Peer Fiss is the Jill and Frank Fertitta Chair of Business Administration and a Professor of Management & Organization, and Sociology (by courtesy) at the University of Southern California. His research interests lie in the fields of organization theory and strategic management, with a focus on how to deal with causal complexity. He has also been working for more than two decades on the use of set-analytic methods in management and the social sciences, and specifically on the use of crisp and fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA).
Announcing AQCA 2025
The Fourth Annual QCA Conference of the Americas
April 2-4, 2025
Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Intersectional Inequality: Race, Class, Test Scores, and Poverty
Charles C. Ragin and Peer C. Fiss
In their recent book Charles Ragin and Peer Fiss bring set-analytic methods to the public policy debate. They begin by taking up the controversy regarding the relative importance of test scores versus socioeconomic background on life chances, a debate that has raged since the 1994 publication of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s TheBell Curve. In contrast to prior work, Ragin and Fiss bring an intersectional approach to the evidence, analyzing the different ways that advantages and disadvantages combine in their impact on life chances. Moving beyond controversy and fixed policy positions, the authors propose sophisticated new methods of analysis to underscore the importance of attending to configurations of race, gender, family background, educational achievement, and related conditions when addressing social inequality in America today.
University of Chicago Press, 2017
“This is one of those very rare books that offers genuine innovation. Its combination of substantive and methodological material and argument is increasingly rare”
— Barry Cooper, University of Durham
“This is a breakthrough book. […] they demonstrate that their methods can provide new insights that are wholly missed by regression and related methods”
— Christopher Winship, Harvard University
Peer is a regular speaker at a variety of conferences focused both on academics and practitioners. He also regularly speaks to companies in a variety of executive education programs. Topics he speaks on include corporate governance, developing a strategic mindset, driving strategies for growth, and strategies for innovation.
At USC Marshall, he currently teaches MBA level courses on competitive and corporate strategy.
