Josh Whitford

Josh Whitford is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University, part of the Social Science faculty. His research interests include economic and organizational sociology, comparative political economy, economic geography, and pragmatist social theory. Whitford focuses on regulation at the intersection of the public and private sectors, as well as the social, political, and institutional implications of productive decentralization and outsourcing in manufacturing industries in the United States and Europe, with particular attention to network failures endemic to decentralized production regimes. He joined the Columbia Sociology faculty as an Assistant Professor in 2004 after serving as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. He advanced to Associate Professor without tenure in 2010 and to Associate Professor in 2012. Whitford is a faculty affiliate at the Center on Organizational Innovation and the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, and he serves on the Computational Social Science Committee at Columbia's Data Science Institute.

Whitford earned a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2003, an M.A. in Sociology in 1998, and a B.A. with majors in Mathematics and Italian in 1993 from the same institution. His honors include the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Industry Studies Fellowship in 2007, a National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant in 2016, the Kathryn DuPre Lumpkin Award for the Best Dissertation in the University of Wisconsin Department of Sociology in 2003, and a Fulbright IIE Fellowship for Italy in 1998. He is the author of The New Old Economy: Networks, Institutions, and the Organizational Transformation of American Manufacturing (Oxford University Press, 2005). Notable publications include Fixing Network Failures? The Contested Case of the American Manufacturing Extension Partnership (Socio-Economic Review, 2017, with Philipp Brandt), The Network Firm as a Political Coalition (Organization Studies, 2016, with Francesco Zirpoli), Pragmatism, Practice, and the Boundaries of Organization (Organization Science, 2014, with Francesco Zirpoli), and Waltzing, Relational Work, and the Construction (or Not) of Collaboration in Manufacturing Industries (Politics & Society, 2012). Forthcoming books are When Networks Fail (Princeton University Press, with Andrew Schrank) and Icons on the Edge (University of Chicago Press, with Francesco Zirpoli and Markus Becker). Whitford has served on the editorial boards of Socio-Economic Review and Argomenti and as program co-chair for the 2007 Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics meeting.

Professional Email: jw2212@columbia.edu