Department of
Sociology

Center for
Innovation

What's New at the Center

  • Hadden submitted a comment to the U.S. Census on proposals to revise the standards for questions on “race” and “ethnicity”.
  • Hage, Valadez and Hadden have in press with Routledge a book entitled Saving Society: Systematic coordinated inter-organizational networks, innovation and equality. The social sciences are presently dominated by two disciplines and their theories of coordination: economics (market competition) and political science (elections and state regulation). However, these models are breaking down given the more complex issues involved in social and political development that are ever more evident. This book provides a new model of societal coordination, one that builds cooperation and trust and can solve complex practical problems: systematic coordinated inter-organizational networks (scions). The first chapter details how scions can quickly catalyze considerable amounts of organizational change, especially adaptiveness, in the members of the inter-organizational network. It also provides a general framework for characterizing both individual and organizational change.

    Rather than being just a theoretical treatise, the second chapter outlines an epic case study of how these theoretical ideas were applied to rebuild the health care system in rural Nicaragua after a major natural disaster in 1998 (Hurricane Mitch). Each subsequent chapter provides lessons for public health program managers as well as new social science theory. Among other practical issues considered are how to establish a scion, create effective coordination within it, and best practices for safe motherhood and child survival programs. Besides making contributions to the literature on modes of coordination, the findings indicate alternative ways of thinking about social capital and its effectiveness in changing human behavior, the role of organizational change and the importance of adaptiveness. Although this is a case study, an explanation is provided as to why its findings have considerable generalizability.

  • Hage has just published an entry in the Routledge International Handbook of Economic Sociology, chapter 23, edited by Milan Zafirovsky, entitled “The Sociology of Economic Enterprise, Management, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation: Public Sector, Private Sector and Non-Governmental Sector". Since these are large topics and the entry is for an encyclopedia on economic sociology, a number of references are attached. The four major themes are: market contexts and organizational form, kinds of innovation, and kinds of coordination modes.

Updated 5 April 2023