Doug Guthrie

Guthrie was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1969, where he attended Franklin Regional and Taylor Allderdice High Schools. He received his AB Degree in East Asian Languages and Civilizations (concentration in Chinese literature) from the University of Chicago in 1992. During his time at Chicago, he left school for a year to study Mandarin in Taipei, Taiwan. Immediately following graduation from Chicago, he went on to study organizational and economic sociology at the University of California Berkeley under Neil Fligstein and Thomas Gold. A Social Science Research Council Grant allowed him to study in Berkeley’s Economics Department and then to go on to conduct his dissertation research in Shanghai. There he conducted a study of 81 factories in industrial Shanghai. His dissertation was awarded the American Sociological Association’s annual award for the best dissertation in the discipline (calendar year 1997) and eventually formed the basis for the book Dragon in a Three Piece Suit: The Emergence of Capitalism in China (Princeton 1999).

Guthrie’s first academic appointment began at New York University’s Department of Sociology in 1997. Upon receiving tenure in 2000, Guthrie embarked on a string of other, short-term appointments to explore different ways to engage the business community more directly. From 1999-2003 Guthrie was director of the Business Institutions Initiative and the Program on the Corporation as a Social Institution at the Social Science Research Council. In building this program, Guthrie received grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Ford Foundation to support research and field development in the areas of economic sociology, study of the corporation as a social institution, and corporate social responsibility. From 2001-06, while still on the faculty at NYU, he served as a visiting professor at Columbia Business School, Stanford Business School, the Goizueta Business School at Emory, INSEAD, and Harvard Business School.

In 2006, Doug Guthrie returned to the NYU Stern School of Business to take the position of professor of management (with a joint appointment as professor of sociology on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences). He taught in courses such as Leading Organizations, the Leadership Training for High Potentials Open Enrollment program, and Strategic Investment in China. He also took up the post as director of executive education at Stern. In 2008, Guthrie began his relationship with the Berlin School of Creative Leadership, an Executive MBA school for executives in the creative industries, where he served as executive academic director. In the Summer of 2010, he was named Dean of the George Washington University School of Business. He was ousted from Deanship and also stripped of his university position as vice president for China operations in August 2013. In an e-mail to faculty, Provost Steven Lerman said that “fundamental differences about financial and operational performance were significant enough to warrant a change in leadership.” University spokesperson Candace Smith told the university’s student newspaper, the GW Hatchet, that “issues were discovered” when the university closed out the fiscal 2013 books, but that the business school is financially healthy. “The administration and Doug Guthrie have been unable to reach a common understanding of how the business school should operate in the future,” Smith said.[1] Guthrie remained at GWSB as a Professor of Management and International Business until June 2014.

In February 2014, Guthrie began working with Apple Inc.. He joined the company full-time as a Senior Director and member of the Apple University Faculty in February 2015. From 2015-19, he moved to Shanghai and worked with the Apple University team on organizational/talent/leadership development, focusing on China/APAC. In the Fall or 2019, he joined the Thunderbird School of Global Management.

• Politics and Partnerships: The Transformation of the Nonprofit Sector in the Era of the Declining Welfare State. Co-edited with Elisabeth S. Clemens (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
• China and Globalization: The Social, Economic, and Political Transformation of Chinese Society, Third Edition. (New York: Routledge, 2012).
• China and Globalization: The Social, Economic, and Political Transformation of Chinese Society, Revised Edition. (New York: Routledge, 2009).
• China and Globalization: The Social, Economic, and Political Transformation of Chinese Society [First Edition]. (New York: Routledge, 2006).
• Social Connections in China: Institutions, Culture, and the Changing Nature of Guanxi. Co-edited with Thomas Gold and David Wank (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
• Dragon in a Three-Piece Suit: The Emergence of Capitalism in China. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).

• “Inefficient Deregulation and the Global Economic Crisis: The United States and China Compared.” (Special Edition: Markets on Trial: The Economic Sociology of the US Financial Crisis, Edited by Michael Loundsbury and Paul M. Hirsch.) Research in the Sociology of Organizations 30B: 283-312. (With David Slocum, 2010)
• “Work and Productivity in Reform-Era China.” Research in the Sociology of Work 19: 35-73. (With Zhixing Xiao, and Junmin Wang, 2009)
• “Social Enterprise and Social Entrepreneurship: Institutional Innovation and Social Change.” European Management Review: 1-13. (With Rodolphe Durand 2008)
• “Corporate Investment, Social Innovation, and Community Change: The Local Political Economy of Low-Income Housing Development.” City and Community 7(2): 113-40. (With Michael McQuarrie, 2008)
• “Giving to Local Schools: Corporate Philanthropy and the Receding Welfare State.” Social Science Research 974: 1-18. (With Richard Arum, Josipa Roksa, and Sarah Damaske, 2007)
• “Privatization and the Social Contract: Corporate Welfare and Low-Income Housing in the United States since 1986.” Research in Political Sociology 14: 15-51. (With Michael McQuarrie, 2005)
• “Organizational Learning and Productivity: State Structure and Foreign Investment in the Rise of the Chinese Corporation.” Management and Organization Review 1(2): 165-95. (2005)
• “An Accidental Good: How Savvy Social Entrepreneurs Seized on a Tax Loophole to Raise Billions of Corporate Dollars for Affordable Housing.” Stanford Social Innovation Review (Fall): 34-44. (2004)
• “The Quiet Revolution: The Emergence of Capitalism in China,” Harvard International Review 25(2): 48-53. (2003)
• “The Transformation of Labor Relations in China’s Emerging Market Economy.” Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 19: 137-68. (2002)
• “Understanding China’s Transition to Capitalism: The Contributions of Victor Nee and Andrew Walder.” Sociological Forum 15(4): 725-47. (2000)
• “The State, Courts, and Equal Opportunities for Female CEOs in U.S. Organizations: Specifying Institutional Mechanisms.” Social Forces 78(2): 511-42. (With Louise Roth 1999)
• “The State, Courts, and Maternity Leave Policies in U.S. Organizations: Specifying Institutional Mechanisms.” American Sociological Review 64(1): 41-63. (With Louise Roth 1999)
• “The Declining Significance of Guanxi in China’s Economic Transition.” The China Quarterly 154: 31-62. (1998)
• “Between Markets and Politics: Organizational Responses to Reform in China.” American Journal of Sociology 102: 1258-1303. (1997)

• Doug Guthrie's personal blog at GWU (archived)