PROFESSION: My own academic career has taken me to a variety of institutions, content areas, and opportunities I would not have anticipated in my early life or even in graduate school. My own purposes were always (...)

Which goals have you focused on in your professional career?

Whohub

My own academic career has taken me to a variety of institutions, content areas, and opportunities I would not have anticipated in my early life or even in graduate school. My own purposes were always to satisfy a sense of curiosity about the social world, coupled with early if inchoate sense of social justice. This basis, coupled with acquiring a skill set in social sciences research, allowed me to contribute in an active community of research sociologists.
As as researcher, I had the good fortune to work with researchers and teachers who imagined a richly organizational and empirical form of sociology and who embodied the gist of Weber's spirit of vocation and purpose. I am grateful to these people for the careers they forged and their willingness to engage regularly with us as graduate students.
When I started working in business schools, I had to learn a new idiom of teaching and engagement. in the 1990s and since, b-schools have been important sites for debates about commonwealth as well as individual wealth. This view of how to analyze and understand the changing relations of business and society (and likely culture as well) is a broad frame for much of my current research and teaching.