Susan S. Silbey, a sociologist, is the Leon and Anne Goldberg Professor of Humanities, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, and Professor of Behavioral and Policy Sciences, Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Silbey is a researcher on law and the legal process, with specific interest in how legal systems both are implemented and maintained, best known for her work on popular legal consciousness: how ordinary people experience and participate in legal systems. She regularly writes and analyzes legal culture in diverse settings, most recently on governance, regulation, and audit in complex organizations, among other fields. Her current research focuses on the creation of management systems for containing risks: these risks ranging from ethical lapses inside of organizations to environmental, health and safety hazards.[1]
Silbey was raised in Brooklyn, New York, and attended Erasmus High School. She attended CUNY Brooklyn College as an undergraduate, and received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science. She went on to receive a PhD from the University of Chicago in political science under David Greenstone, co-supervised by Egon Bittner, Sociologist at Brandeis University, writing her dissertation on "Consumer Justice: Massachusetts Attorney General's Office of Consumer Protection, 1968–1974."
Silbey was a sociology professor at Wellesley College from 1974 until 2000, when she began a career in MIT’s Anthropology department (serving nine years as department head) and the Sloan School of Management. In 2017, Silbey was elected Chair of the Faculty of MIT for a two-year term.
In May 2019 Silbey was named the recipient of the 2019–2020 James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award - the highest honour the Institute faculty bestows on one of its members, granted to one professor per year.[2]
In her final column for the MIT Faculty newsletter, Silbey urged the MIT to embrace climate change as the most important priority, saying, "We can no longer engage in business as usual at MIT. Time is running out. MIT, the United States, and the world face an existential threat unprecedented in human history." "[3]
Throughout her career, while studying and working in several disciplines, Silbey has centered her research "on conducting empirical research on how law works. She is preoccupied with understanding what makes the law such a durable and powerful institution, more similar in its fundamental processes across its 4,000 years than any other social institution – including the family, the state, and the economy."[4]