What counts? 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. This can be disorienting and disconcerting. Because of this, many organizations devote considerable resources to limiting and clarifying the logics used for evaluating worth. But as David Stark argues, firms would often be better off, especially in managing change, if they allowed multiple logics of worth and did not necessarily discourage uncertainty. In fact, in many cases multiple orders of worth are unavoidable, so organizations and firms should learn to harness the benefits of such "heterarchy" rather than seeking to purge it. Stark makes this argument with ethnographic case studies of three companies attempting to cope with rapid change: a machine-tool company in late and postcommunist Hungary, a new-media startup in New York during and after the collapse of the Internet bubble, and a Wall Street investment bank whose trading room was destroyed on 9/11. In each case, the friction of competing criteria of worth promoted an organizational reflexivity that made it easier for the company to change and deal with market uncertainty. Drawing on John Dewey's notion that "perplexing situations" provide opportunities for innovative inquiry, Stark 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