Glenn R. Carroll

Glenn R. Carroll is a Stanford University professor of organizational behavior, with an appointment in sociology by courtesy. His scholarship examines organizations and their evolution; it also includes research on authenticity and how audiences evaluate organizations.

Carroll coauthored Cascading Organizational Change with Michael T. Hannan and László Pólos. The paper develops a formal account of how a change to one part of an organization’s architecture can lead to further changes elsewhere. It links the centrality of the initiating unit and the intricacy of organizational design to the time and opportunity costs of reorganization. For the strategic entropy article, this is a way to explain why changing an interconnected system may involve more than altering a single component—not evidence that all organizational complexity is waste.