AnnaLee Saxenian (original) (raw)

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AnnaLee Saxenian
AnnaLee Saxenian addressing graduates at the UC Berkeley School of Information 2006 commencement.
Education Williams College
Alma mater Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Known for Dean of the UC Berkeley School of Information
Scientific career
Fields Technology clusters and social networks in Silicon Valley
Institutions UC Berkeley School of Information
Thesis The political economy of industrial adaptation in Silicon Valley (1989)
Doctoral advisor Charles Sabel
Doctoral students danah boyd

AnnaLee Saxenian, 2005

AnnaLee Saxenian is a professor and the former Dean of the UC Berkeley School of Information, known widely for her work on technology clusters and social networks in Silicon Valley. She received her BA from Williams College in 1976 and her PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989.[1]

In her book Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (1994), Saxenian proposes a hypothesis to explain why California's Silicon Valley was able to keep up with the fast pace of technological progress during the 1980s, while the vertically integrated firms of the Route 128 beltway fell behind. She argues that the key was Silicon Valley's decentralized organizational form, non-proprietary standards, and tradition of cooperative exchange (sharing information and outsourcing for component parts), in opposition to hierarchical and independent industrial systems in the East Coast of the US.[2]

Her 2006 book, The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy, explores the globalization of the technology workforce that has occurred as the "brain drain" becomes a "brain circulation" with immigrant Indian, Chinese, and Israeli professionals taking the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial model to their home countries while also maintaining connections with the US.

  1. ^ "AnnaLee Saxenian".
  2. ^ Starr, Paul (May 1995). "Review of Annalee Saxenian, Regional Advantage". Contemporary Sociology.