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People: Faculty Profile
Michael D. Cohen William D. Hamilton Collegiate Professor of Complex Systems
BA, Stanford University; Ph.D. in social science, University of California-Irvine
(734) 647-8027
| 312 West Hall
E-mail: mdc@umich.edu
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Classes taught
SI Ph.D. students currently advised:
Michael D. Cohen is William D. Hamilton Collegiate Professor of Complex Systems at the U-M, and serves as a professor in the School of Information, the Department of Political Science, and the Ford School of Public Policy.
Cohen's research centers on processes of learning and adaptation that go on within organizations as they respond to their changing environments.
His book with Robert Axelrod, Harnessing Complexity: Organizational Implications of a Scientific Frontier, was a finalist for the George Terry book award of the Academy of Management in the year 2001 for its "outstanding contribution to the advancement of management knowledge."
He is also a co-author of Leadership and Ambiguity, an influential study of the organizational problems facing American college and university presidents. He edited, (with Lee Sproull) Organizational Learning, a major collection of research articles in this burgeoning field.
He has written numerous articles contributing to the theory of organizational decision making, many employing computer simulation. The best known of these is "A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice", co-authored with James March and Johann Olsen. His articles on structural conditions favoring cooperation have appeared in journals such as Rationality and Society and Nature. He has also pursued this theoretical work as an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute and as an associate of the University of Michigan Center for the Study of Complex Systems.
In recent years, Cohen's empirical research has focused increasingly on the organizational effects of information technology, using studies of both controlled laboratory and complex field settings. His work has provided stronger foundations for organizational research by forging links to psychological findings on human memory and emotions.
Cohen has served as a long-term consultant at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. He was a founding associate director of the Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work and a founding faculty member of the School of Information. He is active in applying organizational research to improving uses of technology in medical and nonprofit organizations.
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