Rate My Professor Walter Powell

Walter W. Powell is the Jacks Family Professor of Education at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education and holds professor appointments by courtesy in Sociology, Organizational Behavior at the Graduate School of Business, Management Science and Engineering at the School of Engineering, and Communication. A prominent figure in social science, he earned his PhD in Sociology from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1978, MA from the same institution in 1975, and BA from Florida State University in 1975. Powell has received honorary degrees from Uppsala University, Copenhagen Business School, and Aalto University. His career trajectory includes assistant professor at SUNY Stony Brook (1978-1979), faculty positions at Yale University (1979-1987) and the University of Arizona (1988-1999), and Stanford since 1999. He co-directs the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society since 2006, directs the Scandinavian Consortium for Organizational Research, and serves on the board of directors of the Social Science Research Council since 2000. Powell is an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute, and a fellow of the British Academy, the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, to which he was elected in 2025. He received the 2019 School of Humanities and Sciences Dean’s Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching.

Powell’s research specializes in organization theory, economic sociology, and the sociology of science, with emphasis on knowledge transfer across organizations, networks facilitating innovation, and the institutionalization of practices in higher education and the nonprofit sector. Key publications include “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields,” co-authored with Paul J. DiMaggio (1983), the most cited article in the history of the American Sociological Review; “Neither Market Nor Hierarchy: Network Forms of Organization” (1990), winner of the 1991 Max Weber Prize; “Network Dynamics and Field Evolution: The Growth of Inter-Organizational Collaboration in the Life Sciences” (2005, with D. White, K. Koput, and J. Owen-Smith), recipient of the 2007 Viviana A. Zelizer Prize; “Interorganizational Collaboration and the Locus of Innovation: Networks of Learning in Biotechnology” (1996, with K. Koput and L. Smith-Doerr), recognized by Administrative Science Quarterly as one of its most influential articles; and books such as The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, co-edited with Paul J. DiMaggio (1991), The Emergence of Organizations and Markets, co-edited with John F. Padgett (2012), and The Nonprofit Sector: A Research Handbook, co-edited with Patricia Bromley (2020).