About

David Strang is a professor in the Department of Sociology at Cornell University, with a research focus on innovation and diffusion in the political, organizational, and scientific worlds. His recent projects include studying the evolution of research articles over time, analyzing the impact of social movements on Congressional voting, and developing computational models of the adoption and abandonment of management practices. Ongoing work also examines obituaries in the New York Times to understand what achievements are publicly celebrated. His research interests encompass political sociology, social movements, organizations, economic sociology, and models and methods for dynamic processes. Strang has contributed to the understanding of the sociology of science, management ideas, and the diffusion of innovations across organizations and cultures.

Research topics

• Political science
• Business
• Computer science
• Sociology
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Technical Note: The Effectiveness of the Transformation for T-Chart Data

  HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2023-11-14

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  As part of environmental health surveillance, healthcare surveillance, and public health surveillance there is a need to track rare events. Where these data follow a Poisson distribution, such as surveillance of infectious diseases or incidents involving inhalation of elemental mercury vapour (e.g. a damaged sphygmomanometer), various statistical methods have been developed. One option is the T-Chart, which allows the user to track a single variable of interest over time, then look for non-random variation referred to as ‘special cause’. This was first developed by Nelson in 1994 and is a sub-type of statistical process control charts.Nelson noted that “the times between occurrences of Poisson-distributed events are independent and exponentially distributed” and therefore highly positively skewed. Nelson therefore proposed a power transformation to overcome this to form a Weibull distribution. However, the effectiveness of this transformation on real world data is unknown, therefore the purpose of this study is to identify real world data from the published literature and quantify its effectiveness.This study observed that T-Charts are not common in the published literature, that researchers could report the skewness and kurtosis of data to help understand whether conventional ‘special cause’ rules will be appropriate, and that Normality is not achieved in all cases using Nelson’s power transformation. The recommendation of using 0.5 in place of zero appears to improve the effectiveness of the transformation, however, few sample were available.

  PublisherOA PDF

• Technical Note: Inclusion of Zeros on T-Charts for Rare Events (Exponential Distribution) in Healthcare Settings

  HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2023-07-22

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDF

• 18. Institutionalizing Family-Friendly Policies

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2019-03-14 · 3 citations

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Researching management ideas

  2019-01-01

  articleSenior author
  Publisher

• Peer Review and the Production of Scholarly Knowledge: Automated Textual Analysis of Manuscripts Revised for Publication in <i>Administrative Science Quarterly</i>

  2019-03-27 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter extends research on peer review by utilizing and assessing an emerging methodology: automated textual analysis. In a corpus of 38 papers successfully revised for publication in Administrative Science Quarterly, the authors found that measures based on exact wording (measured by plagiarism detection) and sentence similarity (measured by Word Mover’s Distance) performed well in capturing differences between original submissions and published papers. They identified the same overall pattern of revision that authors reported (intensive revision of Theory and Discussion sections, limited modification of Methods), and were strongly correlated with the turnover in references and hypotheses that occurred in the course of peer review. Automated textual analysis can usefully contribute to the study of manuscript change in peer review and other social scientific contexts, particularly as available textual corpora grow in size.

  PublisherDOI

• Methods for the Study of Management Ideas

  2019-03-28 · 10 citations

  reference-entryOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter surveys methodologies employed in the study of management ideas. It emphasizes the field’s rich variety of data collection, measurement, and inferential strategies. To map this landscape, the authors group studies by the number of cases they examine, from large N event history analyses based on archival data to ethnographies of a single organization. They give particular attention to bibliometrics and discourse analysis because these methods grapple with the interpretive and communicative processes that are central to management ideas and because techniques for capturing and analysing text are currently being revolutionized across the social sciences.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• New Directions for Research on Management Ideas

  2019-03-28 · 1 citations

  reference-entrySenior author

  This short chapter draws together selected insights and views from the various contributions to the handbook in order to consider avenues for further research into management ideas. In particular, the need to make diverse empirical, theoretical, disciplinary, methodological, and conceptual linkages is outlined. Also, emergent themes are identified which include the familiar and important concerns with identifying the impact of management ideas. In addition, debates on possible academic engagement with practitioners in the field along with calls to extend beyond conventional contexts and approaches are discussed. The conclusion reflects briefly on the possibility for extending the reach of studies related to management ideas.

  PublisherDOI

• Researching management ideas : an introduction

  Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) · 2019-03-01 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  This chapter introduces the research field of management ideas by identifying different approaches and literatures and discussing some of the reasons why it has expanded in recent years. The fragmentation of the field is outlined and linked to a diversity in terminology, theoretical perspectives and empirical objects. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the structure of the handbook and summaries of each of the individual contributions.

  Publisher

• From ‘just the facts’ to ‘more theory and methods, please’: The evolution of the research article in <i>Administrative Science Quarterly</i> , 1956–2008

  Social Studies of Science · 2017-03-21 · 17 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This paper analyzes the surface structure of research articles published in Administrative Science Quarterly between 1956 and 2008. The period is marked by a shift from essays that interweave theory, methods and results to experimental reports that separate them. There is dramatic growth in the size of theory, methods and discussion sections, accompanied by a shrinking results section. Bibliographic references and hypotheses expand in number and become concentrated in theory sections. Article structure varies primarily with historical time and also with research design (broadly, quantitative vs. qualitative) and the author's background. We link trends in article structure to the disciplinary development of organization studies and consider its distinctive trajectory relative to physical science.

  PublisherDOI

• Interorganizational Institutions

  2017-08-11 · 41 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Beth V. Yarbrough

  85 shared

• Peter F. Cowhey

  University of California, San Diego

  85 shared

• Janice Gross Stein

  University of Toronto

  85 shared

• Mark W. Zacher

  85 shared

• John Gerard Ruggie

  85 shared

• Oran R. Young

  85 shared

• Charles Lake

  GTx (United States)

  85 shared

• Duncan Snidal

  University of Oxford

  85 shared