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People Faculty Staff Students |
Jason Owen-Smith
PhD Year and University: 2000, University of Arizona
Other U of M Affiliation:
Sociology
Organizational Studies
Field(s) of Study:
Economic sociology, organizations, and the sociology of science and technology.
University of Michigan
1225 S. University, 286 University Towers, 2590
Phone: 936-0700
Second Office: 714 Dennison, 1090
Second Phone: 764-6767
E-mail: jdos@umich.edu
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Homepage:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jdos/
His dissertation examined trajectories of organizational and institutional change in the context of patenting and licensing efforts at research-intensive universities. That research expanded to encompass several related projects. An ethnographic study of the micro-processes of organizational learning draws on more than a year of fieldwork in a technology licensing office to examine decision-making processes and the role that non-scientists play in shaping innovations. Quantitative analyses of multiple indicators of technology transfer success aim to understand the organizational effects of different pathways to commercial engagement on campus. With collaborators, Jason engages in projects that examine the role of academic research institutions in economic growth, the evolution of innovation networks, and network-based organizational learning. He is working to balance the use of multiple methods and developing techniques to enable the visual exploration, analysis, and presentation of complex network data.
Current Projects:
(1) Institutional/Organizational change and decision making- I'm interested in how the decisions made by small groups of (particularly professionals) in organizations get transformed into standard operating procedures and rules of behavior that constrain future organizational action; (2) Innovation and novelty -- I'm interested in the ways that novelty (particularly scientific and technical innovations) emerge from largely conservative social arrangements (notably formal organizations and institutions such as scientific peer review). My work here focuses largely on explaining rates of patenting and publishing by firms and universities and looking at the changes that increased commercialism is causing in the university and the role of academic institutions in the economy; and (3) My newest set of projects looks at the evolution of inter-organizational networks in research intensive industries (such as Biotechnology) with a focus on explaining the emergence of stable groups of connected organizations and the effects of position in those groups on organizational outcomes.
Copyright 2002, The Regents of the University of Michigan