David Stark

David Stark (www.thesenseofdissonance.com) is Arthur Lehman Professor of Sociology at Columbia University where he directs the Center on Organizational Innovation. His most recent book, The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life, was published by Princeton University Press in 2009. Stark studies how organizations and their members search for what is valuable. Dissonance - disagreement about the principles of worth - can lead to discovery. To study the organizational basis for innovation, he has carried out ethnographic field research in Hungarian factories before and after 1989, in new media start-ups in Manhattan before and after the dot.com crash, and in a World Financial Center trading room before and after the attack on September 11th.

Stark is also conducting historical network analysis. What is a social group across time in network terms? Supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, Stark and his former student, Balazs Vedres, are analyzing a large, longitudinal dataset on the ownership ties, personnel ties, and political ties of the largest 2,200 Hungarian enterprises from 1987-2006. Papers from this project include: Structural Folds: Generative Disruption in Overlapping Groups, American Journal of Sociology, 2010, vol 15, no 4; Social Times of Network Spaces: Network Sequences and Foreign Investment in Hungary, American Journal of Sociology, 2006; and Political Holes in the Economy: Blockage and Brokerage in Hungary.

With another former student, Daniel Beunza, Stark has been working on the social studies of finance. Their recent papers include: Reflexive Modeling and Systemic Risk: From Individual Bias to Social Interdependence (under review); How to Recognize Opportunities: Heterarchical Search in a Trading Room, in The Sociology of Financial Markets (Oxford University Press, 2005); and Tools of the Trade: The Socio-Technology of Arbitrage in a Wall Street Trading Room, Industrial and Corporate Change 2004.

Other research addresses innovations in the public sphere including, for example, PowerPoint in Public: Digital Technologies and the New Morphology of Demonstration, (with Verena Paravel) Theory, Culture & Society 2008; Sociotechnologies of Assembly (with Monique Girard) in Governance and Information: The Rewiring of Governing and Deliberation in the 21st Century, 2007; and Rooted Transnational Publics: Integrating Foreign Ties and Civic Activism (with Balazs Vedres and Laszlo Bruszt) Theory and Society 2006.

Stark was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2002. He has been a visiting fellow at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris; the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne; the Institute of Advanced Study in Durham, UK; the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City; the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand; the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto; the Institute for Advanced Study/Collegium Budapest; the Center for the Social Sciences in Berlin; and the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.