Although the focus of this volume is on Stanford’s contribution to organization studies,
resource dependence owes as much to the University of Illinois as it does to Stanford, according
to Pfeffer (2003). After receiving his BS and MS degrees from Carnegie-Mellon University, Jeff
Pfeffer entered the doctoral program in organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School
of Business and completed his PhD in under three years (a record subsequently bested only by
William Ocasio, now at Northwestern). He went on to faculty positions first at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and then the University of California at Berkeley, returning to
Stanford as a faculty member in 1979. Pfeffer’s dissertation was a remarkable set of
demonstrations of the importance of exchange and power relations in and around organizations,
and his time at Illinois resulted in a flood of early publications arising from his dissertation (e.g.,
Pfeffer, 1972a, 1972b, 1972c). The fertile intellectual soil of Urbana-Champaign, coupled with
Gerry Salancik’s complementary micro orientation, allowed resource dependence theory to grow
like a mighty stalk of corn. But to strain the simile to the breaking point, it is fair to say that the
seeds for the theory were carried from Stanford and germinated by Jeff Pfeffer’s dissertation
committee, which included James Miller, Mike Hannan, Dick Scott, and Eugene Webb. Pfeffer
credited Gene Webb in particular as an important and under-appreciated influence at Stanford, as
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Gene had a talent for finding unobtrusive methods of studying organizational phenomena, which
contrasted with the dominant survey-based approach of the time.