Woody Powell is Jacks Family Professor of Education, and (by courtesy) Sociology, Organizational Behavior, Management Science and Engineering, and Communication at Stanford University. He has been faculty co-director of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society since its founding in 2006.. At PACS, he heads the Civic Life of Cities Lab, which studies civil society organizations in the SF Bay Area, Seattle, Shenzhen, Sydney, Taipei, and Vienna. He is the 2019 recipient of the School of Humanities and Sciences Dean's Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching. He has received honorary degrees from Uppsala University, Copenhagen Business School, and Aalto University, and is an international member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Science and The British Academy. He has served on the board of directors of the Social Science Research Council since 2000. He was an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute from 2001-13 and continues involvement with SFI today. With Bob Gibbons (MIT), he has led the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) summer institute on Organizations and their Effectiveness since 2016.

His interests focus on the processes through which ideas and practices move across organizations, and the role of networks in facilitating or hindering the transfer of ideas.
He is the author or editor of Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing, with Lewis Coser and Charles Kadushin (Basic Books, 1982); Getting into Print: The Decision-Making Process in Scholarly Publishing (U. of Chicago Press, 1985); The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, with Paul DiMaggio (U. of Chicago Press, 1991); Private Action and the Public Good, with Elisabeth Clemens (Yale U. Press, 1997); The Emergence of Organizations and Markets, with John Padgett (Princeton U. Press, 2012), and The Nonprofit Sector: A Research Handbook, with Patricia Bromley (Stanford U. Press, 2020). His 1990 article, “Neither Market Nor Hierarchy: Network Forms of Organization,” won the Max Weber award; “Network Dynamics and Field Evolution: The Growth of Inter-Organizational Collaboration in the Life Sciences,” (2005), received the Viviana Zelizer prize. “Technological Change and the Locus of Innovation: Networks of Learning in Biotechnology,” with K. Koput and L. Smith-Doerr (1996), was recognized by Administrative Science Quarterly as one of its most influential publications. His 1983 paper with Paul DiMaggio, “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields,” is the most cited article in the history of the American Sociological Review.