18 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
American organizational psychologist — Harvard Business School — creator of the psychological safety concept — who discovered that the highest-performing hospital teams made more errors (because they reported them) and built the psychological safety research program from that finding.
American historian at Harvard who won two Pulitzer Prizes — The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and Voyagers to the West — and who fundamentally transformed understanding of the American Revolution by demonstrating the centrality of the republican tradition (Country ideology) in Revolutionary thought.
American business theorist — Harvard Business School — author of The Innovator's Dilemma — who created the disruptive innovation theory — the most influential business theory of the last 30 years.
American geneticist at Harvard — who pioneered ancient DNA analysis to reconstruct human prehistory — author of Who We Are and How We Got Here — whose lab has produced more ancient DNA research than any other in the world.
American economic historian — Harvard — author of The Wealth and Poverty of Nations — who argued that culture (specifically the Protestant work ethic and technological curiosity) rather than geography explains economic development differences.
American economist at Harvard — author of Triumph of the City — the most influential urban economist of his generation — whose work on agglomeration, housing supply, and urban productivity has shaped housing policy debates.
American urban economist — Harvard — author of Triumph of the City — the leading academic advocate for urban density as the solution to housing costs, economic development, and environmental sustainability.
American geneticist at Harvard Medical School — who co-pioneered next-generation DNA sequencing, CRISPR gene editing applications, and synthetic biology — one of the most prolific inventors in biology with over 100 patent applications — proponent of de-extincting woolly mammoths.
Harvard University's law school — the oldest and arguably most prestigious in the United States — producer of Supreme Court justices, Presidents, and corporate lawyers — notable for the case method of legal education.
American philosopher at Harvard — author of A Theory of Justice (1971) and Political Liberalism — who revived Anglo-American political philosophy and provided the most influential liberal theory of justice in the 20th century.
American anthropologist at Harvard — author of The Secret of Our Success and The WEIRDest People in the World — whose research on cultural evolution and the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) bias in psychology is reshaping social science.
American economist — Harvard professor — former Chief Economist of the IMF — author of This Time Is Different (with Carmen Reinhart) — the most widely cited economist on government debt, financial crises, and central banking.
American economist who served as Chief Economist of the World Bank, US Treasury Secretary, President of Harvard, and Director of the National Economic Council under Obama — one of the most prominent and controversial economists in public life.
American business strategist — Harvard Business School — creator of Porter's Five Forces and the Competitive Advantage framework — the most influential business strategy theorist of the last 50 years.
Father of Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt — mentioned in biographical context of Stephen Greenblatt's work on Renaissance self-fashioning and the family's Jewish immigrant background in Boston.
American political scientist at Harvard's Kennedy School — founding editor of Education Next — a leading researcher on school choice, vouchers, and urban education reform.
American political scientist — Harvard — author of Bowling Alone and Making Democracy Work — who created the social capital concept and documented its decline in America — the most influential political scientist of the last 30 years.
American philosopher at Harvard who wrote The World Viewed (on film), The Claim of Reason (on Wittgenstein), and Pursuits of Happiness (on Hollywood comedy of remarriage) — and who made Emerson and Thoreau philosophically central in a way they had not been in analytic philosophy.