David Stark is Arthur Lehman Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Columbia University where he is Chair of the Department of Sociology and also 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.  Publications from this project include: Structural Folds: Generative Disruption in Overlapping Groups, American Journal of Sociology, 2010, vol 15, no 4; and Social Times of Network Spaces: Network Sequences and Foreign Investment in Hungary, American Journal of Sociology, 2006.

Other recent publications include: 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;  Rooted Transnational Publics: Integrating Foreign Ties and Civic Activism (with Balazs Vedres and Laszlo Bruszt) Theory and Society 2006; Tools of the Trade: The Socio-Technology of Arbitrage in a Wall Street Trading Room (with Daniel Beunza) in Industrial and Corporate Change 2004; and Postsocialist Pathways: Transforming Politics and Property in Eastern Europe (with Laszlo Bruszt) Cambridge University Press, 1998.

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. 

Current CV

Selected Publications

The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009.   

“Structural Folds: Generative Disruption in Overlapping Groups," American Journal of Sociology, January 2010, 15(4) in press (with Balazs Vedres)

“PowerPoint in Public: Digital Technologies and the New Morphology of Demonstration,”  Theory, Culture & Society 2008, 25(5):31-56 (with Verena Paravel).

“Opportunities of Constraints: A Sociologist’s Reflections on Janos Kornai’s 'By Force of Reason'.”  Theory and Society vol. 36 no 5 (October 2007), pp. 469-476.

“Social Times of Network Spaces:  Network Sequences and Foreign Investment in Hungary.” (with Balazs Vedres)  American Journal of Sociology, March 2006, vol. 111, no. 5, pp. 1368-1411.

“Socio-technologies of Assembly: Sense-making and Demonstration in Rebuilding Lower Manhattan.” (with Monique Girard)  In David Lazer and Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, eds.,   Governance and Information:  The Rewiring of Governing and Deliberation in the 21st Century.  New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 145-176.

“Rooted Transnational Publics: Integrating Foreign Ties and Civic Activism.” (with Balazs Vedres and Laszlo Bruszt) Theory and Society, vol. 35, no. 3 (2006), pp. 323-349.      

“Resolving Identities: Successive Crises in a Trading Room after 9/11.”  (with Daniel Beunza).  In Nancy Foner, Wounded City: The Social Impact of 9/11.  New York, Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2005, pp. 293-320.

“Organizing Technologies: Genre Forms of Online Civic Association in Eastern Europe.”  (with Balazs Vedres and Laszlo Bruszt).  In Eric Klinenberg, ed., Cultural Production in a Digital Age special issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2004, pp. 171-188.

“Tools of the Trade: The Socio-Technology of Arbitrage in a Wall Street Trading Room.”  (with Daniel Beunza)  Industrial and Corporate Change, vol. 13, no. 1, 2004, pp. 369-401.

“Permanently Beta: Responsive Organization in the Internet Era.”  (with Gina Neff)  In Philip E.N. Howard and Steve Jones, eds., Society Online: The Internet In Context.  Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003, pp. 173-188.

“The Organization of Responsiveness: Innovation and Recovery in the Trading Rooms of Lower Manhattan” (with Daniel Beunza).   Socio-Economic Review  vol 1, no 2 (2003), pp. 135-164.

“Who Counts?: Supranational Norms and Societal Needs.” (with Laszlo Bruszt)  East European Politics and Societies, 17(1):74-82. 

“Distributing Intelligence and Organizing Diversity in New Media Projects.” (with Monique Girard) Environment and Planning A, vol. 34, no 11, November 2002, pp. 1927-1949.

“One Way or Multiple Paths: For a Comparative Sociology of East European Capitalism.” (with Laszlo Bruszt)  American Journal of Sociology 106(4) 1129-37.

“Ambiguous Assets for Uncertain Environments: Heterarchy in Postsocialist Firms,”  In Paul DiMaggio, ed.,  The Twenty-First-Century Firm: Changing Economic Organization in International Perspective. Princeton University Press, 2001, pp. 69-104.

Postsocialist Pathways: Transforming Politics and Property in East Central Europe (with László Bruszt).  New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

"Recombinant Property in East European Capitalism."  American Journal of Sociology.  vol. 101, no. 4 (January 1996), pp. 993-1027.  

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