Designing Institutions for Contribution, Collaboration, and Flourishing

My research examines how institutions create the conditions for people with different experiences, identities, values, and forms of expertise to contribute, collaborate, and thrive together.

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I study organizations as relational systems. Rather than treating leadership, culture, conflict, belonging, or organizational performance as isolated phenomena, my work explores how institutional design shapes the relationships through which people coordinate, exercise authority, resolve disagreement, pursue shared purposes, and adapt to change. Drawing primarily on organizational sociology while engaging scholarship across management, civic studies, education, political science, and the humanities, I seek to develop frameworks that help explain how institutions remain both effective and legitimate in periods of technological, economic, and social transformation.

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My research spans several interconnected areas, including organizational design, disagreement and democratic practice, social values, artificial intelligence, the future of work, vocational and liberal education, and the changing role of cultural institutions. Although these topics are diverse, they are connected by a common question:

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How can institutions be intentionally designed so that people with different experiences, identities, values, and forms of expertise can contribute, collaborate, and thrive together?

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Across these projects, I am interested less in solving isolated organizational problems than in understanding the broader conditions that allow institutions to evolve. Whether examining organizational disagreement, leadership, opportunity structures, professional identity, technological disruption, or higher education, I ask how institutional design shapes both organizational effectiveness and the capacity for diverse people to work together productively.

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My scholarship is intentionally interdisciplinary and practice-informed. Through collaborations with universities, nonprofit organizations, corporations, governments, philanthropic institutions, and community partners, I seek to produce research that advances theory while informing institutional design and leadership practice. I believe some of the most important opportunities for scholarship lie not only in explaining organizations but also in helping design institutions that are more effective, more adaptive, and more capable of enabling human contribution.

Ultimately, my work seeks to understand how institutions can be intentionally designed so that people with different experiences, identities, values, and forms of expertise can contribute, collaborate, and thrive together.