Mindfulness is the dynamic process of building and maintaining awareness of one’s environment and paying attention to stimuli (Langer, 1989; Brown, Ryan, & Creswell, 2007). A cognitively effortful endeavor, mindfulness requires “the capacity to respond to unanticipated cues or signals from one’s context” (Levinthal & Rerup, 2006, p. 504). Mindful...
This research questions how institutional logics shape and change through the event sequencing of institutional reforms. Literature reviewed on sequences of social events underspecifies the enchainment of events, i.e., the set of social processes that both links events and also renders the sequence meaningful beyond summing its individual events. My...
Over the last decade, a rising trend of corporations publicly acting on social and political issues has come to the fore. The issues and methods have both varied widely—from immigration to abortion, and from advertisements to boycotts. This introduces an interesting puzzle in the realm of strategy research: Where does...
“Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” is the name for one of French artist Paul Gauguin’s most influential paintings. Unsurprisingly, these very questions have occupied the minds of countless philosophers, artists, and scholars since the beginning of human civilization. These questions become especially salient...
The increasing availability of large-scale scholarly datasets offers an unprecedented opportunity to understand the fundamental predictability, uncertainty, and dynamics of science and innovation. In this dissertation, I present some of my contributions to the science of science and innovation in three distinct but related settings, through a combination of canonical...
Racial and economic disparities in education, employment, and wealth continue to pervade modern U.S. society—and American workplaces reflect and reinforce these vast inequalities. In response, organizations spend an estimated $8 billion annually on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Despite these efforts, many DEI initiatives have limited success. My dissertation...
This dissertation studies the limitations of incentive design in organizations and how they lead to inefficient outcomes. Chapter 1 studies how a coalition coordinates its members when they freely join and leave. It characterizes the conditions under which such coordination prevents the coalition from forming in the first place. In...
This dissertation describes three studies which develop a deeper understanding of both failure and performance in human service referral networks focusing on veterans. It draws on theories across network science, public administration, organizational communication, and technology design to explore three major questions: 1) how stakeholders in veteran care networks define...
This dissertation examines the interactional mechanisms that undergird exercises of regulatory authority in expert work settings. In the first chapter, I argue that, in the aftermath of a crisis (in this case, induced by a major regulatory event), organizational actors face environments of high uncertainty which challenge rational models of...
The prospect of being evaluated by others is oftentimes psychologically crippling. At the core of feeling evaluated is perceiving other minds capable of possessing (judgmental) thoughts and feelings. While research on mind perception in evaluative situations oftentimes examines positive aspects (e.g., increased prosocial behavior), this dissertation looks into how mind...
