Doug Guthrie


Doug Guthrie is an American organizational sociologist and China scholar. He is currently Professor of Practice in Global Leadership and Director of China Initiatives at the Thunderbird School of Global Management. From 2014-19 he was a Senior Director and Apple University Faculty Member at Apple Inc., where he represented Apple University in China. Prior to joining Apple, he served as dean at The George Washington University School of Business in Washington DC from 2010–13 and Vice President for University-Wide China Operations in 2013. Prior to joining GWSB, he was professor of management and sociology at New York University, holding joint appointments in the Stern School of Business and NYU’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. His areas of expertise lie in the fields of leadership and organizational change, corporate governance and corporate social responsibility, and economic reform in China. He has published widely in these fields, though he is probably best known for his work on China. He has taught as a visiting professor at Harvard Business School, INSEAD, and the Graduate Schools of Business at Stanford University, Columbia University, and Emory University. He was director of the Business Institutions Initiative at the Social Science Research Council. He has also been deeply involved in executive education, previously holding positions as the director of Custom Executive Education at NYU-Stern and as the executive academic director of the Berlin School of Creative Leadership. Currently, he lives in Ann Arbor, MI.

Biography

Guthrie was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1969, where he attended Franklin Regional and Taylor Allderdice High Schools. He received his AB Degree in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago in 1992. During his time at Chicago, he left school for a year to study Mandarin in Taipei, Taiwan. Immediately following graduation from Chicago, he went on to study organizational and economic sociology at the University of California Berkeley under Neil Fligstein and Thomas Gold. A Social Science Research Council Grant allowed him to study in Berkeley’s Economics Department and then to go on to conduct his dissertation research in Shanghai. There he conducted a study of 81 factories in industrial Shanghai. His dissertation was awarded the American Sociological Association’s annual award for the best dissertation in the discipline and eventually formed the basis for the book Dragon in a Three Piece Suit: The Emergence of Capitalism in China.
Guthrie’s first academic appointment began at New York University’s Department of Sociology in 1997. Upon receiving tenure in 2000, Guthrie embarked on a string of other, short-term appointments to explore different ways to engage the business community more directly. From 1999-2003 Guthrie was director of the Business Institutions Initiative and the Program on the Corporation as a Social Institution at the Social Science Research Council. In building this program, Guthrie received grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Ford Foundation to support research and field development in the areas of economic sociology, study of the corporation as a social institution, and corporate social responsibility. From 2001-06, while still on the faculty at NYU, he served as a visiting professor at Columbia Business School, Stanford Business School, the Goizueta Business School at Emory, INSEAD, and Harvard Business School.
In 2006, Doug Guthrie returned to the NYU Stern School of Business to take the position of professor of management. He taught in courses such as Leading Organizations, the Leadership Training for High Potentials Open Enrollment program, and Strategic Investment in China. He also took up the post as director of executive education at Stern. In 2008, Guthrie began his relationship with the Berlin School of Creative Leadership, an Executive MBA school for executives in the creative industries, where he served as executive academic director. In the Summer of 2010, he was named Dean of the George Washington University School of Business. He was ousted from Deanship and also stripped of his university position as vice president for China operations in August 2013. In an e-mail to faculty, Provost Steven Lerman said that “fundamental differences about financial and operational performance were significant enough to warrant a change in leadership.” University spokesperson Candace Smith told the university’s student newspaper, the GW Hatchet, that “issues were discovered” when the university closed out the fiscal 2013 books, but that the business school is financially healthy. “The administration and Doug Guthrie have been unable to reach a common understanding of how the business school should operate in the future,” Smith said. Guthrie remained at GWSB as a Professor of Management and International Business until June 2014.
In February 2014, Guthrie began working with Apple Inc.. He joined the company full-time as a Senior Director and member of the Apple University Faculty in February 2015. From 2015-19, he moved to Shanghai and worked with the Apple University team on organizational/talent/leadership development, focusing on China/APAC. In the Fall or 2019, he joined the Thunderbird School of Global Management.

Books