“Business as usual” is fast becoming a memory. In recent years, organizations have faced radical challenges to their modus operandi from generative AI, political extremism, the COVID pandemic, intensifying global conflict, and climate change. My research concentrates on how organizations navigate these changes.
To study these changes, I use mixed methods, including analysis of archival material, interviewing, ethnography, and statistical methods, to bring a nuanced perspective to these processes, allowing me to both adumbrate novel theories about causes and mechanisms, as well as to rigorously test those theories. Because social changes both emanate from and result in inequalities in the distribution of resources, an important theoretical contribution of my work is to elucidate the link between culture, social change, and inequality. My research also has significant practical implications for managerial and public policy–When we understand the role of culture in social change, we can both design more effective strategies to adapt to volatile circumstances and achieve resilience, and we can also construct better policies for promoting equity and justice in a changing society.
Research
Trading Creativity for Connection: How Outsiders Navigate Meaning in the Face of Digital Technological Change (w. Aruna Ranganathan)
Artists have long found deep meaning in the creative execution of their craft, yet digital design technologies threaten their ability to find this meaning. Who, then, would willingly adopt tools that erode artistic freedom—and why? This paper examines two creative industries in India –wooden handicrafts and folk music– where digital design technologies challenge artisans’ and musicians’ creativity. Through ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, we compare “traditionalists” who uphold manual production methods, with those “modernists” who embrace digital production. While traditionalists cherish creative work as a source of meaning, technology adopters lament their constrained ability to create —yet they still adopt digital tools. We find that while traditionalists are insiders coming from long craft lineages, technology adopters are outsider artists, who are shunned by traditionalist peers and patrons. Outsiders accept reduced opportunities for creativity in return for new relationships with technologists and wider audiences, which give their work meaning. We contribute to the literature on meaning-making in creative industries and the study of outsiders in artistic fields.
Second Round Review at Academy of Management Discoveries.
Processes of Classification Work
I investigate the emergence and operationalization of “essential” businesses exempt from COVID-19 lockdowns in the early pandemic period. States differed in whether they considered many functions, such as construction, manufacturing, real estate, essential, but why? I conducted interviews with state policymakers and obtained internal communications using freedom of information requests to answer this question. My qualitative analysis reveals that while factors such as partisanship, industrial structure, and viral intensity played a role in who counted as essential, the primary motivating force for how policymakers drew this boundary was their perception of the novelty and seriousness of COVID. When policymakers believed COVID was an existential event, states designated relatively few businesses as essential, but in a localized way; when they interpreted the situation as manageable and routine, they prioritized inclusive and flexible exemptions.
How Politics Shapes Organizational Responses to the Law
In the second chapter of my dissertation (also my Job Market Paper), I examine how state-level variation in the definition of essential business related to two consequential cultural changes brought on by the pandemic—the brief but deep “lockdown recession,” and the massive and enduring shift to telework. With the help of two research assistants, I constructed a novel dataset of lockdown exemptions for all 50 states and the U.S. territories across, over 200 industry types. I show that government-imposed lockdowns played a modest role in the transition to telework and job loss, organizations and individuals played a far more dominant role in interpreting both whether they were essential and how they should respond. The effects of being deemed essential were highly moderated by whether managers and employees were susceptible to President Trump’s use of the “bully pulpit” to undermine lockdowns. The meaning of “essential,” then, was ambiguous and subject to culturally and politically motivated interpretation.
Organizational Discourses About the “Essential”
I investigate the circumstances under which organizations deem objects “essential,” which I call discursive essentialism. Employing a comparative historical approach, I use the COVID-19 lockdowns, as well as the articulation of human rights in the 18th century, debates about the literary canon in the 1980s, and the construction of “too big to fail banks” in the financial crisis, to theorize how organizations can successfully use discursive essentialism to adapt to, foment, and resist large-scale change.
Interpretations of Endogenous Technical and Social Change
In a second stream of research, I investigate the role of culture in situations when organizational change is endogenous. Prior to the pandemic, I conducted an ethnographic study of a hospital pharmacy undergoing a shift from a manual to a robotic dispensing system. Finally, in a working paper, I examine a public policy initiative in Boston intended to make the city’s business culture more welcoming to outside investors. I develop a new theory in which failed cultural entrepreneurship can sometimes originate in a collective action problem that leads to suboptimal outcomes for all.
Future Projects
My research program thus far has provided me with data and research questions to support a strong pipeline of additional projects. I intend to use additional documents acquired through public records requests to examine how the boundaries of who was “essential” led to non-compliance and lobbying. I have also compiled the requisite data to examine how those boundaries evolved over the course of the pandemic; I hypothesize that the evolution was driven more by factors such as popular narratives and lobbying, rather than either economic or epidemiological prerogatives. Finally, I have assembled a large trove of data concerning how the meaning of “essential worker” in the mass media and popular imagination became decoupled from its legal-political definition.
I am planning several additional projects to study how organizations navigate “grand challenges.” In particular, I would like to study how city governments decide to protect or sacrifice populations and infrastructures as they produce climate adaptation plans. I would also like to study the emergence of norms in weakly institutionalized environments, such as digital platforms. A third upcoming project is to understand the ways that workforce development institutions adapt curricula in the face of new technology. The throughline of these seemingly disparate projects is to understand how culture persists from established social systems into nascent ones.