Emily Erikson is professor of sociology and the school of management (by courtesy) and the Joseph C. Fox Academic Director of the Fox International Fellowship. She uses comparative historical and computational methods to study economic growth, institutional development, and social coordination in global contexts. Her recent book, Trade and Nation: How Companies and Politics Reshaped Economic Thought (Columbia University Press, 2021) argues that the rise of the company and merchant political marginalization encouraged the development of classical economic thought. She has received numerous book and article awards.

How do you use data science?

I use computational modeling, archival research, and data intensive methods to identify social processes that produce large-scale macro-social change, particularly focusing on economic development, institutional change, and democratization. Most recently I have been working on the relationship between network structure and complex social coordination tasks, such as the division of labor. I plan on developing this largely theoretical work further by applying it to empirical contexts using historical data. The goal here would be to better understand how complex social coordination problems have been solved by societies, how this relates to stratification, rank, inequality, and mobility, and organizational development and market specialization.

Some publications:

Emily Erikson and Hirokazu Shirado. 2021. “”Network Structure, Property, and the Division of Labor.”” American Sociological Review 86(1): 758-86.

Erikson, Emily. 2021. Trade and Nation: How Companies and Politics Reshaped Economic Thought. New York: Columbia University Press, Middle Range Series.

Erikson, Emily, ed. 2018. Events and Networks Symposium. Sociological Theory (with articles by Emily Erikson, Ron Breiger, Peter Bearman, and John Levi Martin). Vol 36, Issue 2, June, pp. 185-220.