Christopher Yenkey

Associate Professor of International Business

Chris Yenkey is an Associate Professor of International Business in the Sonoco International Business Department at the Univ. of South Carolina Darla Moore School of Business and a core faculty member of the Rule of Law Collaborative at the USC School of Law. Prior to joining the Moore School in 2016, Prof. Yenkey was an assistant professor of organizations and markets at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business from 2011-2016 and held courtesy appointments in the departments of Sociology and African Studies. Prof. Yenkey earned his PhD in Sociology from Cornell University in 2011. His research extends sociological theories of inter-group conflict and distrust into the analysis of misconduct and market development across Africa. His recent work focuses on how reactions conditioned by social relations allow corruption to be so pervasive despite being so reviled. Prof. Yenkey’s research appears in top outlets such as Administrative Science Quarterly, American Journal of Sociology, and Social Forces and has been recognized with several awards, including the 2017 Granovetter Award for Best Published Paper in Economic Sociology from the American Sociological Association. He currently serves as an Associate Editor at Management Science, a consulting editor at American Journal of Sociology, and as well as a member of the editorial board of Administrative Science Quarterly. Prof. Yenkey teaches undergraduate classes on social networks as well as classes on organizational misconduct and research design at the Master’s and PhD level.

Expertise

  • Economic sociology;
  • organizational theory

Current Research Interests

Distrust, corruption, fraud, market development, social capital, diversity and segregation

citation engraving
“[T]he challenge is to specify and explicate the social mechanisms determining the relationship between the informal social organization of close-knit groups and the formal rules of institutional structures.”— Victor Nee