Research

Overview

I bring a long-term historical perspective to the question of how organizations respond to and are shaped by powerful societal ideologies that influence their behaviors. These forces—whether nationalism, political polarization, or the shareholder primacy ideology—shape organizational behavior through the beliefs, emotions, and attachments of the people who drive them. My work examines how people in and around organizations—leaders, employees, and stakeholders—grapple with these ideologies and the consequences of their engagement. Through historical analysis, I reveal the ways in which these ideologies take root in organizations and are reproduced in society through business activities and practices.

Out of necessity, the bodies of research I draw from and speak to are quite diverse. My intellectual lineage is rooted in research on organizational adaptation, change, and evolution concerning intersections between organizations and various societal-level transformations. Yet, my research contexts, theorized mechanisms, and specific social forces in question often intersect with research in other disciplines, such as economic and political sociology and political science. It is in this sense that I am a transdisciplinary scholar.

I consider myself a scholar of history because almost all of my research is concerned with long-term historical processes, patterns, and events that happened in the past or the influences of various forces rooted in one’s past experiences and memories. Like historians (with some exceptions in economic history), much of my research aims to develop or extend new insights based on such historical investigations. This does not mean that I do not use quantitative tools. I value keeping inquiries driven by questions rather than methodologies, and whenever appropriate, I use various statistical and computational techniques, combining quantitative and qualitative methods, and collaborate with scholars with skillsets that I do not have. This is all to understand phenomena of interest and to tell stories I want to understand.