Preeminent Organizational Behavior Scholar to Join Yale School of Management Faculty; Faculty Appointment in Marketing Announced

New Haven, Conn., April 13, 2006—Yale School of Management Dean Joel M. Podolny today announced that James N. Baron, currently the Walter Kenneth Kilpatrick Professor of Organizational Behavior and Human Resources at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, will join the faculty of the Yale School of Management effective July 1. Dean Podolny also announced that Joseph P. Simmons, a scholar from Princeton University, will join the faculty as assistant professor of marketing.

Commenting on Baron’s appointment, Podolny said, “Throughout his career, Jim Baron has demonstrated a commitment to the highest standards of research and teaching. Indeed, I can think of no organizational scholar who has sustained higher standards on both dimensions. I am delighted that he is coming to Yale. Not only does it constitute a major leap forward in the rebuilding of organizational behavior at SOM; it also contributes to and reinforces the School’s broader momentum around our curriculum reform efforts and the planning for a new campus.”

Other members of the Yale SOM faculty echoed Podolny’s sentiments. Jonathan S. Feinstein, a professor of economics, remarked, “Jim Baron is one of the outstanding scholars of organizations and human resources management of his generation. This is a truly spectacular hire, and takes Yale SOM on the road to building a top organizational behavior group, which will be vital for the School as we pursue our mission of training leaders for business and society.” Said Edward H. Kaplan, William N. and Marie A. Beach Professor of Management Sciences, “Jim Baron is acknowledged as one of the very top scholars in the field of organizational behavior; he also has a strong track record of collaborating with researchers outside his field. More so than at ‘siloed’ business schools where professors from different fields rarely interact, SOM is creating an interdisciplinary culture where faculty with different backgrounds and perspectives jointly teach, pursue research, and generally work together on managerial problems. In this light, Jim is an ideal addition to our faculty.”

Over an academic career spanning more than two decades, Baron’s wide-ranging research interests have included human resources; organizational design and behavior; social stratification and inequality; work, labor markets, and careers; economic sociology; and entrepreneurial companies. At Stanford, he has taught the MBA core course, “Human Resource Management,” since 1996. He was co-director of the Stanford Project on Emerging Companies (SPEC), a large-scale longitudinal study of the organizational design, human resource management practices, and financial and non-financial performance measures of entrepreneurial firms in Silicon Valley. The project exemplified the extent to which it is possible for scholarship to answer basic research questions while also having an impact on pedagogy and practice. Papers based on the project appeared in leading disciplinary journals, and an overview of the project in California Management Review won the 2003 Accenture Award for making “the most important contribution to improving the practice of management.”

He is the author, with Stanford economist David M. Kreps, of a textbook, Strategic Human Resources: Frameworks for General Managers (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.). Baron is also a regular contributor to leading sociology and organization journals, such as the American Sociological Review and Administrative Science Quarterly. The breadth of his interests and impact is also revealed by the fact that he has published in influential journals in economics and social psychology. He received a B.A. in sociology in 1976 from Reed College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa; an M.S. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin in 1977; and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1982.

Said Baron on his decision to join the Yale faculty, “The mission of SOM is compelling and appealing to me. As a colleague of Joel Podolny when he was at Stanford, I know he shares my view that business schools need to be not just about economic imperatives but also about society. I have great confidence in and admiration for Joel and his vision for the Yale School of Management. I’m excited about helping the school realize its potential to build a first-class organizational behavior department, with strong ties to other fields and disciplines at SOM.”

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Also joining the Yale School of Management faculty is Joseph P. Simmons, who will come to Yale as an assistant professor of marketing next year. He received a B.S. from Mount Saint Mary’s College in 1999, an M.A. in Psychology from Princeton University in 2001, and a Ph.D. in psychology from Princeton in 2004. He has been a postdoctoral research associate at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs for the last two years. His research focuses in the area of behavioral decision-making and problems in consumer choice. He has published articles in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology and Psychological Science.