In work, as in other areas of life, it is not always clear what standards we are being judged by or how our worth is being determined. Drawing on the notion that "perplexing situations" provide opportunities for innovative inquiry, this title argues that the dissonance of diverse principles can lead to discovery.

Preface xi Chapter 1: Heterarchy: The Organization of Dissonance 1 Searching Questions 1 For a Sociology of Worth 6 Entrepreneurship at the Overlap 13 Heterarchy 19 A Metaphor for Organization in the Twenty-first Century 27 Worth in Contentious Situations 31 Chapter 2: Work, Worth, and Justice in a Socialist Factory 35 The Partnership as Proof 36 Distributive Justice inside the Partnership 52 Maneuvering across Economies 64 Epilogue 75 Chapter 3: Creative Friction in a New-Media Start-Up 81 An Ecology of Value 84 The Firm and the Project Form 91 Distributing Intelligence 97 Organizing Dissonance 102 Discursive Pragmatism and Bountiful Friction 108 Epilogue 111 Chapter 4: The Cognitive Ecology of an Arbitrage Trading Room 118 Studying Quantitative Finance 120 Arbitrage, or Quantitative Finance in the Search for Qualities 126 The Trading Room as a Space for Associations 130 The Trading Room as an Ecology 135 The Trading Room as a Laboratory 142 The Pursuit of New Properties 151 Epilogue 153 Chapter 5: From Field Research to the Field of Research 163 From Classification to Search 166 From Diversity of Organizations to the Organization of Diversity 175 From Unreflective Taken-for-Granteds to Reflexive Cognition 183 From Shared Understandings to Coordination through Misunderstanding 190 From Single Ethnographies to the Broader Sites of Situations 195 Reprise 204 Acknowledgments 213 Bibliography 217 Index 239

"In this book, Stark takes the reader on a fascinating journey of discovery, from the socialist factories of Eastern Europe to the new media companies and financial trading floors of Manhattan. The Sense of Dissonance is equally a book about how organizations really work and how we should think about the problem of organization—a great accomplishment."—Duncan Watts, author of Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age

"For many readers, the most powerful demonstration of the ever-present duality of value and values will be Stark's field research on the impact of the 9/11 tragedy on one financial firm that lost hundreds of employees that day. Stark recounts the process by which the firm rebuilt its business through the painful and cathartic narratives of those lost and of those who survived. A moving analysis that redresses Dewey's paradox of the emotive and evaluative."—Bruce Kogut, Columbia Business School

"At a time when global crises have shattered standard accounts of economic life, David Stark's The Sense of Dissonance offers powerful alternative explanations of economic activity along with specific prescriptions for twenty-first-century economic survival. Taking us into the varied worlds of Hungarian toolmakers, Manhattan Silicon Alley new media workers, and Wall Street arbitrage traders, Stark deftly grounds theoretical insights with marvelous ethnographic accounts. This book instructs and inspires."—Viviana A. Zelizer, author of The Purchase of Intimacy

"This wonderful, lively, and personal book is packed with insights for economic sociology and general sociological theory. A mature statement by a leading sociologist, it is also a delight to read."—Walter W. Powell, Stanford University

"This is an important book about an important topic—and it has a strong narrative and impressive, engaging ethnography."—Michèle Lamont, Harvard University