Neil Fligstein
Professor

Department of Sociology
University of California
Berkeley, California 94720

(510) 642-6567 (510) 642-4766 (messages)
Fax: 510-642-0659

Email: fligst@berkeley.edu

email: fligst@berkeley.edu

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Neil Fligstein is the Class of 1939 Chancellor's Professor. He is also the Director of the Center for Culture, Organization, and Politics at the Institute of Industrial Relations. His main research interests lie in the fields of economic sociology, organizational theory, political sociology, and the sociology of work. He has been interested in developing and using a sociological view of how new social institutions emerge, remain stable, and are transformed to study a wide variety of seemingly disparate phenomena including the history of the large American corporation and the construction of a European legal and political system. He has used this framework to create a more general view of how markets and states are mutually constitutive and applied this framework to trying to make sense of how global markets work. He is currently working on three projects.

He has just completed a book on Europe entitled Euroclash: The EU, European Identity, and the Future of Europe (Oxford University Press, 2008). The central theme of the book is to document how European integration in the past 20 years has created a partial integration of European societies along political, economic, but most importantly social lines. Europe has mostly brought managers, professionals, and other highly educated people into contact. It is this 10-15% or so of the population that is most European. But the remaining population is mostly wedded to conceptions of self that are distinctly national. This explains how the European project is limited. Without a massive change in the way that most people view themselves, it is difficult to see how more political integration will occur.

His second project is to explicate the framework to understand how institutions are formed. He is co-authoring a book with Doug McAdam that is titled A Political-Cultural Approach to the Problem of Strategic Action. This book is a theoretical work that tries to combine insights from institutional theory, social movements theory, and organizational theory to create a general set of understandings of how new social spaces are constructed, maintained, and transformed. At the core of the book, is a distinctly sociological view of social action, one that is based on symbolic interactionism. Professors Fligstein and McAdam think that such a theory can prove very useful to understand strategic action by individuals and groups across a wide variety of social settings, including the organization of markets, politics of all kinds, and social movements. 

Finally, Professor Fligstein has extensively studied how American corporations re-organized themselves during the 1980s and 1990s in order to "maximize shareholder value". He is currently working on understanding how the mergers and layoffs used to achieve this end effected the organization of American industries and ultimately working conditions. He has collected a data set on American industries over time. He is exploring if and how changes in industries precipitated by mergers, layoffs, and computerization effected the provision of health and pension benefits, hours of work, and income inequality.      

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