.

Work

He has been a leading contributor in developing the concept of heterarchy, referring to the process of distributed intelligence and diversity of evaluative principles in organizations. He coined the term "recombinant property" to analyze asset ambiguity during the transformation of the economies of the former Soviet bloc. It has been adopted to study processes of innovation in high technology sectors of the United States and Western Europe.
Stark has been a leading contributor to the new economic sociology. His research uses ethnographic fieldwork and social network analysis. In examining organizational forms as sites of multiple evaluative principles, or frames of worth, he has carried out field research in Hungarian factories before and after 1989, in new media startups in Manhattan before and after the dot.com crash of hi-tech firm stocks in 2000, and in a World Financial Center trading room before and after the attacks on September 11, 2001. Recent work with Balazs Vedres develops a combination of network and sequence analytic methods, a key development in the emerging field of social sequence analysis.
His recent book, The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life, published in 2009, Stark draws on much of his recent research in post-socialist transformations in Hungary, his study of new media firms in Silicon Alley, and his work on decision making in trading rooms. Stark ties these examples together and suggests a number of key determinants of innovation within organization. Foremost of these determinants is a wealth of different goals and notions of worth motivating actors in an organization. With different conceptions of what is valuable, he argues, organizations can be equipped to succeed in a search in which what they are searching for is unclear.

Selected articles