David Strang

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

• Peer Review and Scholarly Originality

  Science Technology & Human Values · 2016-06-30 · 60 citations

  articleSenior author

  We examine the criticisms and subsequent changes that arise in the course of peer review. Fifty-two scholars who had recently published in Administrative Science Quarterly were surveyed regarding their peer review experience and how their article changed from initial journal submission to eventual publication. Papers that challenged theoretical perspectives faced distinctively high levels of criticism and change, particularly with attention to methodology, while those that offered a new perspect…

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• Interorganizational Institutions

  2017-08-11 · 41 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding
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• Revising as Reframing

  Sociological Theory · 2015-03-01 · 39 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Peer review guides the intensive reworking of research reports, a key mechanism in the construction of social scientific knowledge and one that gives substantial creative agency to journal editors and reviewers. We conceptualize this process in terms of two types of challenges: evidentiary challenges that question a study’s methodology and interpretive challenges that question a study’s theoretical framing. A survey of authors recently published in Administrative Science Quarterly finds that the…

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• Coevolution in Management Fashion: An Agent-Based Model of Consultant-Driven Innovation

  American Journal of Sociology · 2014-07-01 · 33 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The rise of management consultancy has been accompanied by increasingly marked faddish cycles in management techniques, but the mechanisms that underlie this relationship are not well understood. The authors develop a simple agent-based framework that models innovation adoption and abandonment on both the supply and demand sides. In opposition to conceptions of consultants as rhetorical wizards who engineer waves of management fashion, firms and consultants are treated as boundedly rational acto…

  PublisherDOI

• 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 st…

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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

Similar researchers at Cornell University

• Matt Hallh-80
• Barum Parkh-62
• Bryan L. Sykesh-59