Featured COI People


Featured Faculty Affiliate:

Victoria Johnson

Associate Professor of Urban Policy and Planning, Hunter College

Victoria Johnson is Associate Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College in New York City. Her current research lies at the intersection of organizations, history, and the natural environment. In 2015-2016, she is the Birkelund Fellow at the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars of the New York Public Library, where she is working on a book on civic organization and the natural environment in nineteenth-century New York City. Before moving to New York City, she taught on organizations at the University of Michigan from 2002 to 2015. Her last book was Backstage at the Revolution: How the Royal Paris Opera Survived the End of the Old Regime (Chicago, 2008). She earned her PhD in sociology from Columbia in 2002.





Biography


Victoria Johnson is Associate Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College in New York City. She earned her undergraduate degree at Yale in 1991 in philosophy, also studying music and art history there before moving to Berlin to study music and sociology at the Humboldt-Universität. She earned her PhD in sociology from Columbia in 2002, writing a dissertation that explored how the cultural and political conditions under which organizations are founded shape their subsequent trajectories. From 2002-2005 she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan, and from 2005-2015 she taught in the University of Michigan’s Organizational Studies Program, an interdisciplinary honors program in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.



Research Interests


• Organization theory
• Nonprofit organizations
• Historical sociology
• Environmental sociology
• Cultural sociology



Selected Publications


• “Identity, Sustainability, and Local Setting at U.S. Botanical Gardens,” Organization &
Environment 25(3): 259-285

• “Bourdieu and Organizational Analysis,” co-authored with Mustafa Emirbayer, Theory and
Society 37: 1-44 (special issue symposium with comments by Frank Dobbin, David L. Swartz,
and Diane Vaughan)

• Backstage at the Revolution: How the Royal Paris Opera Survived the End of the Old Regime (Chicago,
2008)

• “What is Organizational Imprinting? Cultural Entrepreneurship in the Founding of the Paris
Opera,” American Journal of Sociology 113(1): 97-127