Research

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Overview

My research program investigates the firm’s role as a sociopolitical intermediary—a powerful actor that shapes, channels, and mediates the relationship between macro-level societal forces and micro-level individual beliefs and behavior. I examine how organizations can become agents of either social harmony or division, focusing on the influence of potent ideologies like nationalism and political partisanship. This work is organized into three interconnected streams:

1. Organizational Nationalism

This is my primary research stream, which aims to establish organizational nationalism as a new field of inquiry. I theorize how and why organizations nurture nationalism not just as an external pressure but as an active expression of their values and strategies. My work in this area explores how organizational leaders may use nationalism as managerial ideology to address shifting managerial concerns, how grassroots movements can transform market labels into vehicles for political mobilization, how nationalist rhetoric can substitute for corporate social responsibility, and how some organizations may decouple their nationalist rhetoric and their actual organizational activities and practices.

Together with my collaborators, I am actively building an intellectual community around this topic through workshops and other field-building activities. Join our Nation and Nationalism Research Network (NNRN).

2. Sociopolitical Forces and Corporate Life

My second stream broadens the inquiry to other powerful forces shaping organizations. This includes:

  • Shareholder Capitalism: Investigating how the rise of institutional investors has redirected corporate innovation away from high-risk exploration toward predictable exploitation, a mechanism we term “performative accountability.”

  • Partisan Ideology: Developing novel measures to track the historical dynamics of partisan alignment in corporate communications.

  • Technology and Inequality: Examining how major business model innovations, such as the adoption of e-commerce, can create opportunities to increase managerial diversity and reduce workplace inequality.

  • Radical Technological Change: Theorizing “cultural collapse” by studying how a shift to remote work can unanchor a deeply embodied organizational culture.

3. Methodological Innovation with Large Language Models (LLMs)

Studying ideologies embedded in vast amounts of text requires new methods. My third research stream focuses on developing rigorous new techniques for using Large Language Models (LLMs) to augment human interpretative capacities in qualitative and historical research. This work aims to enhance the scale and rigor of case-based theorizing in the digital age, and I have been invited to speak on this emerging topic as an expert panelist at the Academy of Management.