SCANCOR at the Weatherhead Center, launched in the fall of 2016, explores the role of formal organizations, including corporations, non-governmental organizations, and professional associations, in the creation of international social, environmental, economic, and political conventions. The project is host to a visiting scholars program at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs that welcomes faculty who use the tools of organizational science to work on international topics.

This project is a partnership between Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Scandinavian Consortium for Organizational Research (SCANCOR), a membership-supported nonprofit sponsored by leading universities and business schools in Scandinavia.

SCANCOR at the Weatherhead Center brings visitors to Harvard for up to one year to work on international projects based in organizational research.  The partnership provides visitors with office space, basic administrative services, and a formal affiliation. Visitors are supported by their own sabbatical funds, research grants, and leave fellowships.

While at Harvard, visitors connect with scholars from across the campus, and around Boston, through the Economic Sociology Seminar, and workshops organized by the Weatherhead Center, Sociology, Government, the Center for European Studies, the Kennedy School, the Business School, and MIT’s Sloan School.

The partnership between SCANCOR and the Weatherhead Center is intended to bring an organizational lens to the study of international norms and conventions. We expect many visitors to undertake truly global projects using the tools of organizational social science. Projects may include the study of:

• the role of corporations in producing new business norms in areas such as civil rights and the environment
• how new public policy ideas spread through multinationals
• how social movements change corporate behavior around the world
• how states, elections, international institutions, and social movements affect firms and are affected by them
• the creation of soft law between corporations, NGOs, INGOs, and IGOs
• how NGOs and corporations shape national regulations and political systems
• how corporate management norms shape public-sector management practices

In addition to providing space and resources to visitors, the project sponsors speakers and conferences on topics of interest to both project visitors and the Weatherhead Center’s Harvard affiliates.

The director of SCANCOR at the Weatherhead Center is Frank Dobbin, Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences and chair of the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. Professor Dobbin is on leave for the 2024–2025 academic year, and serving as acting director this year is Jocelyn Viterna, professor of sociology and chair of the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Diana Ocampo Belloso is the project coordinator.