***M.Sc. Students, this event can count towards one of the six mandatory Research Seminars Series needed to attend (MHS6991 or MGT6991).***
This is a combined GGS ASI Research Café and Telfer Research Seminar Series (TRSS)
Jerry Davis, PhD
There is broad consensus across the political spectrum in the US that monopolistic corporations – particularly Big Tech companies -- have grown too powerful, and that we need to revive antitrust to take on the “curse of bigness.” But both the diagnosis and the cure are rooted in an outdated understanding of how the American economy is organized. Information and communication technologies have fundamentally altered the markets for capital, labor, supplies, and distribution in ways that undermine the basic categories we use to understand the economy. Nationality, industry, firm, size, employee, and other fundamental terms are increasingly detached from the operations of the economy. If we want to understand and tame the new sources of economic power, we need a new diagnosis and a new set of tools.
About the Speaker
Jerry Davis received his PhD from Stanford and taught at Northwestern and Columbia before moving to the University of Michigan, where he is Gilbert and Ruth Whitaker Professor of Business Administration and Professor of Sociology. He has published widely in management, sociology, and finance. His books include Social Movements and Organization Theory (2005); Organizations and Organizing (2007); Managed by the Markets: How Finance Reshaped America (2009); Changing your Company from the Inside Out: A Guide for Social Intrapreneurs (2015); The Vanishing American Corporation (2016); and Taming Corporate Power in the 21st Century (2021).
Davis’s research is broadly concerned with the effects of finance on society, changes in the corporate economy, and new forms of organization. Recent writings examine how ideas about corporate social responsibility have evolved to meet changes in the structures and geographic footprint of multinational corporations; whether "shareholder capitalism" is still a viable model for economic development; how income inequality in an economy is related to corporate size and structure; why theories about organizations do (or do not) progress; how architecture shapes social networks and innovation in organizations; why stock markets spread to some countries and not others; and whether there exist viable organizational alternatives to shareholder-owned corporations in the United States.
