CASBS Revives Summer Institutes

The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University boasts a storied history of organizing summer institutes that have had transformative effects on a variety of social science fields, including behavioral economics, the study of contentious politics, and economic sociology.

During summer 2016, from June 27-July 8, CASBS revived this tradition with a summer institute on Organizations and their Effectiveness. The workshop brought together assistant professors and advanced graduate students from the fields of economics, communication, management, political science, and sociology for an intensive course of study of classic and frontier work in the field of organization studies.

The 2016 CASBS summer institute was under the co-direction of Bob Gibbons (Sloan School of Management and Economics, MIT; CASBS fellow 1994-95 and 2014-15) and Woody Powell (Graduate School of Education and Sociology, Stanford; CASBS fellow 1986-87 and 2008-09).

The central motivations for the summer institute stemmed from a view that a huge fraction of economic, political, and social activity is undertaken in, with, and by organizations. Learning from the “bright spots” among hospitals, schools, governments, and firms – as well as understanding how these successes might be spread – can be immensely valuable. However, current research is badly fragmented: different disciplines operate mostly in isolation and most professional schools focus only on their own kind of organizations. Social science departments often regard organizational effectiveness as outside their purview, and training in professional schools often lacks the conceptual depth available in social science departments.

In response, the CASBS summer institute crossed disciplinary and professional boundaries and brought together a cohort of highly promising young researchers from a wide range of fields and universities. Among the participants from Stanford were Melissa Valentine, assistant professor of management science, and Christof Brandtner, doctoral candidate in sociology. Other participants represented top universities: Columbia, George Washington, MIT, Northwestern, Princeton, Minnesota, Yale, and Lausanne (Switzerland). View the full participant list below.

The scholarly discussions benefited further from contributions by a number of organizational leaders from Google, PARC, IBM, NASA, and Stanford, all senior executives involved in managing working groups with high levels of intellectual and technical talent. Providing additional expertise were Dan Carpenter (dept. of government and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard; CASBS fellow 2003-04), and Katherine Kellogg (professor of organizational behavior, MIT).

Supported by funding from MIT and Stanford’s Office of Sponsored Research, the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and the Hoover Institution, CASBS plans to run the summer institute annually for the next five years, creating a cadre of approximately 75 young scholars. The expectation is that they will re-invigorate the interdisciplinary field of organizations, stimulate work at their home institutions, engage in innovative research, and contribute to the world of practice.

“When I researched what programs at the Center had the greatest impact, high on the list were the summer institutes,” noted Margaret Levi, CASBS director and Stanford professor of political science.  “They changed minds and created life-long collaborations and cohorts. We are so pleased to be reinitiating the institutes with one so perfectly designed for preparing academics for their roles in meeting the critical organizational challenges of our day.”

Participant List

2016 CASBS Summer Institute: Organizations and Their Effectiveness

Organizers

Senior Scholars

Junior Scholars