Erin McDonnell

Notre Dame du Lac and Kellogg Associate Professor

Research Interests

Development, Theory, Political Sociology, Organizational Sociology, and Public Administration

Subfields

Cultural Sociology, Global/Transnational Sociology and International Migration, Political Sociology, Qualitative Methods, Sociology of Development, Theory

Profile

Erin Metz McDonnell is the Kellogg Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, with concurrent appointments in the Keough School of Global Affairs and the Department of Africana Studies. Her research sits at the intersection of organizational, political, cultural, and economic sociology, examining how social organization and culture jointly shape state capacity, governance, and collective wellbeing. Her award-winning book, Patchwork Leviathan: Pockets of Bureaucratic Effectiveness in Developing States (Princeton University Press, 2020), investigates how islands of high performance emerge within otherwise weak state administrations.

McDonnell’s work has appeared in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Comparative Political Studies, and Socio-Economic Review, among others, and has been recognized with multiple national and international awards, including the Junior Theorist Award, the W. Richard Scott Article Award, and the Best Book Award from the European Group for Organizational Studies. Supported by the National Science Foundation, her current projects explore how bureaucratic professionalism and organizational design shape human wellbeing, and how public sector organizations in the Global South achieve positive performance despite weak institutional environments. She has also served as an academic consultant for the World Bank and for national governments in Africa and Latin America, advising on strategies to strengthen public sector performance and foster organizational cultures of effectiveness.