Center for the Study of Social Organization

Damon Centola is an Assistant Professor of Economic Sociology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Damon's research focuses on the diffusion of collective behavior, including 1) social movements, 2) cultural differentiation, and 3) social epidemiology.  His most recent work integrates theoretical results on social networks with applications to on-line communities and the dynamics of behavior change.  His research won the 2006 and 2009 American Sociological Association's Award for Outstanding Article in Mathematical Sociology, and has been published in journals spanning sociology, political science, and physics.  Damon was a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy at Harvard University, and has been a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution and the Santa Fe Institute.

Joseph Blasi is a professor and sociologist at the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University where he teaches the undergraduate and graduate courses on corporate governance.  He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research interests include economic sociology, the social and economic history of the corporation, and public policy. He studies the relationship between the division of rewards, power, and prestige in organizations and performance using large datasets. His books and articles have addressed different systems of work and broad-based employee ownership, profit sharing, and stock options in corporations, countries, industry sectors, (such as Silicon Valley), and historical periods. His latest book, Shared Capitalism at Work (with Douglas Kruse and Richard Freeman), will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2010. Current projects include a study of reward systems and company culture in major corporations and the American economic history of broad-based profit sharing and ownership.