Jerry Davis

Jerry Davis is the Gilbert and Ruth Whitaker Professor of Business Administration at the Ross School of Business and Professor of Sociology, The University of Michigan. Davis received his PhD from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. His books include Social Movements and Organization Theory (with Doug McAdam, W. Richard Scott, and Mayer N. Zald; Cambridge University Press, 2005), Organizations and Organizing: Rational, Natural, and Open System Perspectives (with W. Richard Scott; Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007), Managed By the Markets: How Finance Reshaped America (Oxford University Press, 2009), Changing your Company from the Inside Out: A Guide for Social Intrapreneurs (with Chris White, Harvard Business Review Press, 2015), and The Vanishing American Corporation: Navigating the Hazards of a New Economy (Berrett-Koehler, 2016). His latest book is Taming Corporate Power in the 21st Century (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Davis has published dozens of articles in management, sociology, and finance.

Davis is Faculty Director of Business+Impact and oversees the +Impact Studio, co-teaching its award-winning course on designing equitable enterprises for a just energy transition.

Davis’s research is broadly concerned with the corporation as a social and economic vehicle. Recent writings examine why corporations have so little insight into their global supply chains and the moral dilemmas this poses; why the social network of corporate elites has fallen apart; what organizational alternative exist to the shareholder-owned corporation; how national institutions shape corporate structures, and what this means for income inequality; how platform capitalism might be tamed to meet human needs other than profit; how management research might help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals; how new technologies have enabled worker political activism within the corporation; how social scientists can inform public opinion; and how information and communication technologies have enabled entirely new designs for economic organization.