IOA Public Lecture Series 'Organizing Uncertainty'
The Sense of Dissonance: Reflexivity and Innovation in Organizations
by Professor David Stark, Columbia University, New York
Abstract. Search is the watchword of the information age, but here Stark examines a different kind of search – when we don’t know what we’re looking for but will recognize it when we find it. Drawing on John Dewey’s notion of collaborative inquiry, Stark uses ethnography to study the perplexing situations in which actors search for what’s valuable. His cases include machine tool makers in Hungary, new media workers in Silicon Alley, and derivatives traders on Wall Street. In coping with uncertainty, organizations benefit from the friction of competing criteria of worth. The dissonance of diverse principles can lead to discovery.
Chapter 1 of ‘The Sense of Dissonance’ is available at http://www.thesenseofdissonance.com/books.php
The lecture will be followed by a reception .
For registration and further information contact
Katja Høeg Tingleff, Department of Organization:
Registration by e-mail before 7 January.
Arranged by:
Department of Organization
David Stark
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.
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.