About

Woody Powell is Jacks Family Professor of Education, and Professor of Sociology, Organizational Behavior, Management Science and Engineering, and Communication at Stanford University. He is also an External Faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute. He was a founding co-director of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (PACS) in 2006, where he heads the Civic Life of Cities Lab, which studies civil society organizations in the SF Bay Area, Seattle, Shenzhen, Sydney, Taipei, and Vienna. Powell has received the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching in the School of Humanities and Sciences for 2018-19, and has served as director of SCANCOR at Stanford from 1999 to 2010, continuing his involvement through supervising postdoctoral fellows and running the annual PhD workshop in Europe. He has received honorary degrees from Uppsala University, Copenhagen Business School, and the Helsinki School of Economics, and is a foreign member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Science and The British Academy. His research interests focus on the processes through which ideas and practices are transferred across organizations, and the role of networks in facilitating or hindering innovation. His recent publications include books such as 'The Emergence of Organizations and Markets' with John F. Padgett and 'The Nonprofit Sector' co-edited with Patricia Bromley.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Art
• Mathematics
• Art history
• Cognitive psychology
• Media studies
• Engineering
• History
• Management
• Aesthetics
• Psychology
• Business
• Combinatorics
• Economics
• Law and economics

Selected publications

• From innovation <i>versus</i> equity to innovation <i>and</i> equity

  Industrial and Corporate Change · 2025-11-12

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The essays in the special issue reframe the relationship between innovation and equity, not as opposing objectives but as mutually constitutive design choices. Drawing together contributions at the levels of the workplace, city, region, and nation, they emphasize how outcomes depend less on market or technological inevitabilities than on practices situated in places. The essays converge on the insight that innovation systems are inherently political, shaped by institutions, governance, and collective action. Yet they also surface unsettled questions: how equity at one scale may undermine it at another, how to govern multi-actor systems such as data and surveillance, how to stabilize inclusive arrangements over time, and how to measure intangible assets and civic participation alongside wages or GDP. The task ahead is to design across levels, institutions, and metrics to recognize equity not as a constraint but as a source of resilience.

  PublisherDOI

• Serendipity in Strategy, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09

  article

  This symposium will focus on the role of serendipity in the organizational context. Leading scholars will discuss how and why serendipity matters in strategy, entrepreneurship, and innovation—and how companies can use it to their advantage. The focus of the short “panel sparks” is to highlight current state-of-the-art research, as well as relevant future research opportunities. We will conclude the symposium with reflections by an eminent management scholar (Henry Mintzberg), who will (serendipitously) “connect the dots” between the emerging themes.

  PublisherDOI

• Organizations as Carriers of Status and Class Dynamics: A Historical Ethnography of the Emergence of Bordeaux’s Cork Aristocracy

  Research in the sociology of organizations · 2024-09-07 · 4 citations

  book-chapterOpen accessSenior author

  International audience

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Neighborhood effects on integrative organizational practices in five global cities

  Nature Cities · 2024-10-29 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Capturing the Civic Lives of Cities: An Organizational, Place-Based Perspective on Civil Society in Global Cities

  2023-06-23

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  In a wired world, how do social interactions among organizations and people continue to define civil society? Our co-produced approach to studying civil societies through a place-based, organizational lens provides fresh answers to perennial questions about voice, accountability, and embeddedness. The six articles in this collection on the civic life of cities draw on more than 1,400 interviews with organizational leaders in San Francisco, Seattle, Shenzhen, Singapore, Sydney, and Vienna. Moving beyond the “big theories” of civil society, the articles illustrate the value of our dual emphasis on place and organizations by showing how comparisons of the people, practices, and partnerships of civil society organizations enable new middle-range theories of civil society. This approach promises to offer rich comparative insights into similarities and differences among organizations around the globe.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• From Iron Cage to Glass House: Repurposing of bureaucratic management and the turn to openness

  Organization Studies · 2023-09-04 · 17 citations

  article

  Although many contemporary organizations face institutional pressures to embrace open organizing principles, some defer or decline the call. We examine how existing bureaucratic practices shape organizations’ initial steps towards openness to explain variation in substantive openness in the practice of management. Scrutinizing the assumption that bureaucratic organizations operate behind closed doors, we study the turn to openness in a single metropolitan area with heterogeneous management practices and shared calls for greater transparency and inclusion. Econometric analyses paired with in-depth interviews reveal that more bureaucratic organizations first encountered such ideals of openness because they were quicker to use digital communication tools. How open organizations are managed results from the repurposing of existing practices in pursuit of openness. The turn to openness can be understood as a transformation of existing bureaucratic management instead of de-novo adoption of new practices. Our study illuminates how bureaucratic management counterintuitively enables some organizations to become more open, and offers support for repurposing as a mechanism of change in the transformation of an organizational field.

  PublisherDOI

• The Iron Cage Redux: Looking Back and Forward

  Organization Theory · 2023 · 31 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Media studies

  This seems an opportune time to reflect on our paper, The Iron Cage Revisited, some 40 years after its original publication. In this essay, we recall the influences on us at the time, speculate on factors that shaped its subsequent reception, and assess selective strands of work that it may have influenced. By today’s standards, it was a relatively short paper, only 14 pages, yet it has had a long life and a generous audience (68,624 citations according to Google Scholar on Oct. 15, 2023). We divide the essay into four parts: (a) our experiences at Yale in the early 1980s and the influences on us; (b) thoughts on the reception of the paper shortly after it was published; (c) reactions to the attention it subsequently received; and (d) brief reflections on subsequent institutional lines of work that we have followed. We conclude with thoughts on theorizing in organization studies.

  PublisherDOI

• Representations of Self in the Digital Public Sphere: The Field of Social Impact Analyzed Through Relational and Discursive Moves

  Research in the sociology of organizations · 2022-09-05 · 1 citations

  book-chapter

  We analyze the structure and the dynamics of a field, drawing on data from organizational public behavior in the digital sphere. Organizational self-representations afford rich insights into how organizations position themselves with regard to their peers, both in terms of web page language and hyperlink affiliations. Our empirical example is the lively and important discussion of the social impact of nonprofit organizations. We follow how it has evolved from 2011 to 2018 and with what consequences. We begin with portraits of the discursive movements of powerful, individual organizations, where we observe extensive changes. These portraits show how influential organizations alter their public faces. We then analyze discourse at the field level, which is surprisingly stable even though individual organizations change their discursive and relational positions frequently. Finally, we turn to groups of organizations with similar positions and highlight their ability to integrate vocabularies of other groups. Here we observe that a lingua franca increases integration at the field level, while affording distinction with individual organizations’ positioning. We conclude with a discussion of complementary research avenues that can advance the relational and linguistic view we present in this paper.

  PublisherDOI

• San Francisco Bay Area: A Left Coast Metropolis Grapples with Technocracy and Inequality

  Global Perspectives · 2022-01-01 · 5 citations

  articleSenior author

  How do civic organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area straddle the paradox of challenging entrenched inequalities in an ostensibly progressive region that has been transformed by tech-driven wealth? Local nonprofits face the tension of maintaining access to elite resources while building connections to distribute those resources and navigate divides between the haves and have-nots. We draw on original data collected over the course of two decades on a representative sample of Bay Area nonprofit organizations. With rich information from both quantitative and qualitative data, we examine different aspects of nonprofits’ relationship to their constituents and environments, including their community embeddedness, cross-sector collaborations, and engagement in advocacy. We then turn to the internal operations of these organizations and survey the professional backgrounds of nonprofit leaders and the usage of practices that purportedly make nonprofits more professional, accountable, and digitally savvy. Our findings reveal a sector that is developing its own model of what community-directed management looks like, neither tethered strictly to a Left Coast ethos nor displaying uniform responses to strong institutional pressures. Although the Bay Area sector pursues heterogeneous approaches to repairing social ruptures, there is a consistent theme of rebuilding and re-creating community. We argue that the region’s diversity in values, practices, and orientations stems from fighting deep fractures that resist simple solutions in a place marked by paradox.

  PublisherDOI

• Capturing the Civic Lives of Cities: An Organizational, Place-Based Perspective on Civil Society in Global Cities

  Global Perspectives · 2022-01-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Introduction to Global Perspectives special collection: The Civic Life of Cities around the World In a wired world, how do social interactions among organizations and people continue to define civil society? Our co-produced approach to studying civil societies through a place-based, organizational lens provides fresh answers to perennial questions about voice, accountability, and embeddedness. The six articles in this collection on the civic life of cities draw on more than 1,400 interviews with organizational leaders in San Francisco, Seattle, Shenzhen, Singapore, Sydney, and Vienna. Moving beyond the “big theories” of civil society, the articles illustrate the value of our dual emphasis on place and organizations by showing how comparisons of the people, practices, and partnerships of civil society organizations enable new middle-range theories of civil society. This approach promises to offer rich comparative insights into similarities and differences among organizations around the globe.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jason Owen‐Smith

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  35 shared

• Paul DiMaggio

  29 shared

• Achim Oberg

  9 shared

• Celeste Diaz Ferraro

  Pennsylvania State University

  8 shared

• Kenneth W. Koput

  University of Arizona

  8 shared

• Forrest Briscoe

  Cornell University

  8 shared

• Patricia Bromley

  Stanford University

  8 shared

• Barbara Gray

  8 shared

Awards & honors

• 2019 School of Humanities and Sciences Dean's Award for Exce…
• Honorary degrees from Uppsala University, Copenhagen Busines…
• Member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Science
• Member of The British Academy
• Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences