David Stark

A century after Max Weber studied a Calvinist sect in Oklahoma, David Stark returns to study again the relationship between religious experience and economic culture. This time, in a new organizational form: the megachurch. Although it would be easy to denounce the field sites as businesses disguised as churches, Stark’s ethnographic research in Oklahoma City megachurches suggests that it might be more telling to see them as churches disguised as businesses. The project, Belong Before you Believe: The Megachurch Experience, draws on many years studying organizational innovation in diverse settings and benefits from insights from Stark’s more recent work on The Performance Complex (Oxford University Press, 2020). Attention to aspects of megachurch digital culture extends his recent analysis of platforms and algorithmic management.

Stark is Arthur Lehman Professor of Sociology at Columbia University where he directs the Center on Organizational Innovation. He is also co-editor-in-chief of Sociologica: International Journal for Sociological Debate. He uses a broad variety of research methods – ethnographic, network analytic, and experimental – to study processes of valuation and innovation. He has studied factory workers in socialist Hungary, new media employees in a Silicon Alley startup, derivatives traders on Wall Street, electronic music artists in Berlin, bankers in Budapest, farmers in Nebraska, video game producers, and megachurches that look like shopping malls. Stark was a fellow at CASBS in 1995-96.   

For more information, please visit: https://davidcstark.net