Michael Hannan investigates change in the world of organizations. This work involves both formal theoretical treatments of organizational change and empirical studies of the emergence, change, and dissolution of categories and populations of organizations. His current theoretical research involves applications of dynamic and modal logics to organization theory, exploration of the emergence of organizational categories, and typecasting processes. His current empirical research investigates the dynamics of categories in the wine and restaurant industries.

Michael Hannan is the Stratacom Professor of Management in the Graduate School of Business and Professor of Sociology in the School of Humanities and Sciences.

He received his PhD in sociology from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1970. He came to Stanford as Assistant Professor of Sociology in 1969, moved to Cornell in 1984 where he was the Scarborough Professor of Social Sciences, and returned to Stanford in 1991.

His major research interests include categories in markets, organizational ecology, sociological methodology, and formal sociological theory. His current theoretical research applies dynamic logics to organization theory. His current empirical research investigates the emergence of organizational categories and the implications of category membership for organizational identity in several domains, including winemaking in the Italian regions of Piedmont and Tuscany as well as Alsace in France.

Professor Hannan has published more than 100 articles in scholarly journals. Two of his books have received best book awards from the American Sociological Association. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences, the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study, and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, and he received a Guggenheim fellowship.