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Henning Hillmann is Professor of Economic Sociology at the University of Mannheim and a faculty member of the Mannheim Center for European Social Research (MZES). He received his Ph.D. and M.Phil. in Sociology from Columbia University in New York and his M.A. (Diplom) in the Social Sciences from Humboldt University in Berlin. Before joining the Sociology Department at the University of Mannheim in 2009, he was an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stanford University (2004–2010).
His fields of interest include economic history, economic sociology, organizational analysis and a methodological focus on social network analysis and the quantitative analysis of qualitative historical data. His current research projects include a comparative study of the organization of privateering and its political implications in eighteenth-century Britain and France. In a second study of industrial corporations in late Imperial Russia he seeks to understand how entrepreneurship is possible in emergent economies with weak public institutions. A third comparative project investigates to what extent economic networks may help to overcome political conflicts. Findings from these and previous research projects have been published in the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, and the Journal of Economic History.
Publications and Conference Papers
- Burgdorf, K. and Hillmann, H. (2024). Identity from symbolic networks: the rise of New Hollywood. Sociological Science, 11, 297–339.
- Aven, B. and Hillmann, H. (2018). Structural role complementarity in entrepreneurial teams. Management Science, 64, 5688-5704.
- Hillmann, H. (2013). Economic Institutions and the State: Insights from Economic History. Annual Review of Sociology, 39, 251–273.
- Hillmann, H. and Aven, B. (2011). Fragmented networks and entrepreneurship in late imperial Russia. American Journal of Sociology : AJS, 117, 484–538.
- Hillmann, H. and Gathmann, C. (2011). Overseas Trade and the Decline of Privateering. The Journal of Economic History, 71, 730–761.
- Hillmann, H. (2008). Localism and the Limits of Political Brokerage: Evidence from Revolutionary Vermont. American Journal of Sociology : AJS, 114, 287–331.
- Hillmann, H. (2008). Mediation in Multiple Networks: Elite Mobilization before the English Civil War. American Sociological Review : ASR, 73, 426–454.
- Böhm, T. and Hillmann, H. (2015). A closed elite? Bristol’s Society of Merchant Venturers and the abolition of slave trading. In Chartering capitalism : organizing markets, states, and publics (S. 147–175). Bradford [u.a.]: Emerald Group Publ.