Tom Beamish

Tom Beamish is a Professor at the Sociology Department at University of California, Davis. He joined the university as an Assistant Professor on 2003. His research interests and expertise include Risks, Hazards, & Environment; Civic Politics and Community Movements; Institutions, Organizations, & Economy; and Science, Technology, & Innovation Studies. As an environmental and organizational sociologist, and as a sociologist of risk, Professor Beamish’s research has generated two books and many papers published in leading journals. Throughout his career, within these broad areas of interest, Professor Beamish has focused on the collective construction of rationality and how group or situated memberships shape interpretation, expectations, and preferences in ways that result in profound social and material consequences. “Memberships” – reflected in the places people live, the formal and informal groups and organizations that people belong to, and the social categories and identities people are given or with which they self-identify – always involve the intersection of institutions, organizations, and interpretive work that gives rise to distinctive “collective rationalities.” For instance, in his first book he focused on the social and organizational responses to an oil spill disaster titled, Silent Spill: The Organization of an Industrial Crisis (MIT Press). In his second book, titled, Community at Risk: Biodefense and the Collective Search for Security (Stanford University Press), he compares local community based civic politics in three different communities surrounding a controversial and risky government biodefense proposal. Professor Beamish has also researched and written extensively about organizational and institutional aspects (and impediments) to “green” innovation(s) and regarding metropolitan level governance in California as the state has responded to urban growth and climate change. Professor Beamish has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the California Energy Commission, a UC Toxics Research and Teaching Fellowship, and the Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation.