Background

Chris Yenkey is an associate professor in the Sonoco International Business Department at the Univ. of South Carolina Darla Moore School of Business and a core faculty member of the Rule of Law Collaborative at the Univ. of South Carolina School of Law. Prior to joining the Moore School in 2016, Prof. Yenkey was an assistant professor of organizations and markets at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business from 2011-2016, where he was the John E. Jueck Faculty Fellow from 2015-2016 and held courtesy appointments in the departments of Sociology and African Studies.

While earning his Ph.D. in Economic Sociology at Cornell University, Prof. Yenkey was a visiting scholar in 2008 at the Institute for Economic Affairs in Nairobi, Kenya, and served as associate director of the Center for the Study of Economy and Society at Cornell University from 2010-2011. Prior to his graduate studies, Yenkey received a B.A. in Economics from the University of Texas, Austin, in 2001 and served as a research associate in the Department of Economic Research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City from 2001 to 2003.

Research

Prof. Yenkey’s research focuses on corruption as a collective action problem. Corruption is a reviled yet pervasive practice and explaining it persistence requires better understanding of the conditions under which the general public is drawn into the practice despite ethical misgivings. Prof. Yenkey uses innovative field experiments to capture the micro-foundations of public support for corruption. He works with a range of public and private sector organizations to identify and test new interventions that help members of the public decline self-interested benefits available through occasional collusion with public officials.

In a separate stream of work, Prof. Yenkey extends sociological theories of social relationships, segregation and inter-group trust into the analysis of misconduct and market development. He first developed this line of work in a long-term study of the effects of distrust stemming from ethnic tensions and fraud on the development of the Nairobi Securities Exchange. Currently, he studies the effects of political violence and corruption on global capital flows, particularly to African countries. An additional line of work on organizational misconduct studies the causes and effects of performance-enhancing misconduct in highly competitive industries. Across these areas of work, Prof. Yenkey emphasizes careful contextual understanding as critical to empirical and theoretical contributions to economic sociology, organizational theory, criminology, and political economy.

Prof. Yenkey’s research appears in Administrative Science Quarterly, Management Science, American Journal of Sociology, and Social Forces. This work has been recognized with several awards, including the 2017 Granovetter Award for Best Published Paper in Economic Sociology from the American Sociological Association and the 2011 William H. Newman Best Dissertation Paper Award from the Academy of Management.

Prof. Yenkey also advances research through professional service. He currently serves as an associate editor at Management Science, a consulting editor at American Journal of Sociology, and a member of the editorial board at Administrative Science Quarterly.

Teaching

Prof. Yenkey teaches in several areas related to his research. At the Ph.D. level, he teaches the department’s first-year research design course. At the master’s level, he teaches courses on organizational misconduct and corruption in the Moore School’s Master of International Business and Professional MBA programs. At the undergraduate level, he teaches the regional specialty course Business in Africa. Prof. Yenkey supervises Ph.D. students at the Univ. of South Carolina as well Strathmore University (Nairobi, Keyna). He has also taught research methods to African policy makers and academics in an annual workshop co-hosted by the Univ. of Stellenbosch Business School in Cape Town, South Africa.

Research Interests

Economic sociology, organizational theory, distrust, corruption, fraud, market development, social capital, diversity and segregation

Education

Ph.D., Sociology, Cornell University, 2011
B.A., Economics (Highest Honors), University of Texas-Austin, 2003