The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life

About the Book

What counts? In work, as in other areas of life, it is not always clear what standards we are being judged by or how our worth is being determined. This can be disorienting and disconcerting. Because of this, many organizations devote considerable resources to limiting and clarifying the logics used for evaluating worth. But as David Stark argues, firms would often be better off, especially in managing change, if they allowed multiple logics of worth and did not necessarily discourage uncertainty. In fact, in many cases multiple orders of worth are unavoidable, so organizations and firms should learn to harness the benefits of such "heterarchy" rather than seeking to purge it. Stark makes this argument with ethnographic case studies of three companies attempting to cope with rapid change: a machine-tool company in late and postcommunist Hungary, a new-media startup in New York during and after the collapse of the Internet bubble, and a Wall Street investment bank whose trading room was destroyed on 9/11. In each case, the friction of competing criteria of worth promoted an organizational reflexivity that made it easier for the company to change and deal with market uncertainty.Drawing on John Dewey's notion that "perplexing situations" provide opportunities for innovative inquiry, Stark argues that the dissonance of diverse principles can lead to discovery.

Table of Contents:
Preface xi Chapter 1: Heterarchy: The Organization of Dissonance 1 Searching Questions 1 For a Sociology of Worth 6 Entrepreneurship at the Overlap 13 Heterarchy 19 A Metaphor for Organization in the Twenty-first Century 27 Worth in Contentious Situations 31 Chapter 2: Work, Worth, and Justice in a Socialist Factory 35 The Partnership as Proof 36 Distributive Justice inside the Partnership 52 Maneuvering across Economies 64 Epilogue 75 Chapter 3: Creative Friction in a New-Media Start-Up 81 An Ecology of Value 84 The Firm and the Project Form 91 Distributing Intelligence 97 Organizing Dissonance 102 Discursive Pragmatism and Bountiful Friction 108 Epilogue 111 Chapter 4: The Cognitive Ecology of an Arbitrage Trading Room 118 Studying Quantitative Finance 120 Arbitrage, or Quantitative Finance in the Search for Qualities 126 The Trading Room as a Space for Associations 130 The Trading Room as an Ecology 135 The Trading Room as a Laboratory 142 The Pursuit of New Properties 151 Epilogue 153 Chapter 5: From Field Research to the Field of Research 163 From Classification to Search 166 From Diversity of Organizations to the Organization of Diversity 175 From Unreflective Taken-for-Granteds to Reflexive Cognition 183 From Shared Understandings to Coordination through Misunderstanding 190 From Single Ethnographies to the Broader Sites of Situations 195 Reprise 204 Acknowledgments 213 Bibliography 217 Index 239

About the Author :

David Stark is the Arthur Lehman Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Columbia University, where he chairs the Department of Sociology and directs the Center on Organizational Innovation. He is the coauthor of Postsocialist Pathways.

Review :
"The Sense of Dissonance is an important and refreshing contribution to both economic sociology and organizational sociology, introducing a wealth of new concepts, ideas, and lines of thinking."--Olav Velthuis, American Journal of Sociology "Stark's ideas about the value of play, ambiguity, and uncertainty are particularly provocative and far-reaching."--Brooke Harrington, Contexts "[S]mart and ambitious... [This book] constitutes an important contribution to the most cutting-edge debates of contemporary economic sociology and organization theory."--Pierre Francois, European Economic Sociology Newsletter "Stark gave us a book both theoretically very deep, pleasant to read, and rich in empirical details."--Filippo Barbera, Sociologica "The Sense of Dissonance is a great book, and I recommend it warmly... Like most great achievements, Stark's book opens up more questions than it answers and leaves its readers with important puzzles."--Petter Holm, Administrative Science Quarterly