Neil Fligstein is the Class of 1939 Chancellor's Professor. He is also the Director of the Center for Culture, Organization, and Politics at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. His main research interests lie in the fields of economic sociology, organizational theory, and political sociology. He has been interested in developing and using a sociological view of how new social institutions emerge, remain stable, and are transformed to study a wide variety of seemingly disparate phenomena including the history of the large American corporation and the construction of a European legal and political system. He has used this framework to create a more general view of how markets and states are mutually constitutive and applied this framework to trying to make sense of how global markets work.