He has been a leading contributor in developing the concept of heterarchy, referring to the process of distributed intelligence and diversity of evaluative principles in organizations.
In examining organizational forms as sites of multiple evaluative principles, or frames of worth, he has carried out field research in Hungarian factories before and after 1989, in new media startups in Manhattan before and after the dot.com crash of hi-tech firm stocks in 2000, and in a World Financial Center trading room before and after the attacks on September 11, 2001.
In his book, The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life, published in 2009, Stark draws on much of his recent research in post-socialist transformations in Hungary, his study of new media firms in Silicon Alley, and his work on decision making in trading rooms.
[4] As of 2016 Stark has been principal investigator on the European Research Council Horizon 2020 project BLINDSPOT: Diversity and Performance in Networks and Teams.
In 2021, Stark co-edited with Ivana Pais a special issue of Sociologica titled 'Power and Control in Platform Monopoly Capitalism.'