David Stark is the Arnold A. Saltzman Professor of Sociology and International Affairs and the chair of the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. A member of the external faculty of the Sante Fe Institute, he studies organizational innovation. Stark is currently researching new organizational forms among firms in Manhattan's Silicon Alley. In postsocialist Eastern Europe, he studied how inter-firm networks facilitated and impeded economic restructuring.

His recent publications include Ambiguous Assets for Uncertain Environments: Heterarchy in Postsocialist Firms, forthcoming in a volume from Princeton University Press, and Postsocialist Portfolios: Network Strategies in the Shadow of the State. His book Postsocialist Pathways: Transforming Politics and Property in Eastern Europe, with Laszlo Bruszt, is a comparative study of the opportunities and dilemmas posed by the simultaneous extension of property rights and citizenship rights. With Gernot Grabher, he co-edited Restructuring Networks in Postsocialism: Legacies, Linkages, and Localities.

Stark has been a visiting fellow at the Santa Fe Institute; the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, California; the Institute for Advanced Study/Collegium Budapest; the Icole des Hautes Itudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the Center for the Social Sciences in Berlin and the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He served as chair of the Section on Comparative-Historical Sociology of the American Sociological Association for the 1998-9 term.