Dr. Mark Suchman

Biography

Mark Suchman is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Purdue University. His research interests focus on the impact of legal institutions on economic life, particularly how legal conditions create or foreclose opportunities for innovation and entrepreneurship. He is perhaps best known for his theoretical work on organizational legitimacy. Mark has conducted major empirical studies on the role of law firms in Silicon Valley and the governance challenges posed by new information technologies in health care. He has also explored the sequential structure of the entrepreneurial start-up process and the practices of inter-organizational disputing. His approach incorporates social science theories to analyze contracts and the emergence of law-like structures within corporate bureaucracies. Mark's research has been supported by major grant-giving organizations, including the National Science Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and he has published extensively in leading scholarly journals, including the Academy of Management Review and the Law & Society Review. Before joining Purdue, he was a Professor at Brown University and led the Department of Sociology’s Work, Organizations, and Economy faculty. Mark has served as Program Director for the National Science Foundation's Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure and chaired various sections of the American Sociological Association.

Research Interests