About

Victor Nee is the Frank and Rosa Rhodes Professor of Economic Sociology at Cornell University, where he also serves as the Director of the Center for the Study of Economy and Society and the Director of the Center for the Study of Economy and Society. He has previously held the position of Goldwin Smith Professor of Sociology and has served as Chair of the Department of Sociology. His academic background includes undergraduate studies at the University of California, Los Angeles and Santa Cruz, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University. Nee's career includes positions as a Lecturer at the John F. Kennedy Institute of Politics, Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a return to Cornell University in 1985. He was also a Global Professor of Social Research and Public Policy at New York University, Abu Dhabi in 2012. His research focuses on the new institutionalism in economic and organizational sociology, immigration and assimilation, and inequality. He has written extensively on these topics, contributing to the understanding of market transition, institutional change, and ethnic stratification. Nee is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and has received numerous awards and honors for his scholarly work.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Economics
• Social Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Psychology
• Market economy
• Positive economics
• Epistemology
• Economy
• Criminology
• Management science
• Business

Selected publications

• The Assembly of an American Sociologist

  Annual Review of Sociology · 2025-03-27

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article examines the relationship between biography, chance, and persistence in accounting for the assembly of an American sociologist. It traces the accumulation of experiences involved in a research journey aimed at explanation of social behavior and institutional change. The process of discovery leading to a new theory may arise from serendipitous observations gained through fieldwork, while new combinations of ideas also emerge from social interactions with acquaintances, colleagues and friends. Cross-disciplinary intellectual trade offers rich opportunities for advances in the social and behavioral sciences.

  PublisherDOI

• Assimilation

  2025-09-18

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Social Mechanisms of Regional Advantage: United States and Sweden

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Knowledge spillover and network rewiring are interconnected social mechanisms enabling and motivating regional economic growth. In a comparative analysis of knowledge economies in the United States and Sweden, we examine the intertwined social dynamics that they involve. At the micro-level, we explore patterns of entrepreneurial action to identify informal and formal institutional elements at play in enabling and guiding the growth of startup tech firms. At the meso-level, we examine the behavioral patterns of knowledge flow and network rewiring in knowledge economies of the United States (Los Angeles, New York City and Silicon Valley) and Sweden (Stockholm and Lund/Malmo). As predicted by theory and derived hypotheses, the more expansive the knowledge spillover and network rewiring, the greater the breadth of innovation and diversity of technology firms. At the country level, our finding is consistent with varieties of capitalism theory on liberal and coordinated market economies. We find a broader range of economic institutions and a higher volume of startup technology firms in the liberal market economy. In coordinated market economy contexts, nonmarket coordinating institutions constrain the extent of knowledge spillover and innovation outside of established big technology firms; notwithstanding, ongoing institutional change has led to diffusion of liberal market institutions.

  PublisherDOI

• A theory of emergence: Knowledge, rewiring and innovation

  Social Science Research · 2023-02-21 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Why do social interactions linked to sharing knowledge drive the emergence of a regional technology economy? We proffer a positive theory and explanation-sketch identifying mechanisms and initial conditions in an explanation of emergence of a knowledge economy. We trace the emergence of a knowledge economy, from a small group of founding members to a regional technology economy. With the rapid influx of new people, knowledge spillover motivates technologists and entrepreneurs to reach out beyond existing contacts to explore the expanding knowledge economy and interact with new acquaintances in the search for novelty. In the course of network rewiring in knowledge clusters, individuals share knowledge and cooperate in innovation, and move to more central positions when they interact. Mirroring the trends of increased knowledge exploration and innovative activity at the individual level, new startup firms founded during this time period come to span a greater number of industry groups. Endogenous dynamics of overlapping knowledge networks lie behind the rapid morphogenesis of new regional technology economies in New York City and Los Angeles.

  PublisherDOI

• Specialization in the marketplace for ideas

  PLoS ONE · 2023-10-25 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Organizations that compete for attention in the marketplace face a strategic decision: whether to target a specialized niche or diversify to reach a broader market. Previous research has extensively analyzed the specialization dilemma faced by for-profit firms. We extend the analysis to knowledge-sharing groups in the marketplace of ideas. Using data on over 1,500 technology groups collected from an online event-organizing platform over a fifteen-year period, we measure the effect of topical focus, rarity, novelty, and technical exclusivity on audience growth, retention, and sustained engagement. We find that knowledge-sharing groups benefit marginally by specializing in rare topics but not in new topics. The strongest predictor of growth and survival is whether the group is associated with technically sophisticated topics, regardless of the breadth of focus, even though technical topics are less widely accessible. We conclude that what matters is not how specialized the organization, but how the organization is specialized.

  PublisherDOI

• Methods of quantifying specialized knowledge and network rewiring

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2023-09-25

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Technological innovations are a major driver of economic development that depend on the exchange of knowledge and ideas among those with unique but complementary specialized knowledge and knowhow. However, measurement of specialized knowledge embedded in technologists, scientists and entrepreneurs in the knowledge economy presents an empirical challenge as both the exchange of knowledge and knowledge itself remain difficult to observe. We develop novel measures of specialized knowledge using a unique dataset of longitudinal records of participation at technology-focused meetup events in two regional knowledge economics. Our measures of specialized knowledge can be further used to quantify the extend of knowledge spillover and network rewiring and uncover underlying social mechanisms that contribute to the development of increasingly complex and differentiated networks in maturing knowledge economies. We apply these methods in the context of the rapid morphogenesis of emerging regional technology economies in New York City and Los Angeles.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Cooperation with Strangers: Spillover of Community Norms

  Organization Science · 2022-03-25 · 20 citations

  article

  Why do leaders of organizations cooperate with players with whom they may never transact again? Such transactions can involve the incentives to exploit the other party because these interactions are not recurrent or embedded in networks. Yet, in a market economy, organizational actors learn to cooperate with strangers; otherwise, they risk closure from new ideas and business opportunities outside of their local community. With a large random sample of CEOs of manufacturing firms in the Yangzi River Delta region of China, we measured social norms using vignettes that describe hypothetical situations illustrating the social mechanisms of norm enforcement in respondents’ local communities. Several years later, in a laboratory-in-the-field experiment, we asked the same participants to play a one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) game with a complete stranger. Our findings suggest that belief in the reliability of robust norm enforcement is positively associated with a higher probability of cooperation with strangers. To our knowledge, this mixed-method study is the first to explore the relationship between social norms and cooperation with strangers using a large sample of leaders of organizations outside the environment of the laboratory. Finally, to explore the generalizability of our behavioral findings, we experimentally manipulated norm vignettes and study the PD game in online experiments with managers in the Yangzi River Delta region. History: This paper has been accepted for the Organization Science Special Issue on Experiments in Organizational Theory. Funding: V. Nee gratefully acknowledges funding for research from the John Templeton Foundation (2005-2009 and 2015-2018), and from the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University. H. Holm thanks the Jan Wallander’s and Tom Hedelius’ Foundation for funding lab-in-the-field behavioral game. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2021.1521 .

  PublisherDOI

• The road to parity: determinants of the socioeconomic achievements of Asian Americans *

  2022-11-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In recent decades Asian Americans have made significant socioeconomic gains, which have resulted in changing societal perceptions of Asian Americans. The pre-World War II pattern of ethnic isolation and discrimination has given way to a trend more similar to the assimilation processes of white ethnic groups, particularly those that have pursued higher education as a means of getting ahead. An important debate in the literature on Asian American status attainment is whether cultural or structural factors are decisive in explaining the socioeconomic gains of Asian Americans. Self-employment among Asian Americans is generally associated with high earnings. This is seen most clearly in the case of Chinese and Filipinos, and less so for the Japanese. The concentration of Chinese and Japanese Americans in small business ownership implies the existence of an enclave economy. Filipinos’ low income-returns to schooling appear to be consistent with a cost of ethnicity explanation.

  PublisherDOI

• INTRODUCTION

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2020-09-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction: Rational Choice Social Research

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020 · 12 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Computer Science
  • Sociology
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Оlga Gurova

  Laurea University of Applied Sciences

  72 shared

• Franck Billé

  University of California, Berkeley

  72 shared

• Alexander Kurakin

  72 shared

• Regina Resheteeva

  Research Council of Finland

  72 shared

• Billé Franck -Phd

  Cornell University

  36 shared

• Billé Franck -Phd

  National Research University Higher School of Economics

  36 shared

• Sonja Opper

  Bocconi University

  35 shared

• Richard Alba

  The Graduate Center, CUNY

  17 shared

Education

• Ph.d., Sociology

  Harvard University

  1977

Awards & honors

• George R. Terry Book Award from the Academy of Management
• Thomas and Znanieki Best Book Award from the American Sociol…
• Mirra Komoravsky Best Book Award from the Eastern Sociologic…
• James S. Coleman Best Book Award from the ASA Rationality an…
• Best Paper Award from the Academy of Management