Stephen R. Barley a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Technology Management at the College of Engineering at the University of California Santa Barbara and a Professor Emeritus of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. He holds an AB. in English from the College of William and Mary, an M.Ed. from the Ohio State University, and a Ph.D. in Organization Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to coming to UCSB, Barley served for ten years on the faculty of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University and for twenty-two years at Stanford’s School of Engineering where he was the Richard Weiland Professor of Management Science and Engineering and the Co-founder and co-director of the Center for Work, Technology and Organization. He was editor of the Administrative Science Quarterly from 1993 to 1997 and the founding editor of the Stanford Social Innovation Review from 2002 to 2004. 

Barley has served on the editorial boards of the Academy of Management Discovery, the Academy of Management Annals, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Research in the Sociology of Work, Information and Organization, Engineering Studies and the Journal of Organizational Ethnography. He has been the recipient the Academy of Management's New Concept Award and was named Distinguished Scholar by the Academy of Management’s Organization and Management Theory Division in 2006, the Organization Communication and Information Systems Division in 2010 and the Critical Management Studies Division in 2010. Barley has been a fellow at Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and is a Fellow of the Academy of Management. In 2006 the Academy of Management Journal named Barley as the author of the largest number of “interesting” articles in the field of management studies. He was awarded the Everett C. Hughes award by the Careers Division of the Academy of Management in 2021 and the Conrad Arensberg Award by Lifetime Contribution to the Anthropology of Work by the American Anthropological Society in 2018.

Barley was a member of the Board of Senior Scholars of the National Center for the Educational Quality of the Workforce and co-chaired National Research Council and the National Academy of Science's committee on the changing occupational structure in the United States. The committee's report, The Changing Nature of Work, was published in 1999. He recently served on the National Research Council’s (NRC) committee on the Information Technology Research and Development Ecosystem and on the NRC’s Committee on Automation and the Workforce.

Barley has written over ninety articles on the impact of new technologies on work, the organization of technical work, and organizational culture. He and Julian Orr edited a volume on technical work entitled Between Craft and Science: Technical Work in the United States published in 1997 by the Cornell University Press. In collaboration with Gideon Kunda of Tel Aviv University, Barley authored Gurus, Hired Guns and Warm Bodies: Itinerant Experts in the Knowledge Economy, an ethnography of contingent work among engineers and software developers published by the Princeton University Press in 2004.  Oxford University published his most recent book, Work and Technological Change, in 2020.

Interests

• Technology's role in occupational and organizational change

• Science and innovation in industrial settings

• Organizational and occupational culture

• Corporate power

• Social network theory

• Macro-organizational behavior