On leave during the 2025-26 academic year as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto.

David Stark is currently directing a major research project on Diversity and Performance: Networks of Cognition in Markets and Teams supported by a five-year Advanced career Award from the European Research Council.

In his book, The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life (Princeton University Press, 2011), Stark carried out ethnographic research in three distinct settings to study how organizations and their members search for what is valuable. Dissonance – disagreement about the principles of worth – can lead to discovery.  On a related topic, he recently co-edited Moments of Valuation: Exploring Sites of Dissonance (Oxford University Press, 2015).