Mark Mizruchi | |
---|---|
Born | Mark Sheldon Mizruchi December 10, 1953 |
Education | Washington University in St. Louis (B.A., 1975), State University of New York at Stony Brook (PhD, 1980) |
Known for | social network analysis and organizational theory |
Awards | 2011 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, 1988–1993 National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Sociology |
Institutions | University of Michigan, Columbia University |
Doctoral advisor | Michael Schwartz [1] |
Other academic advisors | Mark Granovetter [1] |
Mark Sheldon Mizruchi (born December 10, 1953) is the Robert Cooley Angell Collegiate Professor of Sociology and Barger Family Professor of Organizational Studies at the University of Michigan. He also holds an appointment as Professor of Management and Organizations at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business. His research has focused on the political activity of the U.S. corporate elite over the 20th and 21st centuries. [2] He was influential in the development of social network analysis, and has published research in the fields of organizational theory, economic sociology, and political sociology.
Mizruchi received his A.B. from Washington University in St. Louis in 1975 and his M.A. and PhD from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1980, both in sociology. From 1980 to 1987 he was a statistical consultant in the computing center of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, becoming an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry (biostatistics). [2] In 1987 he moved to Columbia University, first as Assistant and then as Associate Professor of Sociology. In 1991 he moved to the University of Michigan as Professor of Sociology, with a courtesy appointment as Professor of Business Administration. He was named Barger Family Professor in 2012 and Robert Cooley Angell Collegiate Professor of Sociology in 2014. [3]
Mizruchi's work has centered on, first, the changing ownership and control of the largest U.S. corporations, and, second, corporate political action. His key theoretical work has been explaining the sources of unity and conflict among U.S. big business. [4] When do firms, modeled as independent agents in most social scientific analysis, collaborate to achieve common goals? This line of research addresses a long-standing question about the nature of the corporation: who controls the corporation when ownership is widely dispersed among shareholders? Can managers act in their own interest, and what forces prevent them from doing so?
To address these questions, Mizruchi has empirically focused on relationships between firms arising from corporate board relationships. [2] Many corporate board members serve on more than one corporate board, creating Interlocking directorates that allow for the diffusion of ideas; Mizruchi has investigated how this interlock network has evolved, and the role that it plays in coordinating action. Not all interlocks, however, are created equal. He shows that through the twentieth century, representatives from financial institutions played a central role in the interlock network. [5] Through these network ties, banks were able to monitor firms' behavior, with significant financial consequences. However, his later work demonstrated recent declines in the centrality of banks. This thesis is expanded in his latest book, which highlights the growing fracturing of the U.S. corporate elite over the past forty years, and suggests broad consequences for the governance of the U.S. economy. [6]
Charles Horton Cooley was an American sociologist and the son of Michigan Supreme Court Judge Thomas M. Cooley. He studied and went on to teach economics and sociology at the University of Michigan, was a founding member of the American Sociological Association in 1905 and became its eighth president in 1918. He is perhaps best known for his concept of the looking-glass self, which is the concept that a person's self grows out of society's interpersonal interactions and the perceptions of others. Cooley's health began to deteriorate in 1928. He was diagnosed with an unidentified form of cancer in March 1929 and died two months later.
Mark Sanford Granovetter is an American sociologist and professor at Stanford University. Granovetter was recently recognized as a Citation Laureate by Thomson Reuters and added to that organization’s list of predicted Nobel Prize winners in economics for the year 2014. Data from the Web of Science show that Granovetter has written both the first and third most cited sociology articles. He is best known for his work in social network theory and in economic sociology, particularly his theory on the spread of information in social networks known as "The Strength of Weak Ties" (1973).
Alfred DuPont Chandler Jr. was a professor of business history at Harvard Business School and Johns Hopkins University, who wrote extensively about the scale and the management structures of modern corporations. His works redefined business and economic history of industrialization. He received the Pulitzer Prize for History for his work, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977). He has been called "the doyen of American business historians".
Theda Skocpol is an American sociologist and political scientist, who is currently the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. An influential figure in both disciplines, Skocpol is best known as an advocate of the historical-institutional and comparative approaches, as well as her "state autonomy theory". She has written widely for both popular and academic audiences.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter is the Ernest L. Arbuckle professor of business at Harvard Business School. She is also director and chair of the Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative.
Andrew J. Hoffman is a scholar of environmental issues and sustainable enterprise. He is the Holcim (US) Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business and School of Environment and Sustainability (SEAS). His research uses a sociological perspective to understand the cultural and institutional aspects of environmental issues for organizations. In particular, he focuses on the processes by which environmental issues both emerge and evolve as social, political and managerial issues. He has written extensively about: the evolving nature of field level pressures related to environmental issues; the corporate responses that have emerged as a result of those pressures, particularly around the issue of climate change; the interconnected networks among non-governmental organizations and corporations and how those networks influence change processes within cultural and institutional systems; the social and psychological barriers to these change processes; and the underlying cultural values that are engaged when these barriers are overcome. His Ph.D. was conferred by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995. He is an expert in environmental pollution and has published thirteen books and over one-hundred articles and book chapters.
Rakesh Khurana is an American educator. He is Professor of Sociology at Harvard University, Professor of Leadership Development at Harvard Business School, and Dean of Harvard College.
Interlocking directorate refers to the practice of members of a corporate board of directors serving on the boards of multiple corporations. A person that sits on multiple boards is known as a multiple director. Two firms have a direct interlock if a director or executive of one firm is also a director of the other, and an indirect interlock if a director of each sits on the board of a third firm. This practice, although widespread and lawful, raises questions about the quality and independence of board decisions.
Herman H. Pevler was the 10th president of the Roanoke, VA based Norfolk and Western Railway (N&W). He had previously served as president of the Wabash Railroad, and served as president of the N&W from October 1, 1963, until his retirement in April 1970.
In political science and sociology, elite theory is a theory of the state that seeks to describe and explain power relationships in contemporary society. The theory posits that a small minority, consisting of members of the economic elite and policy-planning networks, holds the most power—and that this power is independent of democratic elections.
Michael Herman Schwartz is an American sociologist and prominent critic of the Iraq war. He is a Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in New York, where he also serves as faculty director of the Undergraduate College of Global Studies and Chair of the Sociology Department. Schwartz has written extensively in the areas of economic sociology and social movements.
The transnational capitalist class (TCC), also known as the transnational capitalist network (TCN), in neo-Gramscian and Marxian-influenced analyses of international political economy and globalization, is the global social stratum that controls supranational instruments of the global economy such as transnational corporations and heavily influences political organs such as the World Trade Organization.
Wayne E. Baker is an American author and sociologist on the senior faculty of the University of Michigan Ross School of Business. His teaching and research interests are in the fields of values, American society, social capital, social networks and economic sociology. Baker is best known both for his research in economic sociology, where he demonstrated that financial markets operate as social networks, and his survey research on values, where he documented Americans’ core values. His data show Americans share more core values than news media and political campaigns will admit. These core values include patriotism, belief in God, individualism, success, equal opportunities, freedom and liberty, respect and the free market. He writes in both academic and popular media on this theme and is often invited to present his findings across the U.S
Doug Guthrie is an American organizational sociologist and China scholar. He is currently Professor of Global Leadership at the Thunderbird School of Global Management at The Arizona State University. He is also Director of China Initiatives Executive Director of Thunderbird Global at Thunderbird. From 2014-19 he was a Senior Director and Apple University Faculty Member at Apple Inc., where he represented Apple University in China. Prior to joining Apple, he served as dean at The George Washington University School of Business in Washington DC from 2010–13 and Vice President for University-Wide China Operations in 2013. Prior to joining GWSB, he was professor of management and sociology at New York University, holding joint appointments in the Stern School of Business and NYU’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. His areas of expertise lie in the fields of leadership and organizational change, corporate governance and corporate social responsibility, and economic reform in China. He has published widely in these fields, though he is probably best known for his work on China. He has taught as a visiting professor at Harvard Business School, INSEAD, and the Graduate Schools of Business at Stanford University, Columbia University, and Emory University. He was director of the Business Institutions Initiative (1999–2003) at the Social Science Research Council. He has also been deeply involved in executive education, previously holding positions as the director of Custom Executive Education at NYU-Stern and as the executive academic director of the Berlin School of Creative Leadership. Currently, he splits his time between Ann Arbor, MI and Phoenix, AZ.
Kathleen M. Carley is an American social scientist specializing in dynamic network analysis. She is a professor in the School of Computer Science in the Institute for Software Research International at Carnegie Mellon University and also holds appointments in the Tepper School of Business, the Heinz College, the Department of Engineering and Public Policy, and the Department of Social and Decision Sciences.
John Peter Scott is an English sociologist working on issues of economic and political sociology, social stratification, the history of sociology, and social network analysis. He is currently working independently, and has previously worked at the Universities of Strathclyde, Leicester, Essex, and Plymouth. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He has been a member of the British Sociological Association since 1970. In 2015 he became Chair of Section S4 of the British Academy. In 2016 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Essex University.
Ronald Breiger is an American sociologist and a Regents Professor, a professor of sociology and government and public policy, an affiliate of the interdisciplinary graduate program in statistics and data science, and an affiliate of the interdisciplinary graduate program in applied mathematics at the University of Arizona. Prior to coming to Arizona he served on the faculties of Harvard University and Cornell University. He is well cited in the fields of social networks, social stratification, mathematical sociology, organizational sociology and cultural sociology and, with Linton Freeman, edited the influential academic journal Social Networks from 1998 to 2006. In 2005 he was the recipient of the Georg Simmel Distinguished Career Award of the International Network for Social Network Analysis,. In 2018 he received the James S. Coleman Distinguished Career Achievement Award of the American Sociological Association (ASA) Section on Mathematical Sociology. In 2020 he was the recipient of the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award of the ASA Section on Methodology, recognizing a scholar who has made a career of outstanding contributions to methodology in sociology.
Gerald Fredrick (Jerry) Davis is an American sociologist, and Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan, known for his work on corporate networks, social movements and organization theory.
Joseph Galaskiewicz is an American sociologist and Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona, known for his work on interorganizational relations and social network analysis.
Robert Cooley Angell was an American sociologist and educator. Committed to the advancement of rigorous social scientific research, Angell's work focussed on social integration and the pursuit of a more peaceful world order. Professor Angell enjoyed the highest honors which his discipline bestowed, presiding over both the American Sociological Society (1951) and the International Sociological Association (1953–1956). As a devoted educator, Angell was instrumental in developing the Honors Program at the University of Michigan, becoming its first director from 1957–1960.