Theor Soc (2008) 37:53–63

DOI 10.1007/s11186-007-9051-z
A RT I C L E

The poverty of organizational theory: Comment on:

“Bourdieu and organizational analysis”

Frank Dobbin

Published online: 4 January 2008

# Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2007

Abstract American organizational theorists have not taken up the call to apply
Bourdieu’s approach in all of its richness in part because, for better or worse,
evidentiary traditions render untenable the kind of sweeping analysis that makes
Bourdieu’s classics compelling. Yet many of the insights found in Bourdieu are
being pursued piecemeal, in distinct paradigmatic projects that explore the character
of fields, the emergence of organizational habitus, and the changing forms of capital
that are key to the control of modern organizations. A number of these programs
build on the same sociological classics that Bourdieu built his own theory on. These
share the same lineage, even if they were not directly influenced by Bourdieu.

The relational theorist Mustafa Emirbayer and the organizational scholar Victoria
Johnson have thrown down the gauntlet to American organizational researchers,
arguing that as a field we have not taken Bourdieu’s insights about the world of
organizations to heart and that our theory and research are impoverished as a result.
Their central argument is that while components of Bourdieu’s ideas have been
picked up here and there, Bourdieu’s great power comes from its integration of a
theory of the individual (habitus), a theory of social structure (the field), and a theory
of power relations (the various forms of capital). The whole of this theory is more
than the sum of its parts and so the potential of the theory has not been realized in
American practice even if some of the parts have been embraced. Moreover, we have
not explored the power of the theory as an approach to understanding a single
organization, from the perspective of field, capital, and habitus. Where Bourdieu’s
insights have been picked up, they have been considered at the interorganizational,
not intraorganizational, level.
Emirbayer and Johnson note not only that aspects of the theory have been picked
up here and there, but also that American organizational scholars have arrived at
some parallel insights on their own. Institutionalists and network theorists, for
instance, share many of Bourdieu’s insights about fields. Some have developed

F. Dobbin (*)
Department of Sociology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
e-mail: frank_dobbin@harvard.edu
54 Theor Soc (2008) 37:53–63

insights consistent with Bourdieu’s paradigm that Bourdieu himself did not
recognize, notwithstanding the vast scope of his theoretical contributions. Emirbayer
and Johnson rely, in part, on Bourdieu’s recently translated The Social Structures of
the Economy (Bourdieu 2005[2000]), his first work to assess and critique American
organizational sociology in any detail. Being better informed about the state of
American work than Bourdieu himself was, Emirbayer and Johnson take a more
measured and nuanced, and ultimately more useful, view of the weaknesses of the
field and of the potential for Bourdieu’s theory to enrich it.
It is the challenge of using Bourdieu’s theory holistically, linking his fully
developed concepts of field, capital, and habitus in a manner true to his work, that
has likely deterred most American organizational theorists. Americans may be
understandably reluctant to take on the challenge, for epistemological and
evidentiary standards differ between the United States and France. While such
Bourdieu classics as Distinction (Bourdieu 1984[1979]) and Homo Academicus
(Bourdieu 1988[1984]) show sure strokes of genius, they also require a certain
suspension of disbelief. The reader must take Bourdieu’s word for the character of
the academic system, or the status system, in France. Bourdieu is not bogged down
by proving every last claim. American organizational sociology operates differently
as a genre. The ideal typical piece is a journal article dominated by regression
coefficients. Less common are ethnographies, though over the years the field has
amassed quite a few monographs exploring a single organization.1 In both of these
genres, the quantitative journal article and the native’s-point-of-view ethnography,
the bird’s eye view that Bourdieu gives us is sacrificed in favor of scrupulous
evidence of a particular mechanism at work or a particular culture in action. The idea
of, in a single study, depicting habitus, power and its basis in different forms of
capital, and the operation of an organizational field (beginning with an investigation
of the participants in that field) is, to most American organizational theorists,
daunting. This hesitancy to make a broader argument than we can empirically flesh
out in the space of an article or book certainly impoverishes our work.
In point of fact, however, Bourdieu’s approach has deterred not only American
organizational theorists, wedded to another genre than Bourdieu’s; it has deterred his
own students. The work of his most creative former acolytes is typically narrower in
scope than Bourdieu’s own. Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thevenot’s De la
Justification, recently published in English as On Justification: Economies of Worth
(Boltanski and Thevenot 2006[1991]), does a brilliant job of depicting the different
internal logics found in organizations, and in fields generally, across history. But it
does not undertake a full-bore Bourdieusian analysis, not only because the protégés
have moved beyond their mentor, but also because it would be absurd to try it for
their subject, which is, in effect, organizational history since Plato.
Some American scholars have undertaken the sort of comprehensive institutional
analysis Bourdieu would like to see, at least for an individual organization. Diane
Vaughan’s (1996) masterful The Challenger Launch Decision is perhaps the best
illustration. While Vaughan seeks to explain organizational failure – hardly a
Bourdieusian goal – her description of NASA covers all the bases that Bourdieu

1
See Randy Hodson’s Workplace Ethnographies Project at http://www.sociology.ohio-state.edu/rdh/
Workplace-Ethnography-Project.html.
Theor Soc (2008) 37:53–63 55

might have covered in an analysis of NASA as an organization-as-field. She

describes the internal and external fields, sketches the structural constraints on
actors, and discusses the mindset and history (habitus) of the organization’s members
and the expertise and authority (capital) they bring to the table. As she writes a book
in the jargon-free tradition of American case study, however, we must draw some of
the theoretical conclusions for ourselves.
As a field, American organizational sociology has operated somewhat differently
from French organizational sociology or from French sociology in general. We have
our grand thinkers, like the French, but much of the most visible work is
compartmentalized. Some scholars spend their careers depicting the structure of
fields – that is certainly what many network theorists are up to (Burt 1992; Podolny
2005). Others spend their careers describing power relations between actors – that is
certainly what the neo-Marxists are up to (Perrow 2002; Roy 1997). Still others
work largely on mindset or worldview or what Bourdieu calls habitus (Fligstein
2001; Meyer, Boli, and Thomas 1987). In American organizational theory, these
approaches have sometimes been seen as competing paradigms, in large part because
the tradition of American sociology was, for years, to sponsor matches between
Marxism and Functionalism. But it is perhaps more useful to think of these groups as
fleshing out different parts of a bigger story. Field-oriented population ecologists and
network theorists draw liberally on the social constructionist institutionalists when it
suits them, and vice versa. Power theorists are increasingly difficult to distinguish
from network theorists. If Bourdieu sketches the whole elephant in broad strokes,
one might see American organizational theorists as each taking a leg, an ear, or a
hind quarter and sketching it in greater detail. What is striking in the end, then, is
that the big pictures resemble one another. Perhaps given their common roots in
Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, and their common objects of study, it is not so
surprising that what Bourdieu and American organizational theorists come up with is
broadly similar. For years Americans eschewed Bourdieu’s focus on power relations,
but as they have come to pay more attention to power, their (collective) work has
come to resemble Bourdieu’s view more closely.
In the following sections, I take each of Bourdieu’s core concepts and point,
briefly, at how some American organizational theorists embrace similar ideas. Some
of them draw on Bourdieu. Others build on the same classics Bourdieu builds on. As
Emirbayer and Johnson have so expertly sketched Bourdieu’s own view, I use my
limited space to draw parallels.

The organizational field

Emirbayer and Johnson (E & J hereafter) charge that Bourdieu’s conceptualization of

a field, and methodology for identifying a field, is often neglected in American
sociology. Classical organizational sociology had an impoverished notion of the field
as the industry, or the discipline, that does not capture Bourdieu’s true meaning. It is
true that by field Bourdieu means a group organized around a common stake – the
people competing for the same set of material resources, whose behavior is
organized around that competition. American organizational theorists have not
defined fields in nearly so material a way, or not until very recently.
56 Theor Soc (2008) 37:53–63

In terms of defining the boundaries of the field, for Bourdieu the field consists of
all relevant actors in a social space, and what is important to ego (what constitutes
the field in which he operates) is the global set of actors and organizations relevant
in some way. The industry does not capture this. All sorts of actors – media players,
suppliers, customers, professionals – who are not part of the industry or discipline
are nonetheless part of the field. People and organizations that ego would not
consider to be part of her field may shape her behavior and thinking nonetheless.
For Bourdieu, a field can only be established in the research process; constructed
by the researcher based on the subjective understandings of the participants, and not
based on socially produced categories like industry and discipline. DiMaggio and
Powell (1983) appropriated that idea early on, and so it influences how
institutionalists and network theorists think of fields. Yet while American
organizational theorists from several camps have defined organizational fields,
domains, or networks expansively, in practice they rarely follow Bourdieu’s
prescription for how to identify a field and its members. Resource dependence
theorists (Lawrence and Lorsch 1967; Pfeffer and Salancik 2003[1978]) argue that
the key players in ego’s field are all of those organizations and individuals ego
depends on for resources, both material and symbolic. Industry members tend to be
less salient than regulatory agencies, suppliers, community groups, etc. This usage
may come close to Bourdieu’s, in that resource contests define fields, yet resource
dependence theorists do not go about establishing field boundaries inductively.
Network theorists do focus, as Bourdieu did, on the structure of a field and they
often focus on competition for resources. Harrison White (White 1981, 1992; Leifer
and White 1987) argues that we should think of the relevant field as composed of
the organizations ego compares himself to. Too often, White argues, economists treat
the market as the locus of social interaction, presuming that the relevant others in the
market are those on the other side of the trading relationship. Those relevant to a
producer are the consumers who buy his goods. For White, those most relevant are
the other producers, to whom ego compares himself and among whom ego strives to
carve a unique market niche. White shares a focus on competition for resources with
Bourdieu, to be sure. Other network theorists have been centrally concerned with
who is most salient in a field. Podolny (2001, 2005) can be seen to bring together
Bourdieu’s conception of field with his conception of capital, arguing that the most
salient members of a field are those that hold the most valued forms of capital. In
Getting a Job, Granovetter (1972) points out that the most salient members of ego’s
field may be those with whom she has the weakest ties, but the social networks
Granovetter describes offer resources to ego, they do not compete with her for
resources. Burt (1987) finds that people look to others like themselves in fields for
signals of how to behave.
In his posthumously translated book on the economy, Bourdieu (2005[2000])
tackles American organizational theory more directly than he had previously, and
there he calls for a less dyadic, more structural and relational, approach to networks.
E & J rightly assert that network theorists focus on the pattern of dyadic connections
and thus that they underplay the role of structural constraint in a field. This is a fair
critique, although some have sought to move beyond the agglomeration of dyads.
There is the observation of Burt (1992) that the network participants to whom ego
has no direct connections impose important constraints on ego.
Theor Soc (2008) 37:53–63 57

Each of the insights from network theory enriches our understanding of how
fields operate. In American organizational theory, this is how the game is played,
one insight at a time. Bourdieu’s brilliance and scope are due, in large measure, to
the intellectual field he operated in himself, one valuing ideas over evidence, holistic
theory over middle-range insights.
Institutionalists have built a theory of fields that comes closer to Bourdieu’s than
that of relational, or network, theorists on the symbolic dimension, if not on the
dimensions of power and competition. Those who have done best by Bourdieu are
probably DiMaggio and Powell (1983, 1991b) who draw explicitly on Bourdieu’s
work to enrich the new organizational institutionalism, and Fligstein (1990, 2001),
who uses an expanded conception of the field as being constituted by symbolic
capital as well as constituting symbolic capital.
DiMaggio and Powell, in the introduction to their 1991 reader on institutional
theory, define fields not as static but as dynamic, and describe how they are
structured:
The process of institutional definition, or ‘structuration’ consists of four parts:
1) an increase in the extent of interaction among organizations in the field;
2) the emergence of sharply defined interorganizational structures of domina-
tion and patterns of coalition; 3) an increase in the information load with which
the organizations in a field must contend; 4) and the development of a mutual
awareness among participants in a set of organizations that they are involved in
a common enterprise. (DiMaggio and Powell 1991a: p. 65)
Thus fields vary significantly in degree of structuration and may comprise members
of very different industries and disciplines.
What may be most distinctive about Fligstein’s approach is his view that
conceptions of control, which would be bases of symbolic capital in Bourdieu’s
schema, define fields rather than vice versa. At times Bourdieu suggests that those in
positions of power define important forms of symbolic capital. For Fligstein, in the
world of organizations new symbolic systems (such as the financial theory of
corporate management) help to constitute fields of actors.
Conceptions of control are world views that define one firm’s relationships with
others, what behavior is appropriate for firms of that type, and how those kinds
of organizations ought to work. They imply certain strategies and structures. In
essence, conceptions of control and the organizational fields they create define
how markets are structured for firms. (Fligstein 1990: p. 295).
Thus in Bourdieu’s terms, symbolic resources, in the form of conceptions of control,
may be the source of new field configurations.
E & J note that while American organizational theorists do discuss fields, they
neglect one of the most important facets of Bourdieu’s argument, the structural
constraints that fields impose on actors. In fact, in recent decades network theorists
and institutionalists have been particularly concerned with structural constraints.
White (1981) argued that market entrants are very much constrained by the market
positions of others in the existing market, or field, as E & J note. E & J argue that
White and the other network theorists are too interactionist in their conception of the
field. If that is a fair critique, and I am not certain it is if one looks at the whole of
58 Theor Soc (2008) 37:53–63

White’s work (and especially White 2002), it is probably also true of the classic
article on embeddedness of Granovetter (1985), which suggests that participants in a
market constrain opportunistic behavior. That constraint, while structural, is also
interactional in that it hinges on future discipline of opportunists.
It is not entirely clear to me why E & J disfavor interactionist approaches to
positional constraints, but it is the case that other American organizational theorists
describe structural constraints that do not depend to such a great extent on
interactions. This is certainly true of the theory by Fligstein (2001) of how con-
ceptions of control constrain action: by influencing what managers can imagine
doing – which avenues of action make sense and which don’t. My own book on
industrial policy takes a similar tack on explaining why American, British, and
French policymakers imagined such different approaches to regulating the economy
(Dobbin 1994). William Roy’s Socializing Capital (Roy 1997) probably contains
the most developed theory of structural constraint, a theory that goes beyond the
classical theory of the three types of power by Lukes (1974), which ends with the
power to set the agenda. For Roy, power enables certain groups to establish not only
the regulatory framework, but the common-sense theories of economic efficiency
that underlie our basic assumptions about the world. The power of financiers at the
end of the nineteenth century facilitated the rise of a regulatory regime enforcing
competition that favored large firms, and the rise of a theory of economies of scale
that depicted large firms as efficient. Roy’s theory seems closer to Bourdieu’s
conception of structural constraint than the theories E & J review.
Network theorists such as Burt or Podolny, institutionalists such as DiMaggio and
Powell or Meyer and colleagues, and power theorists such as Fligstein (1990) and
Roy (1997) have developed new insights about fields and their operation that go
beyond Bourdieu’s own insights. Their insights may come as contributions to middle
range theory, but they do help to give the elephant shape and form and detail.

Habitus in organizations

Bourdieu’s notion of habitus helps to integrate his ideas about capital and fields at
the level of individual consciousness. For Bourdieu, habitus is more than simply
worldview in the classical sociological sense, but worldview is probably the closest
approximation – worldview as it is affected by one’s society, class, and personal
history. For institutionalists, habitus or worldview is a central component of the
theoretical picture, but it is a part that is seldom picked up and developed in
research.
Being based, loosely, in the social constructionism of Peter Berger and Thomas
Luckmann, the institutional perspective first set out in the “Institutionalized
Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony” of Meyer and Rowan
(1977) and developed in discussions of theory (Meyer, Boli, and Thomas 1987;
Meyer and Jepperson 2000) describes the modern worldview as an historical
construct. Meyer and colleagues offer a radical challenge to the taken for granted
categories of modernity and the taken for granted causal relationships. In the brand
of social phenomenology of Berger and Luckmann (1966: p. 20), the task is to grasp
“the objectivations of subjective processes (and meanings) by which the intersub-
Theor Soc (2008) 37:53–63 59

jective commonsense world is constructed.” How is it that our subjective

“knowledge” of the world comes to have the feel of objective reality? We do not
see the socially constructed reality around us as a social product. We see it as real.
Berger and Luckmann focus on the different intersubjective realities found in
mystified, religious, and rational settings. These realities emerge through experience,
and at the level of cognition, the individual makes causal connections on the basis of
the wider system of meaning institutionalized in concrete customs.
Meyer et al. (1987) build on this insight to think about how we historically came
to see ourselves as agents and individuals rather than as tradition bound members of
indivisible clans or tribes. They do not, in empirical work, go very far with this
historical conceptualization of individual consciousness, but it is worth noting that
they make it part of the foundation of their institutional theory of organizations.
Bourdieu (1977) himself has theorized habitus more elaborately than he has
documented it, with the exception of early studies such as his classic Outline of a
Theory of Practice.
Comparative students of organizations, both psychologists and sociologists, have
explored differences in worldview across groups, but they have focused on
differences across nations rather than differences across classes, as Bourdieu might
prefer. Experimental studies reveal that individuals from different countries describe
the same picture in very different ways, e.g., Americans focusing on the subject and
Japanese focusing on the context (Nisbett et al. 2001). Hence Americans are more
likely to attribute the behavior of others to character, while Japanese are more likely
to attribute it to context. Comparative studies of management practices and ideas
(e.g., Hofstede 1980) show that across a wide range of countries, orientations to
authority, innovation, and cooperation vary widely. “National character” used to be
thought to explain these differences, but organizational scholars increasingly trace
them to differences in experience with national institutions (e.g. Dore 2000; Whitley
and Kristensen 1996). These studies perhaps document best the broad national
differences in what Bourdieu would call habitus, but of course Bourdieu himself is
not satisfied to characterize whole countries.
In studying organizations per se, the “Cognitive Limits on Rationality” in their
classic book, Organizations of March and Simon (1958), begins from the
observation that managers seldom consider all available solutions to a particular
problem. In the process of explaining this, they describe how consciousness is
shaped by life within an organization – how an organizational habitus emerges.
When faced with a problem, people typically think of an analogous problem from
the past and apply the solution used in that case. The menu of solutions that come to
mind, then, is a consequence of organizational experience. That menu is central to
the organizationally relevant habitus.
In organizational psychology, Karl Weick’s theory of sensemaking comes close to
describing the effects of habitus. For Weick (1993, 1995), the interpretive frames
offered by society, and by the focal organization, shape how the individual
understands her own actions. Weick finds that people make sense of their own
actions retrospectively, rather than prospectively. They explain to themselves why
they did something after the fact, describing their behavior as part of a plan (Weick
1979: p. 194). Sensemaking is like cartography in Weick’s view, in that there is no
one best map of the world but many useful maps. In sensemaking, people assemble
60 Theor Soc (2008) 37:53–63

causal maps of the world from bits and pieces of practice and theory: “What the
world is made of is itself a question which must be answered in terms of the
available conceptual resources of science at a particular time” (Fay 1990: p. 36).
Weick’s observation that cognitive maps of the world derive from experience and
institutions parallels Bourdieu’s ideas closely.
As with Bourdieu’s notion of field, his notion of habitus is closely paralleled by
discussions in American organizational sociology. The disarticulated field of
organizational scholarship lacks a coherent framework to parallel Bourdieu’s,
though the neo-institutionalists do theoretically integrate the level of the field and
the level of worldview or cognition, as can be seen in the work of Meyer et al.
(1987) and in the effort of DiMaggio (1997) to bridge the divide between
institutionalized fields and cognition. None of these theories, however, has built in
as fully developed a conception of capital as Bourdieu’s.

Capital

Bourdieu received wide attention in the United States for his notions of cultural and
symbolic capital and for his ideas about symbolic violence. The underlying insight is
that in recent years, knowledge has become the coin of the realm. This is hardly
Bourdieu’s singular insight, but he has best elaborated the implications as part of a
coherent theory. The growing role of knowledge experts, and their increasing
capacity to influence key policy decisions of the state and the corporation and
thereby shape the lives of others, has been a central concern of political and
organizational sociologists, in fact. For Meyer and Rowan (1977) organizations seek
legitimacy as much as they seek monetary resources: cultural capital is as important
to the organization as it is to the individual.
Roy’s Socializing Capital (1997), discussed above, is an example of the American
effort to reconceptualize capital, or symbolic resources. Roy documents the rise of a
corporate governance regime based on key assumptions about efficiency and the
public good. That regime served the interests of finance capital, and its theoretical
underpinnings became taken for granted. Bourdieu would surely describe the result
as a case of symbolic violence. Fligstein (1990, 2001) describes how esoteric forms
of financial expertise became the basis of symbolic capital in the 1950s, as a national
network of finance experts championed their own forms of expertise as key to the
coordination of the modern firm, and managed to displace a cadre of company
presidents with a knowledge base in production and marketing. Finance experts used
symbolic violence to win, but the group was not a conventional class so much as one
fraction of the managerial class, in contest with another fraction.
Several case studies achieve the sort of integration of field, habitus, and capital
that Bourdieu prescribes, as I have noted, although without using Bourdieu’s
terminology. Gideon Kunda’s neo-Marxist analysis of a work at a high technology
company is an example that, like Vaughan’s The Challenger Launch Decision,
illustrates well the organization as field approach that E & J devote the last section of
their essay to. The goal of Kunda (1992) is to understand how symbolic capital, in
Bourdieu’s terms, has become the basis of a system of domination, or what Bourdieu
might call symbolic violence, in a high technology firm characterized by what is
Theor Soc (2008) 37:53–63 61

now described as high commitment work practices. What Kunda describes is an

organization-as-field set within a particular historical context. At Kunda’s high
technology firm, the internal field consists of a charismatic founder, a low-skill
workforce, and a high-skill technical workforce whose commitment is driven by a
culture department, hence the title, Engineering Culture. Kunda describes a dual
system of symbolic capital, based in the expertise of the engineers and the cultural
manipulation of the firm’s culture department. The field is composed of the members
of the organization, and their habitus is shaped by their professional preparation, as
engineers or secretaries for the most part, but by the organization specific culture as
well. What Kunda finds surprising is the degree to which norms of commitment
have been developed within the organization, such that conventional forms of social
control, or symbolic violence, are largely absent.
Kunda’s analysis, like Vaughan’s, could quite readily be rewritten in Bourdieu’s
theoretical framework. Organizational sociology does not often take its core
theoretical lessons from case studies such as these, however, and so the insights to
be gained from this sort of synthetic analysis rarely make it into the leading paradigms
of organizational sociology, as they are practiced in sociology departments and
business schools.

Conclusion

Emirbayer and Johnson have done organizational sociology a service by demon-

strating that our practices of paradigm-splitting and navel-gazing have impoverished
our broader mission. Indeed, students often complain that the field of organizational
sociology is too middle range, and that they do not readily see the bigger picture
underlying our specific findings. There are the occasional researchers who can
observe the evolution of a field, such as Johnson (2006) in her study of the Paris
Opera, but the genre often prevents researchers from developing the kinds of
encompassing institutional analyses that Bourdieu might prescribe. Whereas
Bourdieu could sketch a big theoretical picture that gave meaning to his various
empirical studies, tying them together in a single theoretical model, in American
organizational sociology we are often focused on one aspect of that whole. What has
impoverished our research at the level of theory is our failure to conceptualize the
role of an individual research project in contributing to the overall canvas.
Rembrandt painted the faces, but it was his apprentices who specialized in clothing,
background, animals. We have such a system today, but the parts are seldom painted
on the same canvas.
Emirbayer and Johnson have thrown down the gauntlet. Now it is up to
organizational scholars to take what is best from Bourdieu’s framework and to make
good use of it. What Bourdieu gave us was an integrated theoretical framework that
was remarkably generative of research insights. Not only in France, but throughout
Europe and North America, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and
economists have drawn inspiration from Bourdieu’s insights and have built their
work around his ideas. American sociologists too often find themselves spending
their careers sketching elephant hind quarters, and too rarely step back to see the
picture that they are contributing to. Bourdieu’s great strength, beyond his
62 Theor Soc (2008) 37:53–63

substantive insights about how modern systems of domination operate, was his
capacity to keep the big picture in mind and to convey it to his readers even in
his most focused studies. That is something worth aspiring to.
If there is a political lesson to be learned from Emirbayer and Johnson’s analysis,
it may be that American organizational sociology has suffered because it was long
oriented to the purpose of administration, as well as to the goal of pure research. We
have often been of two minds about whether our research should be useful to
practitioners. Bourdieu’s analyses of social systems were uniformly critical,
revealing how power was embedded in everyday social relations and in individual
consciousness. To achieve the sorts of insights Bourdieu achieved, perhaps we need
to be less concerned about being relevant to the project of administration.

Acknowledgments I thank Michele Lamont for comments.

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Frank Dobbin is Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. His The New Economic Sociology: A
Reader (Princeton University Press 2004) traces modern paradigms in economic sociology to their origins
in sociological classics. His Inventing Equal Opportunity, chronicling the construction of corporate anti-
discrimination strategies by human resources professionals, will be published by Princeton University
Press in 2008.