In summer 2023, from July 17-28, CASBS will welcome its fifth cohort to its institute on “Organizations and Their Effectiveness.” The avowed purpose of the institute has been to achieve a fundamental advance in the academic discussion of organizations, and organized activities more generally, fueled by cross-disciplinary conversations, friendships, and collaborations.
The institute, launched in 2016, revived a storied legacy and history of foundational scholarship in the field of organization studies conducted at the Center by CASBS fellows and others.
Institute participants are young scholars (ranging from late-stage graduate students to advanced assistant professors) whose careers studying organizations are underway, and who have demonstrated an interest in and an aptitude for expanding their thinking about organizations, embracing other fields and methodologies. An essential component of the institute is that it is interdisciplinary; it brings together a cohort of highly promising young researchers from a wide range of fields and universities.
From a large pool of competitive applicants, co-directors Bob Gibbons (Sloan School of Management and Economics, MIT) and Woody Powell (Graduate School of Education and Sociology, Stanford) are pleased to announce the 2023 participants.
Participant List
2023 CASBS Summer Institute: Organizations and Their Effectiveness
Participants
Alessandra Frenizia
I am an Assistant Professor at the George Washington University. I earned my BA and MS in Economics from Bocconi University and my PhD in Economics from UC Berkeley. My research concerns evaluating the effectiveness of public-sector organizations and hospitals. I explore the importance of managers and policies aimed at reducing corruption as sources of organizational effectiveness in the public sector. I also study how hospital management practices affect health outcomes in the context of childbirth.
Arvind Karunakaran
I am an assistant professor of management science & engineering at Stanford University. I am a member of the Center for Work, Technology, and Organization (WTO), the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP), and a faculty affiliate of the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). My research examines authority and accountability at work in the context of technological/organizational change. Specifically, my current research focuses on understanding (a) tensions among the different strands of authority in the workplace and how it shapes consequential outcomes such as exclusion/inclusion in the workplace and employee voice; (b) mechanisms for enforcing accountability during periods of change (e.g., introduction of algorithmic evaluation tools, social media platforms, diversity & sustainability initiatives).
I specialize in ethnographic and field-based methods. I complement these methods with comparative-historical analysis of primary archival data and computational analysis of large-corpus textual data.
Benjamin Shestakofsky
I am an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where I’m also affiliated with the Center on Digital Culture and Society. My research centers on how digital technologies are affecting work and employment, organizations, and economic exchange. My book, forthcoming from the University of California Press, investigates the causes and consequences of venture capitalism. Drawing on 19 months of participant-observation research in a tech startup, I examine how investors' priorities created organizational problems that managers addressed by continually reorganizing the human labor in and around algorithmic systems.
The book shows how the burdens imposed on startups by venture capital—as well as the benefits and costs of “moving fast and breaking things”—are unevenly distributed across a company’s workforce and customers. Current and recent projects examine the sociology of artificial intelligence; how organizations can improve conditions for the hidden workers who support AI systems; the governance of digital platforms; power and positionality in organizational ethnography; platform-based workers who work in organizational settings; and the relationship between venture capital, organizational cultures, and organizational change. My next project will examine tech companies with alternative funding models and ownership structures.
Fiona Shen-Bayh
I am an incoming Assistant Professor of Government & Politics with a joint appointment at the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Previously, I was an Assistant Professor of Government at the College of William and Mary. I study the politics of authoritarian regimes, specifically the legal and judicial instruments of power.
My book Undue Process: Persecution and Punishment in Autocratic Courts (September 2022) examines these themes in the context of postcolonial Africa and is featured in the Cambridge Studies in Law and Society series at Cambridge University Press. In other works, I examine the challenges of promoting access to equitable justice and the legacies of autocratic rule. As co-founder and co-director of the Digital Inclusion and Governance Lab, I draw on a variety of digital tools and data to analyze the political economy of development in the Global South.
My research has been published in the American Political Science Review and World Politics and has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Institute of International Studies, and the Global Research Institute.
I earned my PhD and MA in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley and my BA in Economics from Vassar College. Previously, I was a Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan.
Laura Adler
I am an assistant professor of Organizational Behavior at the Yale School of Management. My research addresses topics at the intersection of organizations, gender, and cultural sociology. My recent work explores how the interaction between organizations and pay equity laws has shaped employers’ pay-setting practices. Other projects of mine explore the world of work from the perspectives of workers, employers, and regulatory authorities. Across projects, I take advantage of the complementary strengths of multiple methods including in-depth interviews, archival research, and experiments.
My work has been published in journals including Socio-Economic Review, Nature Human Behaviour, and Annual Review of Sociology.
Lucienne Talba
I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Gender and the Economy (GATE) at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. I graduated from the University of Montreal in 2020 with a Ph.D. in economics. Before starting my doctoral study, I worked in Cameroon for the government as a senior economist.
My research interests lie at the intersection of development economics, gender economics, economic history, and digital economics. In my research, I examine how access to and adoption of different technologies may affect gender roles and cultural values.
Madeleine Rauch
I am a Visiting Fellow (2022-23) at Stanford University and an Assistant Professor at Copenhagen Business School (on leave). My research focuses on strategic management with a particular interest in strategic decision-making, such as heuristics and change of decision patterns. More recently, I have also conducted research in extreme contexts and challenges faced by people both working and living in difficult contexts, such as undocumented in the U.S., medical professionals during the pandemic and
soldiers in war-zones.
Muhammad Haseeb
I am a lecturer (assistant professor) in the school of economics at the University of Bristol. I received my PhD in economics from the University of Warwick in 2020. My research interests are in environmental, organizational, and development economics.
My current research focuses on a) understanding contractual relationships across communities and b) studying how regulators interpret regulations and allocate effort.
My research has been published in Organization Science, Journal of Management Studies, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Strategic Organization, and HBR, among others.
Paul-Henri Moisson
I am a PhD candidate in economics at TSE. From Paris, France, with a background in theoretical physics and mathematics at Ecole polytechnique, I am strongly interested in political science, sociology and political philosophy. I’m currently working on "meritocracy" and inequality.
Pedro Monteiro
I am an assistant professor at the Department of Organization at Copenhagen Business School. My academic work examines the organizational aspects of cross-domain collaboration and expertise, as well as how bureaucracies work. I primarily use qualitative methods (especially ethnography but increasingly archival data) and have conducted studies in the aeronautical and public
sectors.
I am currently developing research with colleagues on the emergence of collaborative relations among professionals in complex manufacturing, how experts translate social concerns into organizations, the role of design aesthetics and visualizations in paperwork and formalization, and how public servants develop a work ethos. I am also keen to make the organization theory and management canon more diverse and inclusive, and use art to develop our scholarly imagination.
Samantha Ortiz Casillas
As an organizational ethnographer, I study how people in public and political organizations work and organize for social change. My research has looked at the work of policymaking, regulation, strike action, and community organizing to understand the everyday challenges people experience, how they manage them, and with what consequences for the organization and its goals.
I am currently studying the effects of populism and austerity policies on the technical and administrative capacities of government organizations in Mexico. I am an assistant professor at the Public Administration Division of the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) in Mexico City. I also co-organize the Ethnography Atelier, a collaborative space that aims to support junior qualitative researchers and promote high-quality ethnographic research in work and organizations.
Sarah James
I am an assistant professor of Political Science at Gonzaga University. I teach and research on American politics with a focus on state politics, inequality, and the American Political Economy. My current book project examines the politics of failed social policies and the role that data and policy evaluation play in altering the power of vested interests in the policy process.
I received my PhD in Government & Social Policy from Harvard in 2021. Prior to graduate school, I worked in K-12 education, first as a teacher and, later, as a high school principal in Boston.
Sarah Riley
I am an information science PhD candidate at Cornell University, where I study municipal algorithmic systems, race/ism, and inequality. My dissertation focuses on the administration of pretrial risk assessments in Virginia. I use a mixed-methods approach to study how human discretion in the pretrial
process—particularly on the part of pretrial officers—affects risk scores, pretrial detention decisions, and life outcomes for accused people.
My interest in municipal algorithmic systems arose while working at the New York City Department of Education to re-engage out-of-school youth and volunteering for the Dignity in Schools Campaign, a national coalition working to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. My research is funded by the Microsoft Research Ada Lovelace Fellowship, the MacArthur Foundation, and UCLA’s Center for Critical Internet Inquiry. I also have a master’s in public policy from the University of California, Berkeley and internship experience with a variety of organizations, including Data 4 Black Lives and Crime Lab New York.
Spencer Pantoja
I am a third-year PhD student in the department of economics at Stanford University. I did my undergraduate at MIT, studying math and economics. I am a game theorist, focusing on questions in political economy and organizational economics. In particular, I am interested in dynamic games, and the institutions, organizations, and norms that govern and structure these long-run interactions. While my toolbox is primarily in economic theory, I also like to seriously engage with the theoretical literatures of political science and organizational science.
My current agenda is extending ideas from theory of the firm to the theory of political parties, focused on capturing the important interactions between internal organizational and external coalitional dynamics.
Yi Zhao
I am Associate Director of Research for the Civic Life of Cities Lab at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. I hold a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Arizona. I am interested in the relationship of organizations to their local communities, particularly in the setting of social entrepreneurship, impact investments, and corporate social responsibility.
My current research focuses on the participation of internal and external constituencies in organizational decision-making. My dissertation about the role of local community in the impact investing market received the 2022 Best Dissertation Award from the Public and Nonprofit Division of the Academy of Management.
Zhaotian Luo
I am an Assistant Professor of political science at the University of Chicago. I am a formal theorist with a broad substantive interest in political institutions and the political economy of non-democracies. I have been studying information control in authoritarian regimes and democratic backsliding.
My current research centers on authoritarian power dynamics and political stability. I hold a PhD in politics from New York University.
Organizers
Bob Gibbons
I guess I am an organizational economist. I definitely am interested inorganizations, as well as in other interactions that are organized (even if not occurring within a single organization). And I use game theory to guide my thinking, so that must be related to economics; on the other hand, it has been so long since I have drawn supply and demand curves that I truly can neither recall nor deduce whether price or quantity goes on the x-axis of such graphs!
I am tempted to say that what I am interested in is “visible hands” (Chandler, 1977), but I’m not sure I could define that term, except to say that I am not interested in the invisible hand. Another description I sometimes use is that I wake up asking “What can an economist do to help a fixed set of people collaborate?” In 2015, at a lunch table on the CASBS patio, my friend Steve Barley (a sociologist) heard me ask that and answered “An economist cannot do any such thing and so should leave!” Still, here I am.
Also at a CASBS lunch table in 2015, Woody and I started discussing this summer institute. It has worked out much better than certainly I ever dared imagine. On the first morning of our time with the 2018 cohort, one member (Jillian Chown) said that her husband had asked “What do Gibbons and Powell get out of this?” Without missing a beat, Woody replied “The department we will never have.” I love that answer, and I love this process.
Woody Powell
I am currently serving as Director of CASBS, excited at the upcoming prospect of shifting from this administrative role to my familiar academic life. As an organizations scholar, it has been fascinating to see the two sides of CASBS life, from those being served to those doing the serving. I am a sociologist by training and mostly continue to identify as one. I work on networks and on institutions, though when I hang out with network people, I wonder where the culture is, and when I hang out with institutions folks, I start freaking out about the absence of relationships. For Bob and me, the summer institute has been one of the most rewarding experiences of our careers. My hobbies include collecting antique maps that confuse our sensibilities about geographic nationalism and borders. I have a few especially interesting maps in the director’s office.
Bob and Woody are grateful to the many supporters of the institute, among them members of the CASBS board of directors, the National Science Foundation, MIT, the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, and multiple supporters at Stanford University — including the Vice Provost & Dean of Research, the Graduate School of Business, the Hoover Institution, and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR).
