Walter W. Powell is Professor of Education (and) Sociology, Organizational Behavior, Management Science and Engineering, Public Policy, and Communication at Stanford University, and Lewis A. Coser Visiting Professor at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. From 1999 to 2010, he was director of Scancor at Stanford; today he remains involved with Scancor through supervising the postdoctoral fellows program and running the annual PhD workshop in Europe. At Stanford, Powell is faculty co-director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.
Powell works in the areas of organization theory, economic sociology, and the sociology of science. His interests focus on the processes through which knowledge is transferred across organizations, and the role of networks in facilitating or hindering innovation and of institutions in codifying ideas. His most recent book, to be discussed at SASE/LSE 2015, is The Emergence of Organizations and Markets (co-authored with John Padgett, Princeton University Press, 2012).