People

Frank Dobbin

Codirector, SCANCOR at the Weatherhead Center; Faculty Associate. Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of Sociology, Harvard University.

Frank Dobbin's evidence-based research on corporate diversity programs (with Alexandra Kalev) shows that mentoring programs, diversity taskforces, and special recruitment programs have helped to promote diversity by engaging managers, while diversity training and diversity performance evaluations have thwarted progress by stigmatizing managers. These findings have been covered by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Le Monde, CNN, and National Public Radio. Dobbin has published numerous books studying the social construction of economic rationality, including Forging Industrial Policy: United States, Britain, and France in the Railway Age (1994) and The Global Diffusion of Markets and Democracy (2008). Recent research examines rise of the shareholder value model of corporate management.

Website

530 William James Hall
33 Kirkland Street
Cambridge, MA 02138

frank_dobbin@harvard.edu

Catherine Nehring

Coordinator, STAR Lab; Coordinator, SCANCOR at the Weatherhead Center; Assistant to Professor Michael J. Hiscox.

Catherine Nehring is the Coordinator of SCANCOR at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. She has been with SCANCOR since before the grand opening at Harvard in 2016.

Catherine has been Professor Michael J. Hiscox's Faculty Assistant since 2012 and the Coordinator of STAR Lab since 2013. She has been at Harvard University for ten years, and she worked at the Graduate School of Social Work at Boston College for four years prior to that. She completed her Bachelor's degree in Liberal Arts at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.

cnehring@wcfia.harvard.edu

Elin Lerum Boasson

Former Visiting Scholar, SCANCOR at the Weatherhead Center (fall 2018-spring 2019). Associate Professor, University of Oslo, Norway.

Elin Lerum Boasson is an associate professor and deputy head of the Political Science Department at the University of Oslo, and a senior researcher at CICERO Center for International Climate Research. She has published extensively on national and EU climate and energy policies; exploring the role of policy entrepreneurship, business influence and political steering. She applies sociological institutional theories as well as historical institutionalism and public policy theories. Boasson teaches political science master courses on climate policy, public policy theory and EU studies. Methodologically, Boasson is specialized in comparative, qualitative case studies and process tracing. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley and the Freie University, Berlin. Boasson is part of the leadership group of the COST Action Innovations in Climate Governance: Sources, Patterns and Effects. Boasson is a lead author in the upcoming Sixth Assessment report cycle of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, working group III Mitigation. During her stay at SCANCOR at the Weatherhead Center in the academic year 2018-2019, Boasson primarily worked on publications relating to two the comparative climate policy project: 'Revising the National Renewables Policy Mix: The role of state aid and other key EU policies (REMIX)’. In addition to several articles, this work has resulted in the open access book Comparative Renewables Policy – Political, Organizational and European Fields.

e.l.boasson@stv.uio.no

Anne Kovalainen

Former Visiting Scholar, SCANCOR at the Weatherhead Center (fall 2018). Professor of Business, University of Turku, Finland.

Anne Kovalainen is an economic sociologist. She works as Professor in entrepreneurship, with special interest in multidisciplinary analyses of society and economic life. She has worked as invited faculty fellow at Stanford University School of Sciences and Humanities, the University of Massachusetts, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK and University of Technology Sydney, Australia. Anne Kovalainen led an international research consortium SWiPE (www.smartworkresearch.fi), which analysed the contemporary forms of work in platform economy, rise of the entrepreneurial university, professionalism and entrepreneurship, and changes in work in the new platform economy. She is currently leading a research project ReGrow, which addresses the complexity of innovation work in the COVID-19 era. Her research has covered topics of gender and economy, welfare society, entrepreneurship, public sector, and qualitative research methods and innovations. Anne Kovalainen is an invited member of both the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, and the Finnish Society of Sciences Letters. Among her latest publications are Poutanen, S. & Kovalainen, A. (2017) Gender and Innovation in the New Economy - Women, Identity, and Creative Work by Palgrave Macmillan, and two qualitative research method books by SAGE (2016, 2008). At SCANCOR at the Weatherhead Center Anne mainly worked on a monograph with Senior Research Fellow Poutanen (Routledge 2019) and an edited volume with several authors (Routledge 2019).

anne.kovalainen@utu.fi

Maarit Laihonen

Former Visiting Scholar, SCANCOR at the Weatherhead Center (spring 2018). Postdoctoral Researcher, School of Business, Aalto University, Finland.

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Aalto University School of Business in the discipline of Philosophy, in the Department of Management Studies. In my doctoral thesis, I studied the politics of nuclear energy in Finland. I have also written about the politics of sustainable development, university activism, and artistic knowledge creation in the context of contemporary political debates. My current research projects include ethnography of unorthodox organizations, political bioeconomy strategies, and the relation of human-forest relationships and forest policies.

maarit.laihonen@aalto.fi

Christina Öberg

Former Visiting Scholar, SCANCOR at the Weatherhead Center (fall 2018). Chair and Professor in Marketing, School of Business, Örebro University, Sweden.

Christina Öberg is Professor and Chair in Marketing at Örebro University and also associated with the Ratio Institute, the University of Exeter, and Leeds University. She has a background from Linköping University and Lund University, and has also been a visiting scholar at Stanford University, the University of Bath, and Manchester University. Her research interests concern mergers and acquisitions, customer relationships, innovations and new ways to pursue business, including the sharing economy and the effects of additive manufacturing. Current projects inlude the spread of the sharing economy; business models in 3D printing; and newly established firms' development of business networks. Internationalisation becomes an integrated part in the ‘borderless’ creation of business, platforms erasing geographical distances, but also the counter trend of local production and consumption, which may effectively redefine distance, where focus rather becomes on individual self-employed parties in borderless structures. Christina's research is published in such journals as the Journal of Business Research, Industrial Marketing Management, International Marketing Review, the European Journal of Marketing, and Production Planning & Control.

christina.j.e.oberg@gmail.com

Seppo Poutanen

Former Visiting Scholar, SCANCOR at the Weatherhead Center (fall 2018). Senior Research Fellow and Docent, University of Turku, Finland.

Seppo Poutanen is Senior Research Fellow and Docent of sociology at the School of Economics at the University of Turku, Finland. Seppo is trained both in philosophy and sociology, and his areas of expertise include metaethics, social epistemology, social theory, sociology of science and technology, gender studies, methodology of social sciences, and economic sociology. Seppo has acted as Visiting Professor and Visiting Scholar at several universities (e.g. Stanford University, London School of Economics, University of Essex, UTS Business School Sydney). Seppo’s current research projects, associated mainly with the international research project SWiPE (www.smartworkresearch.fi), focus on the rise of entrepreneurial university, professionalism and entrepreneurship, and work and education in the new platform economy. He has published his research in Social Epistemology, Critical Public Health, Journal of Critical Realism, Sociological Research Online, International Journal of Gender and Entrepreneurship and in several edited volumes. Seppo’s latest publications include Poutanen, S., Kovalainen, A. & Rouvinen, P. (eds.) (2020) Digital Work and the Platform Economy: Understanding Tasks, Skills and Capabilities in the New Era. New York & Abingdon: Routledge, and Poutanen, S. & Kovalainen, A. (2017) Gender and Innovation in the New Economy - Women, Identity, and Creative Work. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. At SCANCOR at the Weatherhead Center, Seppo mainly worked on a monograph with Professor Kovalainen (Routledge 2021) and the previously mentioned edited volume with several authors (Routledge 2020).

seppo.poutanen@utu.fi

Torkel Strömsten

Former Visiting Scholar, SCANCOR at the Weatherhead Center (fall 2018-spring 2019). Associate Professor, Stockholm School of Economics; Professor, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden.

torkel.stromsten@hhs.se

Jørgen Wettestad

Former Visiting Scholar, SCANCOR at the Weatherhead Center (fall 2018-spring 2019). Research Professor, The Fridtjof Nansen Institute, Norway.

Jørgen Wettestad is a Research Professor at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Oslo, Norway. He has published several books and numerous articles on international and EU environmental policy, with particular attention to emissions trading. His most recent books are Comparative Renewables Policy, Forthcoming, Routledge (edited with Elin Lerum Boasson and Merethe Dotterud Leiren); The Evolution of Carbon Markets: Design and Diffusion Routledge 2018 (edited with Lars H. Gulbrandsen), Rescuing EU Emissions Trading: The Climate Policy Flagship Palgrave 2016 (with Torbjørg Jevnaker), and EU Climate Policy: Industry, Policy Interaction and External Environment Ashgate 2013 (with Elin L. Boasson). Since 2019 he has been member of the Editorial Board for the Politics and Governance Journal. He was a visiting scholar at IIASA, Austria, and the Institute for International Studies, Berkeley, CA. He has also led and participated in several EU funded projects, participated in numerous international research projects, and been Programme Director at the FNI for a long period. Wettestad serves regularly as peer reviewer for international journals and national research councils, and has been editorial board member of the journal Climate Policy since 2001. He will participate as Lead Author in WG III in IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report.

jorgen.wettestad@fni.no