Víctor Nee

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Victor G. Nee (born 1945) is an American sociologist and professor at Cornell University. He is known for his work in economic sociology, inequality, and immigration, and for explaining how capitalism and markets develop in different settings.

Two of his influential books are Remaking the American Mainstream (co-authored with Richard Alba) and Capitalism from Below (co-authored with Sonja Opper). Remaking the American Mainstream presents a neo-assimilation theory about how post-1965 immigrant groups and their children join the American mainstream. Capitalism from Below looks at how new economic institutions and capitalism emerged in China, focusing on norms and networks that support economic performance even when formal policies are weak.

Nee holds the Frank and Rosa Rhodes Professor of Economic Sociology at Cornell and was the founding director of the Center for the Study of Economy and Society (a role he held from 2001 to 2018).

Education and early work
Nee studied at the University of California campuses, earning a BA from UC Santa Cruz in 1967. He pursued graduate work at UCLA and Harvard, where he earned an MA in East Asian Studies and, later, a PhD in sociology in 1977. He helped found the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, a group opposed to the Vietnam War. While a graduate student, he and his wife Brett de Bary published Longtime Californ': A Documentary Study of an American Chinatown, a book recognized by the New York Times as one of the best of 1974.

Academic career
Nee began his professorial career at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1977–1985) before moving to Cornell University in 1985. At Cornell, he held the Goldwin Smith Professor of Sociology title from 1991 to 2011, served as department chair (1997–2002), and founded the Center for the Study of Economy and Society. He lectured as a Global Professor of Social Research and Public Policy at NYU Abu Dhabi in 2012 and served as president of the Eastern Sociological Society in 2016.

Honors and contributions
Nee has received numerous honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2007), visiting fellowships at the Russell Sage Foundation (1994–1995) and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1996–1997), and an honorary doctorate in economics from Lund University (2013). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020.

Research focus
His work centers on mid-level theories in economic sociology, new institutionalism, inequality, and immigration. He helped develop a networks-and-institutions approach within the New Institutionalism and contributed to market transition theory, exploring how changes in markets and social structures reshape inequality and economic life. His research emphasizes how norms, networks, and informal institutions influence organizational action and economic performance.