Josh Whitford’s interests include economic and organizational sociology, comparative political economy, economic geography and pragmatist social theory. His research focuses on regulation at the intersection of the public and private. He has written extensively on the social, political and institutional implications of productive decentralization (outsourcing) in manufacturing industries in both the United States and Europe, including especially of the kinds of “network failures” endemic to those production regimes. Whitford joined the Columbia Sociology faculty as an Assistant Professor in 2004 after a year at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, and is also a faculty affiliate at the Center on Organizational Innovation. In February 2007, he was named an Industry Studies Fellow by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for his research on industrial policy. Whitford is the author of The New Old Economy: Networks, Institutions and the Organizational Transformation of American Manufacturing(Oxford University Press 2005) and has written numerous articles.
