David Stark
Biographic Data
| ID | 186101 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David Stark |
| GIVEN NAMES | David |
| FAMILY NAME | Stark |
| SIGNATURE | STARK D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Columbia University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2435-9619 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 93 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1234 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 91 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1979 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 18 |
Principios de la administración algorítmica
Nuestro título remite al influyente libro de Frederick W. Taylor. Pero nuestra identificación de los principios de la administración algorítmica no es ciertamente una apología. Nuestra tarea en este ensayo es desarrollar una teoría de la administración algorítmica en relación con los cambios fundamentales en la forma y la estructura de la organización en el siglo XXI, que están reconfigurando los límites, las funciones y las relaciones entre dire…
Moments of identity: Dynamics of Artist, Persona, and Audience in Electronic Music
In our account of artistic identities among electronic music artists, we point to the notion of persona as a key element in a triadic framework for studying the dynamics of identity. Building on pragmatist theory, we further draw on Pizzorno's concept of mask and Luhmann's notion of second-order observation to highlight the dual properties of persona: whether like a mask that is put on or like a probe that is put out, persona is a part that stand…
Valuations et sens de la dissonance. Entretien avec David Stark
Algorithmic Management in the Platform Economy
The platform model is the distinguishing organizational form of the early decades of the twenty-first century. Whereas actors in markets contract, hierarchies command, and networks collaborate, platforms co-opt assets, resources, and activities that are not part of the firm. As a distinctive organizational form, the platform model confronts a distinctive managerial challenge: how to manage value-creating activities that are undertaken on the plat…
Preface to a special issue on the sociology of testing
A test can be defined as an orchestrated attempt to reveal an entity’s potentially unknown properties or capacities. A drug trial, a pregnancy test, and a planetary probe are all procedures designed to ascertain the properties of some entity. However, while tests and testing are well-established social forms, their role in culture, economy, politics, and everyday life seems to be expanding. With smart city experimentation, randomized controlled t…
Underground testing: Name-altering practices as probes in electronic music
Name-altering practices are common in many creative fields-pen names in literature, stage names in the performing arts, and aliases in music. More than just reflecting artistic habits or responding to the need for distinctive brands, these practices can also serve as test devices to probe, validate, and guide the artists' active participation in a cultural movement. At the same time, they constitute a powerful probe to negotiate the boundaries of…
Put to the test: For a new sociology of testing
In an age defined by computational innovation, testing seems to have become ubiquitous, and tests are routinely deployed as a form of governance, a marketing device, an instrument for political intervention, and an everyday practice to evaluate the self. This essay argues that something more radical is happening here than simply attempts to move tests from the laboratory into social settings. The challenge that a new sociology of testing must add…
Testing and Being Tested in Pandemic Times
The coronavirus pandemic is witness to a great proliferation of two types of tests. The first type is testing – new medical diagnostic tests as well as epidemiological models that simulate and project the course of the virus. In the second type, actors, organizations, and institutions are being tested in this moment of social and political crisis. This essay analyzes the similarities and differences between these two major types of tests in order…
Crossing the Threshold from Adolescence to Adulthood in Eighteenth-Century Puerto Rico: The Baptismal Sponsorship of Enslaved Infants in Arecibo, 1735-1772
This study examines godparent selection patterns by the parents of 632 slaves baptized in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, from 1735 to 1772. The article broadens our understanding of baptismal sponsorship by using family reconstitution to re-create demographic patterns of behavior, including age and marital status, associated with godparenthood. Data regarding the godparents revealed considerable diversity in age, but most were under the age of 30. Godpare…
What's Observed in a Rating? Rankings as Orientation in the Face of Uncertainty
Ratings and rankings are criticized for being simplistic, obscurantist, inaccurate, and subjective, yet they are becoming an increasingly influential social form. We elaborate the criticisms of ratings and rankings in various fields but go on to argue that analysis should shift its target. The problem that ratings deal with is not observation of an independent world. Instead, the challenge they face is the circularity of second-order observation …
Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570-1640
The history of the early Spanish Caribbean is often viewed through a sugar-centered framework, in which the historiography of the region foregrounds the experience of enslaved Africans and their descendants laboring on sugar plantations. Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean challenges this assumption on two levels: economic activity throughout the Caribbean was not limited to sugar cultivation and its attendant production, and African slaves…
Preparing for the afterlife: Death, dying, and religious practice in eighteenth-century Puerto Rico
Every society possesses deeply rooted attitudes about death, yet much of what we know about the religious practices of ordinary people in colonial Latin America overlooks the way(s) in which people prepared for death and the afterlife. Sacramental records from eighteenth-century Puerto Rican communities provide insights into both religious elements and social aspects of death. The time period selected is important because new sensibilities toward…
Teresita A. Levy. Puerto Ricans in the Empire: Tobacco Growers and U.S. Colonialism
Despite the fact that Puerto Rico was part of the American empire for 117 years, the question of whether association with the U.S. has had a positive or negative impact on the island is still relevant. Puerto Ricans in the Empire: Tobacco Growers and U.S. Colonialism speaks to that debate by providing a new perspective on the years 1898 to 1940. Scholars have used the “sugar narrative” as an analytical framework for examining Puerto Rico’s agricu…
Purchasing Whiteness: Pardos, Mulattos, and the Quest for Social Mobility in the Spanish Indies, written by Ann Twinam
Game Changer: The Topology of Creativity
Э лектронный журнал «Экономическая социология» издаётся с 2000 г.Учредителями являются Национальный исследовательский университет «Высшая школа экономики» (с 2007 г.) и Вадим Валерьевич Радаев (главный редактор).Цель журнала -утверждать международные стандарты экономико-социологических исследований в России, представлять современные работы российских и зарубежных авторов в области экономической социологии, информировать профессиональное сообществ…
From dissonance to resonance: Cognitive Interdependence in Quantitative Finance
This study explores the elusive social dimension of quantitative finance. We conducted three years of observations in the derivatives trading room of a major investment bank. We found that traders use models to translate stock prices into estimates of what their rivals think. Traders use these estimates to look out for possible errors in their own models. We found that this practice, reflexive modeling, enhances returns by turning prices into a v…
Moments of Valuation: Exploring Sites of Dissonance
The outcome of innovation processes are determined by complex, historically grown valuation practices. In this book, a wide range of innovations are taken into consideration, from small inventions like entertainment novelties to large societal changes through new technologies. The chapters observe the particular local or distributed sites in which their episodes of innovation take place, and they identify the initial dissonance among those judgin…
Vocaciones caribeñas, written by Fernando Picó
In this collection of twenty-one essays, Fernando Picó, widely acclaimed as Puerto Rico's preeminent historian, reflects on Puerto Rico's past and asks probing questions about its future.The book's first section is called "Miradas" (observations).Recognizing that the Caribbean has been formed through resistance or reaction to external forces that manifests itself at the local level, Picó begins by going beyond the standard narrative of events to …
Ties that Bind: Baptismal Sponsorship of Slaves in Eighteenth-Century Puerto Rico
This study broadens our understanding of baptismal sponsorship for slave infants by utilizing family reconstitution to recreate the vital statistics of godparents as well as demographic patterns of behaviour associated with godparenthood in Arecibo (Puerto Rico) from 1735 to 1772. The examination of who served as godparents and why they did so provides insights into the lived experience of enslaved populations. Frequent interaction of whites, bla…
Slave Families and the Hato Economy in Puerto Rico
It has long been assumed that sugar cultivation and its attendant production culture shaped the institutional and social framework of slavery throughout the Caribbean. Yet there was greater diversification of economic activities and contrasting conditions of servitude existed. This book expands the study of slavery outside the context of sugar, focusing on the peculiar characteristics of enslavement in areas where the agricultural economy was ori…
Observando las finanzas como una red de observaciones: Un comentario a Esposito
This essay contributes to observation theory by commenting on Esposito's paper, "Economic Circularities and Second-Order Observation: The Reality of Ratings." The key question of that paper is summarized as: How does one calculate in the Keynesian third degree (attempting to ascertain what the average opinion considers as the average opinion) under conditions of diabolical circularity (when uncertainty about the future is generated by attempts to…
On Resilience
This commentary reviews key themes posed by papers in this Special Issue and points to open questions. For example, does resilience in socio-technical systems degrade with use or, like immune systems, is resilience upgraded with use? Similarly, is resilience about responding in the face of the rare event? Or, is it being prepared for the rare event? Is it useful to think about the evolution of resilience? What are the risks posed by models of ris…
Beyond Perfection: A Redemptive Reading of Retracted Holiness Testimony in John Walsh's Letter to Charles Wesley, 15 August 1762
Research Article| January 01 2013 Beyond Perfection: A Redemptive Reading of Retracted Holiness Testimony in John Walsh's Letter to Charles Wesley, 15 August 1762 David Stark David Stark Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Wesley and Methodist Studies (2013) 5: 123–151. https://doi.org/10.2307/42909860 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation David Stark; Beyond Perfection: A Redemptive Readi…
This Place, These People: Life and Shadow on the Great Plains
Photographs by Nancy Warner accompanied by the words of Nebraska farmers and residents
Observing Finance as a Network of Observations. Comment on Esposito
This essay contributes to observation theory by commenting on Esposito’s paper, «Economic circularities and second-order observation: the reality of ratings». The key question of that paper is summarized as: How does one calculate in the Keynesian third degree (attempting to ascertain what average opinion considers «average opinion» to be) under conditions of diabolical circularity (when uncertainty about the future is generated by attempts to pr…
Recombinant Property in East European Capitalism
Recombinant property is a form of organizational hedging in which actors respond to uncertainty by deversifying assets, redefining and recombining resources. It is an attempt to hold resources that can be justified by more than one legitimating principle. Property tansformation in postsocialist Hungary involves the decentralized reorganization of assets and the centralized management of liabilities. Together they blur the boundaries of public and…
Path Dependence and Privatization Strategies in East Central Europe
Across the ruins of Communism, a clear breeze blows from the West. Like the "fresh winds" that had been hailed form the East across the ruins of war more than four decades earlier, it promises prosperity through sacrifice. Like the old vision with its road maps to the promised land, this new vision comes with packaged formulas for applying economic science to the grand project of institutional reconstruction. In 1991, no less than in 1948, devast…
Organizing Diversity: Evolutionary Theory, Network Analysis and Postsocialism
GRABHER G. and STARK D. (1997) Organizing diversity: evolutionary theory, network analysis and postsocialism, Reg. Studies 31, 533-544. In contrast to the dominant transition framework that examines organizational forms in Eastern Europe according to the degree to which they conform to, or depart from the blueprints of already existing capitalisms, this paper examines the innovative character, born of necessity, in which actors in the postsociali…
Structural Folds: Generative Disruption in Overlapping Groups
Entrepreneurial groups face a twinned challenge: recognizing and implementing new ideas. We argue that entrepreneurship is less about importing ideas than about generating new knowledge by recombining resources. In contrast to the brokerage-plus-closure perspective, we address the overlapping of cohesive group structures. In analyzing the network processes of intercohesion, we identify a distinctive network topology: the structural fold. Actors a…
What's Observed in a Rating? Rankings as Orientation in the Face of Uncertainty
Ratings and rankings are criticized for being simplistic, obscurantist, inaccurate, and subjective, yet they are becoming an increasingly influential social form. We elaborate the criticisms of ratings and rankings in various fields but go on to argue that analysis should shift its target. The problem that ratings deal with is not observation of an independent world. Instead, the challenge they face is the circularity of second-order observation …
Rethinking Internal Labor Markets: New Insights from a Comparative Perspective
Internal labor markets take different forms in the capitalist and the socialistfirm as the distinctive organizational problems in each economic system produce differing but comparable institutional solutions. Analysis of systemic uncertainties and the organizational responses of workers and managers yields a comparative model of mirrored opposition: in economies in which the firm operates in a market environment, systemic uncertainties regarding …
The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life
What counts? In work, as in other areas of life, it is not always clear what standards we are being judged by or how our worth is being determined. This can be disorienting and disconcerting. Because of this, many organizations devote considerable resources to limiting and clarifying the logics used for evaluating worth. But as David Stark argues, firms would often be better off, especially in managing change, if they allowed multiple logics of w…
Put to the test: For a new sociology of testing
In an age defined by computational innovation, testing seems to have become ubiquitous, and tests are routinely deployed as a form of governance, a marketing device, an instrument for political intervention, and an everyday practice to evaluate the self. This essay argues that something more radical is happening here than simply attempts to move tests from the laboratory into social settings. The challenge that a new sociology of testing must add…
From dissonance to resonance: Cognitive Interdependence in Quantitative Finance
This study explores the elusive social dimension of quantitative finance. We conducted three years of observations in the derivatives trading room of a major investment bank. We found that traders use models to translate stock prices into estimates of what their rivals think. Traders use these estimates to look out for possible errors in their own models. We found that this practice, reflexive modeling, enhances returns by turning prices into a v…
Game Changer: The Topology of Creativity
Э лектронный журнал «Экономическая социология» издаётся с 2000 г.Учредителями являются Национальный исследовательский университет «Высшая школа экономики» (с 2007 г.) и Вадим Валерьевич Радаев (главный редактор).Цель журнала -утверждать международные стандарты экономико-социологических исследований в России, представлять современные работы российских и зарубежных авторов в области экономической социологии, информировать профессиональное сообществ…
Political Holes in the Economy: The Business Network of Partisan Firms in Hungary
This article redirects attention from the question of how business ties have an impact on politics to the question of how political ties have an impact on business. Specifically, do divisions within the field of politics become divisions in the field of business networks? To study co-evolution of political and economic fields, we conducted a historical network analysis of the relationship between firm-to-party ties and firm-to-firm ties in the Hu…
One Way or Multiple Paths: For a Comparative Sociology of East European Capitalism
Privatization in Hungary: From Plan to Market or from Plan to Clan
For nearly three decades, the conception of reform of the state socialist economies of East Central Europe was dominated by the search for the correct mix of plan and market within the state sector. By the mid 1980s a new conception of reform emerged in Hungary focusing on the small-scale private sector, as economists debated the correct mix of public and private ownership across sectors of the economy. The year 1989 witnessed, in both Hungary an…
Social Times of Network Spaces: Network Sequences and Foreign Investment in Hungary
To model, from its inception, interenterprise network formation and its interaction with foreign investment across an entire epoch of rapid and profound economic transformation, the authors gathered data on the complete ownership histories of 1,696 of the largest Hungarian enterprises from 1987 to 2001. They develop a social sequence analysis to identify distinctive pathways whereby firms use network resources to buffer uncertainty, hide or restr…
Planning, Politics, and Shop-Floor Power: Hidden Forms of Bargaining in Soviet-Imposed State-Socialist Societies
Class struggle and the transformation of the labor process: A relational approach
Link, Search, Interact: The Co-Evolution of NGOs and Interactive Technology
International institutions are being transformed by the twinned appearance of new non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and new technologies. How do these processes co-evolve? If we were limited to three words to describe the new interactive technologies of the Web, we would highlight the following logics: link, search, interact. Whereas in other systems these logics are additive, on the Web they can be recombinatory. Search, for example, can be …
Class Identification Processes of Married, Working Men and Women
We propose gender-specific models of class identification based on the distinctive work and occupational experiences of men and women. Using data from the General Social Surveys of the National Opinion Research Center on white married men and women who were employed full time in 1973, 1974, 1976, 1977, and 1980, regression analysis supports our contention that processes of class identification are gender-specific. Men's class identification is pr…
PowerPoint in Public: Digital Technologies and the New Morphology of Demonstration
When policy issues involve complex technical questions, demonstrations are more likely to marshal charts, graphs, models, and simulations than to mobilize popular movements in the streets. In this paper we analyze PowerPoint demonstrations, the most ubiquitous form of digital demonstrations. Our first set of demonstrations are the PowerPoint presentations made in December 2002 by the seven finalist architectural teams in the Innovative Design com…
Who Counts? Supranational Norms and Societal Needs
Bending the bars of the iron cage: Bureaucratization and informalization in capitalism and socialism
From System Identity to Organizational Diversity: Analyzing Social Change in Eastern Europe
Across the ruins of communism, a clear breeze blows from the West. Like the winds that had been hailed from the East across the ruins of war more than four decades earlier, it promises prosperity through sacrifice. And, like the old vision, with its road maps to the promised land, this vision comes with packaged formulas for applying economic science to the grand project of institutional reconstruction. 1992, no less than in 1948, devastation is …
Distributing Intelligence and Organizing Diversity in New-Media Projects
In this paper we examine how web-design firms in the new-media industry probe and experiment with possible forms and sources of value that give shape to the new economy. Focusing on the collaborative engineering of cross-disciplinary web-design project teams, we examine how websites emerge as provisional settlements among heterogeneous disciplines as they negotiate working compromises across competing performance criteria
Rooted transnational publics: Integrating foreign ties and civic activism
On Resilience
This commentary reviews key themes posed by papers in this Special Issue and points to open questions. For example, does resilience in socio-technical systems degrade with use or, like immune systems, is resilience upgraded with use? Similarly, is resilience about responding in the face of the rare event? Or, is it being prepared for the rare event? Is it useful to think about the evolution of resilience? What are the risks posed by models of ris…
Social Strata and Social Consciousness
Class struggle and the transformation of the labor process: A relational approach
Planning, Politics, and Shop-Floor Power: Hidden Forms of Bargaining in Soviet-Imposed State-Socialist Societies
Visite en Hongrie: Une innovation récente en organisation du travail
Stark David. Visite en Hongrie . In: Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales. Vol. 52-53, juin 1984. Le travail politique. p. 111
Redistributive Injustice
Rethinking Internal Labor Markets: New Insights from a Comparative Perspective
Internal labor markets take different forms in the capitalist and the socialistfirm as the distinctive organizational problems in each economic system produce differing but comparable institutional solutions. Analysis of systemic uncertainties and the organizational responses of workers and managers yields a comparative model of mirrored opposition: in economies in which the firm operates in a market environment, systemic uncertainties regarding …
La sociologie dans son contexte
Stark David. La sociologie dans son contexte. In: Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales. Vol. 61, mars 1986. Science et actualité. p. 55
Politique de réformes et politique de l'entreprise
Reform policy and industrial policy. Work collectives were created in Hungary after the failure of the early attempts at reform of the economy from 1968 onwards. They are groupings of workers in an industrial enterprise organized in semi-autonomous production units which undertake sub-contracting and so offer their members a second paid activity. They represent an original means of reintegrating the «second economy» (the organization of parallel …
Labour Market and Second Economy in Hungary
Class Identification Processes of Married, Working Men and Women
We propose gender-specific models of class identification based on the distinctive work and occupational experiences of men and women. Using data from the General Social Surveys of the National Opinion Research Center on white married men and women who were employed full time in 1973, 1974, 1976, 1977, and 1980, regression analysis supports our contention that processes of class identification are gender-specific. Men's class identification is pr…
Bending the bars of the iron cage: Bureaucratization and informalization in capitalism and socialism
Entrepreneurs on the Road to Post-communism
Privatization in Hungary: From Plan to Market or from Plan to Clan
For nearly three decades, the conception of reform of the state socialist economies of East Central Europe was dominated by the search for the correct mix of plan and market within the state sector. By the mid 1980s a new conception of reform emerged in Hungary focusing on the small-scale private sector, as economists debated the correct mix of public and private ownership across sectors of the economy. The year 1989 witnessed, in both Hungary an…
State Socialism in Transition
Privatisation en Hongrie: Du plan au marché ou du plan au clan
Vom Plan zum Markt oder vom Plan zum Clan? Da die Experimente mit dem "Markt-Sozialismus" fehlgeschlagen sind, tritt das post-kommunistische Regime in Ungarn entschieden für ein Privatisierungsprogramm der verstaatlichten Wirtschaft ein. Doch keiner besitzt den Schlüssel für die Losung dieses aufierst heiklen Problems : Wie läßt sich das Überleben der ineffektiv gewordenen und mangelhaft ausgerüsteten Großunternehmen mit den Erfordernissen des fr…
La valeur du travail et sa rétribution en Hongrie
The Value of Labour and its Remuneration in Hungary. Through an ethnographie study involving participant observation in a big rubber factory in Hungary, the author studies the operation of the System of cooperative sub-contracting within factories which has been in operation since 1982. This new production mechanism, designed to offset the rigidities of state-owned firms by offering freely associated workers the use of the machinery outside their…
Path Dependence and Privatization Strategies in East Central Europe
Across the ruins of Communism, a clear breeze blows from the West. Like the "fresh winds" that had been hailed form the East across the ruins of war more than four decades earlier, it promises prosperity through sacrifice. Like the old vision with its road maps to the promised land, this new vision comes with packaged formulas for applying economic science to the grand project of institutional reconstruction. In 1991, no less than in 1948, devast…
From System Identity to Organizational Diversity: Analyzing Social Change in Eastern Europe
Across the ruins of communism, a clear breeze blows from the West. Like the winds that had been hailed from the East across the ruins of war more than four decades earlier, it promises prosperity through sacrifice. And, like the old vision, with its road maps to the promised land, this vision comes with packaged formulas for applying economic science to the grand project of institutional reconstruction. 1992, no less than in 1948, devastation is …
Career Strategies in Capitalism and Socialism: Work Values and Job Rewards in the United States and Hungary
This article compares work values and job rewards in Hungary and the U.S., using data from a recent study of workers in these two countries (the 1989 International Social Survey Program). We argue that individuals' career strategies and attainments are shaped by their nation's structures of employment relations. The results indicate that Hungarians placed greater importance on economic incentives and on having more “leisure” time from their main …
Recombinant property in East European capitalism
Restructuring Networks in Post-Socialism
This book is about change in Central and Eastern Europe, and social and economic change more generally. In contrast to the dominant ‘transition framework’ that examines organizational forms in Eastern Europe according to the degree to which they conform to, or depart from, the blueprints of already existing capitalisms, this book examines the innovative character, born of necessity, in which actors in the post-socialist setting are restructuring …
The Social and Cultural Embeddedness of Entrepreneurs in Eastern Germany
This chapter starts by outlining the legacy of entrepreneurship and self-entrepreneurship in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). The chapter examines methods of privatization and the structure of ownership in eastern Germany since the regime shift of November 1989. The second section looks into the various aspects of the social and cultural embeddedness of new entrepreneurships in eastern Germany, such as the different group origins, and…
Discovering the Invisible Puerto Rican Slave Family: Demographic Evidence From the Eighteenth Century
Traditional notions that family life among slaves during the pre-plantation period in the non-Hispanic Caribbean was necessarily unstable are fading in light of new research. Although marriage among this segment of the population in Caguas, Cayey, San Germán, and Yauco—rural parishes in Puerto Rico—involved only a fraction of the overall number of marriages in these communities, the marriage of slaves was much more frequent than previously assume…
Restructuring Networks in Post-Socialism: Legacies, Linkages and Localities
This books is about change in Central and Eastern Europe, and how we think about social and economic change more generally. In contrast to the dominant 'transition framework' that examines organizational forms in Eastern Europe according to the degree to which they conform to, or depart from, the blueprints of already existing capitalisms, this book examines the way economic and social actors in the post-socialist setting are restructuring organi…
The Rise of the Network Society
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