Walter “Woody” Powell
Marc and Laura Andreessen Faculty Co-Director of Stanford’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society

Walter “Woody” Powell is Professor of Education and (by courtesy) Sociology, Organizational Behavior, Management Science and Engineering, and Communication. He is the Marc and Laura Andreessen Faculty Co-Director of Stanford’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. He has been a member of the board of directors of the Social Science Research Council since 2000, and was an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute from 1999 to 2013. He has been Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics, and Lewis A. Coser Visiting Professor at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin.

Powell works in the areas of organization theory, economic sociology, and the sociology of science. He is interested in the processes through which knowledge is transferred across organizations, and the role of networks in facilitating or hindering innovation, and institutions in codifying ideas. His current work focuses on the emergence of novel organizational forms. These ideas were developed in a recent book, The Emergence of Organizations and Markets, written with John Padgett, and published by Princeton University Press. The third edition of The Nonprofit Sector: A Research Handbook, co-edited with Patricia Bromley is forthcoming from Stanford University Press.

Mike Ananny
Associate Professor of Communication and Journalism, USC Annenberg

Mike Ananny is an Associate Professor of Communication and Journalism at USC Annenberg, where he researches the public ethics of communication systems, specifically intersections of journalism practice and technology design, the sociotechnical dynamics of networked news infrastructures and the power of algorithmic systems. He is also an Affiliated Faculty with USC’s Science, Technology and Society research cluster, and a 2018-19 Berggruen Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

Ananny has led several public-private learning and design partnerships with the BBC, University of Tampere, Amsterdam Computer Clubhouse, Loyalist College Canada, and The Ark Children’s Cultural Centre. He was principal investigator on European Union grant proposals and has licensed his custom software to Trinity College Dublin for classroom use. He has a background in new media and technology design, creating both technological toys for children’s language acquisition as well as large-scale, interactive public art installations in Dublin, Northern Ireland and Amsterdam for people to communicate publicly through SMS text messaging.

Nina Eliasoph
Professor of Sociology, USC Dornsife

Nina Eliasoph is interested in civic and political organizations in a diverse society, ranging from grassroots civic associations and activist groups, to nonprofits and NGOs. While always sure to analyze the “big” picture from all sorts of methodological approaches, she is especially interested in interpretive approaches that take the structures of ambiguity into account. Eliasoph has also taught and lectured abroad, and enjoys collaborating on cross-national ethnographic projects. Recently, she helped launch a new major called NGOs and Social Change.

Her sociological subfields include: political sociology and communication, cultural sociology, ethnography, sociolinguistics, social theory, emotions, organizations, and nonprofits/NGOs.

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Woody Powell co-edited The Nonprofit Sector: A Research Handbook, which is now in its third edition. The book includes chapters by USC faculty Mike Ananny and Nina Eliasoph. Ananny contributed “Advocating for What? The Nonprofit Press and Models of the Public,” and Eliasoph contributed “What Do Volunteers Do?”. To learn more about the book, visit the website here or purchase the book here.

This event is co-sponsored by the USC Center for Philanthropy and Public Policy and the Price School’s Department of Governance and Management.