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	Josh D. Whitford Assistant Professor 618 Knox Hall - MC 9649 Phone work: +1 212-854-3593 fax: +1 212-854-2963 Email jw2212@columbia.edu Add this person to your addressbook

Josh D. Whitford
Assistant Professor
Columbia University

Sociology

Biography

Josh Whitford's research interests include economic and organizational sociology, comparative political economy, economic geography, and pragmatist social theory. His current work focuses on the social, political and institutional implications of productive decentralization (outsourcing) in manufacturing industries in both the United States and Europe.

Whitford joined the Columbia Sociology faculty as an Assistant Professor in 2004, and is also a faculty affiliate at the Center on Organizational Innovation. In February 2007 he was named an Industry Studies Fellow by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. This award is given to young scholars deemed exceptionally likely to contribute to industrial development and economic competitiveness.

Whitford's book, The New Old Economy: Networks, Institutions and the Organizational Transformation of American Manufacturing, was published by Oxford University Press in 2005. Based on extensive interviews conducted at factories across the American Upper Midwest, it describes the fundamental restructuring of American manufacturing that has occurred in the last quarter century. Whitford argues that heretofore unexamined elements of contemporary network production models reveal ways in which American economic development policies could be adjusted to better meet the challenges of a decentralized production regime. He shows that discussions of this restructuring, in the media and in the academic literature, have hit on the right issues—globalization, de-industrialization, and the outsourcing of production in marketized and in network relationships—but in an overly polarized way that obscures as much as it enlightens.

Whitford's most recent articles on issues of regional economic development are "Regional economies, open networks and the spatial fragmentation of production." (Socio-Economic Review 2007, with Cuz Potter), "Surviving the Fall of a King: The Regional Institutional Implications of Crisis at Fiat Auto" (International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 2005, with Aldo Enrietti). Whitford also maintains an interest in pragmatist social theory, and is the author of "Pragmatism and the untenable dualism of means and ends: Why rational choice theory does not deserve paradigmatic privilege" (Theory and Society, 2002).

Current CV