Craig Rawlings is an Institute for Education Science (IES) Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University's Institute for Research in Education Policy and Practice (IREPP). He completed his B.A. in International Studies at the University of Oregon, his M.A. in Sociology from Rutgers University, and Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His dissertation research was funded by the Social Science Research Council-Sloan Foundation and the National Science Foundation, and focused on organizational change and gender segregation in American higher education since the early 1970s. His work seeks to bridge structural and cultural explanations of how social actors (individuals, colleges, academic departments) influence one another. He is particularly interested in the ways that social networks and status inequalities help shape influence processes. With Dan McFarland, he is currently working on a number of projects concerning peer influences on faculty productivity, as well as the social and structural bases that facilitate the spread of knowledge between academic departments.

John Mohr is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he also serves as Director of the Social Sciences Survey Research Center. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from Yale University. Along with Roger Friedland he is co-editor of Matters of Culture (Cambridge University Press 2004) and author of a number of articles concerned with the use of formal models in cultural analysis, the history of the welfare state, and the racial politics of affirmative action (www.soc.ucsb.edu/ct). He is currently writing about the institutional foundations of nanotechnology.