Suzanne Berger

Who is Suzanne Berger?

Suzanne Berger is an American political scientist. She is the Raphael Dorman and Helen Starbuck Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the MIT International Science and Technology Initiative. A leading authority in comparative politics and political economy, she has pointed to the centrality of politics in mediating and redirecting ostensibly transcendent forces, such as economic modernization and globalization.

She attended Antioch College for two years before transferring to the University of Chicago where she received her B.A. with honors in 1960. She then studied at Harvard University where she received both an M.A. and Ph.D.

In How We Compete, based on a five-year study by the MIT Industrial Performance Center, she presents the result of case studies of over 500 international companies to discover which practices are succeeding in today’s global economy, which are failing, and why. She paints a far more complicated picture than the black-and-white presentations by most promoters and opponents of globalization. Cheap labor is not the answer, offshoring is not a fatality, and the avenues open to companies are much wider than is generally imagined.