Today, enterprises are increasingly provisional and short-lived, resembling the nexus of contracts described by financial economists. They are less like an organism or body than they are like a web page, which requires a rather different corporate ontology.
Gerald Davis
University of Michigan
Jerry Davis received his PhD from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and taught at Northwestern and Columbia before moving to the University of Michigan, where he is Wilbur K. Pierpont Collegiate Professor of Management and of Sociology. He has published widely in management, sociology, and finance. His books include Social Movements and Organization Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2005); Organizations and Organizing (Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007); Managed by the Markets: How Finance Reshaped America (Oxford University Press, 2009); Changing your Company from the Inside Out: A Guide for Social Intrapreneurs (Harvard Business School Press, 2015), and The Vanishing American Corporation: Navigating the Hazards of a New Economy (Berrett-Koehler, 2016).
Davis’s research is broadly concerned with the effects of finance on society and on democratic 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.