Bill Carroll, born in Washington D.C., USA, in 1952. Ph.D. from York University. Professor of Sociology at the University of Victoria.
Fellow (1 September 2000 – 30 June 2001)
At the centre of my work at NIAS has been the longitudinal, cross-national study of networks of corporate power in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Since arriving at NIAS late last August, I have written six papers in the field of corporate power structure, two of them co-authored with other members of the corporate networks group. At present, we are writing a paper that systematically compares four national corporate networks and their changing structures in the late twentieth century. My four single-authored papers now form part of a book manuscript entitled “Corporate Power in a Globalising World: A Study in Elite Social Organization”. This manuscript would not exist except for the stimulating and supportive context I have found at NIAS. My months at NIAS have also enabled me to continue my work in the fields of political economy and the critical sociology of social movements. I have revised four papers which are now scheduled for publication, have written three collaborative articles ‘from scratch’ and have put together a co-edited collection of articles from the “International Colloquium on Globalisation, Societies and Cultures”, held last year at the University of Alberta. The April NIAS conference on “Corporate Governance in a Globalising World”, which I organised and Malcolm Alexander convened and chaired, was quite successful in spurring a high-level discussion in the intersecting fields of economic sociology, international political economy, and organisational analysis. We are now in the process of creating a book that will feature some of the very best papers from the conference but will have at its heart the comparative analysis of corporate networks, which has been the focal point for our subgroup within the larger theme group on “Globalisation and Organisational Transformation”. Finally, my year at NIAS has coincided with my taking up the position of lead editor of the Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, the official journal of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association. This responsibility has claimed a significant share of my time, but the excellent facilities at NIAS have eased the burden of editorial work, enabling me to launch a major new initiative to move the CRSA fully on-line in the next two years.