Prestigious Research Grants Awarded to Professor Jason Owen-Smith

Professor Jason Owen-Smith has just been awarded research grants by the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The grants are aimed to support faculty in the early stages of their career as they work to develop long term research projects. Jason will be using his support to examine the evolution and ramifications of three key markets – for labor, technology, and capital – in the high-tech sectors of the U.S. economy. His project is designed to shed light on the relationship between the institutional and relational components of markets. At the organizational level, understanding the development of particular industrial environments will help explain why some companies and strategies succeed in particular arenas but fail when they enter others. Understanding the character and trajectory of capital, labor, and technology markets will also illuminate the social sources of organizational and technological innovation in fields ranging from biotechnology to telecommunications and semiconductors. These new projects build upon Jason's research and teaching interests. The pilot data that supported his grant applications were collected with the help of OS students. He will turn to our OS students again for research assistance and will continue to offer courses that examine organizational and technological innovation and that are informed by his research. Below, Jason explains the ideas behind his research.

“Economic sociology seeks to explain how different types of markets come into being. Markets vary in their formal rules, their informal codes and expectations, and their forms of organization. They can be concrete and local (e.g. the Ann Arbor Farmer's Market) or abstract and global (e.g. the market for petroleum futures or fine art). Either way, markets are social arrangements that accomplish three things. First, markets facilitate diverse types of exchange. Styles of bartering that will fly at the Farmer's market won't work at Whole Foods, even though you might be buying organic tomatoes in both places. Second, markets make different sorts of rationality sensible. You'll rarely succeed by following the same investment strategies for petroleum futures and fine art. Finally, markets assign disparate values to commodities of all sorts. Seriously, have you looked on EBay recently? Most organizations and individuals must navigate multiple markets in order to accomplish their goals. Those markets impose complex and sometimes contradictory constraints on behavior.

Economic sociologists believe systematic variations in markets come from one of two places. Institutional theorists argue that markets are cultural, political, and cognitive fields that shape individual identities, assumptions, and goals while providing a legal framework that enables exchange. For example, a great many organizational arrangements underpin our ability to easily and confidently buy a house from a stranger. Another camp, network theorists, argues that markets are really networks, webs of concrete relationships that channel resources and information. For example, we tend to be much more trusting of realtors that are recommended by our friends. I think that explaining variations in markets, and thus in organizational strategies and outcomes, requires us to examine how networks and fields grow and change over time.”

We will be excited to find out what Jason learns from his research and especially pleased that Organizational Studies students will be involved in this ground breaking project.