Dennis Mc Namara

Dennis McNamara, S.J. is the Park Professor of Sociology and Korean Studies at Georgetown University. He also serves as Special Assistant to the University President for China Affairs. He joined Georgetown University after receiving his PhD from Harvard University, and has gone on to serve as Chair of the Department, as Chair of University Rank and Tenure, as well as creator and chair of the biannual Georgetown Conference on Korean Society, and coordinator of the university's exchange with the China’s Central Party School in Beijing from 2007. He serves as a member of the Council of Foreign Relations in New York, and chairs the Japan/Korea Seminar at the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. State Department. He is active in the International Studies Association and the International Sociological Association, where he has chaired the Economic Sociology Committee, as well as in the Society for the Study of Socio-Economics (SASE). Continuing a regular round of lecturing and research abroad, he serves as an Adjunct Professor in the Graduate School of International Studies at Sogang University (Seoul), as a member of the International Board at Sophia University (Tokyo), and lectures regularly at Renmin University (Beijing). His appointment from 2007 as Special Assistant for China permits residence in Beijing and elsewhere in Asia for much of the year.

Major publications include and the Colonial Origins of Korean Capitalism (1990), Textiles and Industrial Transition in Japan (1995), Corporatism and Korean Capitalism (1999),

and Market and Society in Korea – Interests, Institutions, and the Textile Industry (2002), He first published on the topic of knowledge networks in a piece titled, "New Places in Old Spaces –Knowledge Hierarchies among Asian SMEs Abroad” in the journal Organization (2006), and later a monograph titled, Business Innovation in Asia - Knowledge and Technology Networks from Japan (Routledge 2011). The work continued with a comparative study of Chinese and Korean innovation in a Whitley volume on Changing Asian Business Systems (Oxford 2016). Current research interests include a comparative study of innovation systems in Northeast Asia. A related project focuses on university-industry collaboration with the extension from production chains abroad to research networks, particularly in the ASEAN nations.