James Baron
James Baron is the William S. Beinecke Professor of Management, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Sociology. Professor Baron’s research interests include human resources; organizational design and behavior; social stratification and inequality; work, labor markets, and careers; economic sociology; and entrepreneurial companies. Before coming to SOM in 2006, he taught at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business from 1982–2006. At Stanford, he taught the MBA core course, Human Resource Management. He was co-director of the Stanford Project on Emerging Companies (SPEC), a large-scale longitudinal study of the organizational design, human resource management practices, and financial and non-financial performance measures of entrepreneurial firms in Silicon Valley. Papers based on the project appeared in leading disciplinary journals, and an overview of the project in California Management Review won the 2003 Accenture Award for making “the most important contribution to improving the practice of management.”
He is the author, with Stanford economist David M. Kreps, of a textbook, Strategic Human Resources: Frameworks for General Managers (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.). Baron is also a regular contributor to leading sociology and organization journals, such as the American Sociological Review and Administrative Science Quarterly. His research has also been published in influential journals in economics and social psychology.
Recent Publications
Books
- Baron, James N. (with D. M. Kreps) (1999). Strategic Human Resources: Frameworks for General Managers. John Wiley & Sons.
- Baron, James N. (edited with D. B. Grusky and D. J. Treiman) (1996). Social Differentiation and Inequality: Essays in Honor of John Pock. Westview Press.
Chapters
- Baron, James N. (with M. T. Hannan) (2005). “The Economic Sociology of Organizational Entrepreneurship: Lessons from the Stanford Project on Emerging Companies,” in V. Nee and R. Swedberg (eds.), The Economic Sociology of Capitalism, pp. 168-203. Princeton University Press.
- Baron, James N. (with M. T. Hannan, Greta Hsu and Ö. Koçak) (2002). “Gender and the Organization-Building Process in Young, High-Tech Firms,” in M. F. Guillén, R. Collins, P. England, and M. Meyer (eds.), The New Economic Sociology: Developments in an Emerging Field, Chapter 10. Russell Sage Foundation.
Articles
- Baron, James N. (2004). “Employing Identities in Organizational Ecology,” Industrial and Corporate Change, 13: 3-32.
- Baron, James N. (with M. T. Hannan) (2002). “Organizational Blueprints for Success in High-Tech Start-Ups: Lessons from the Stanford Project on Emerging Companies,” California Management Review, 44: 8-36.
- Baron, James N. (with M. T. Hannan and M. D. Burton) (2001). “Labor Pains: Organizational Change and Employee Turnover in Young, High-Tech Firms,” American Journal of Sociology, 106: 960-1012.
- Baron, James N. (with W. P. Barnett and T. Stuart) (2000). “Avenues of Attainment: Occupational Demography and Organizational Careers in the California Civil Service,” American Journal of Sociology, 106: 88-144.