Walter W. (Woody) Powell is Professor of Education
and (by courtesy) Sociology, Organizational Behavior,
Management Science, and Communication at Stanford
University. Professor Powell is also an external faculty
member at the Santa Fe Institute. He joined the Stanford
faculty in 1999, after previously teaching at the
University of Arizona, MIT, and Yale. Professor Powell
works in the areas of organization theory, economic
sociology, the sociology of culture, and science and
technology studies. He has written dozens of papers
on inter-organizational collaboration and the growing
salience of networks and alliances to the innovation
process. In the area of nonprofit studies, he edited
The Nonprofit Sector: A Research Handbook (Yale
Univ. Press, 1987), referred to by reviewers as "the
bible of nonprofit scholarship." The new edition
of the handbook was recently published by Yale Press.
Professor Powell is also co-editor of Private
Action and the Public Good (1998), and is an
associate editor of the Stanford Social Innovation
Review. Professor Powell is currently engaged
in two large-scale research projects. In the first,
he is studying the circulation and translation of
managerial ideas in the Bay Area nonprofit sector,
examining how the influence of consulting firms, new
forms of high-engagement philanthropy, and business
initiatives are influencing the nonprofit world. In
the second, Professor Powell and his students are
studying the origins and development of the field
of the life sciences. They focus on the role of universities
in transferring public science into commercial development
by science-based companies, the consequences for universities
of their growing involvement in alliances with for-profit
enterprises, and the evolution of complex patterns
of collaboration among companies, public research
organizations, and financiers.
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