Director
David Stark is director of the Harriman Initiative on Networks, Institutions, and Economic Transformation in Post-Socialism and Arthur Lehman Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Columbia University , where he directs the Center on Organizational Innovation. He is an External Faculty Member of the Santa Fe Institute. Stark examines organizational forms as sites of multiple evaluative principles or frames of worth. He has carried out field research in Hungarian factories before and after 1989, in new media startups 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. With support from the National Science Foundation, his recent research in Eastern Europe involves a multi-country project on the virtual public sphere and a longitudinal network analysis of property transformation among the largest 1,800 Hungarian enterprises. Details about his recent publications are available at:
http://www.sociology.columbia.edu/fac-bios/stark/faculty.html
Advisory Board
Alex Cooley is a member of the advisory board of the Harriman Initiative 2006-2007 and assistant professor of political science at Barnard College. His research examines the role of external actors - including international financial institutions, multinational companies, non-governmental organizations, and foreign military bases - in the political and economic development of the former Soviet states, with a focus on Central Asia . His first book Logics of Hierarchy (Cornell University Press 2005) examines how Soviet administrative legacies influenced post-Soviet Central Asian state-building from a comparative imperial framework. Cooley is currently completing a new book on the politics surrounding U.S. overseas military bases in East Asia, Southern Europe and the post-Communist states. He is the 2007 APSA Annual Meeting section organizer for the Politics of Communism and Post-Communism division.
Timothy Frye is a member of the Harriman Institute and professor of Political Science at Columbia University . His research and teaching interests are in comparative politics and political economy with a focus on the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. He is the author of Brokers and Bureaucrats: Building Markets in Russia, and has published articles on property rights, protection rackets, economic reform, presidential power, and trade liberalization in a wide range of academic journals. Current projects include a book manuscript on the politics of economic reform in 25 postcommunist countries from 1990-2004 and articles on property rights and the rule of law drawing on surveys of business elites and the mass public in Russia.
Co-Conveners of the Harriman Initiative Seminar
David Stark
Roger Schoenman
Fellows
Eugene Raikhel recently received his Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. His dissertation is an ethnographic study of addiction and the therapeutic market in contemporary Russia, focusing on clinical encounters between physicians (and other practitioners) and their patients. This study is based on extensive fieldwork conducted in addiction and psychiatric hospitals, clinics and rehabilitation centers in St. Petersburg. His broader interests include the social dimensions of post-socialist transformations; the anthropology of biomedicine and psychiatry; culture and mental health; and citizenship, social welfare and the state. Following his year at the Harriman Institute, he will hold a post-doctoral fellowship at the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill University.
Roger Schoenman is Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Co-Director of the IGCC Center for Global, Regional and International Studies. His work explores variation in the frequency and dynamics of state-business ties that have appeared across the post-socialist area. Recent publications investigate the impact of party-competition on the politicization of the economy. He is currently working on a manuscript, Captains or Pirates? Party-Business Ties in Post-Socialism that examines the impact of party systems and cleavages, business-elite origins, and the structure of business networks on the nature of state-business ties in the evolving market democracies of the post-socialist area. More information about his work is available at people.ucsc.edu/~rschoenm
Aleksandra Sznajder will receive her Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at Yale University. Starting in 2007-08, she will be Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Richmond. Her research focuses on the politics of industrial restructuring and privatization in transition economies and on different mechanisms of convergence throughout EU accession/new member states. More specifically, Sznajder's research deals with the themes of external pressures on transition economies, state technocratic capacity and the role of the state in economic transition, social dialogue, and EU enlargement. Her publications include “The State-Led Transition to Liberal Capitalism” (with Lawrence P. King), American Journal of Sociology 112, no. 3 (2006), and “Effects of EU Accession on the Politics of Privatization – The Steel Sector in Comparative Perspective” in Das Erbe des Beitritts [The Legacy of EU Accession], edited by A. Kutter and V. Trappmann, 209-231. Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag, 2006.
Balazs Vedres is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University, and received his graduate training at the Department of Sociology, Columbia University. Currently he is an international fellow of the Santa Fe Institute. Vedres has studied civil society organizations with David Stark and Laszlo Bruszt, developing new techniques for data collection and analysis, with a specific interest in civil society networks, both online and offline. Beyond civil society research, Vedres' research interests include economic sociology, economic transformations, social networks, historical and discourse analysis methods. His recent publications concern the interdependence of strategizing agents and evolving network structures in large scale social change, in the fields of business networks, political discourse, and civil society organizations. More information about his recent publications is available at
http://www.personal.ceu.hu/staff/Balazs_Vedres/