Designing Institutions for Contribution, Collaboration, and Flourishing

My research examines how institutions organize the relationships that make coordination possible.

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Grounded in organizational sociology and informed by scholarship across management, education, civic studies, and the humanities, I study how institutions organize the relationships through which people coordinate work, exercise authority, resolve disagreement, and adapt to change. Rather than treating leadership, culture, conflict, belonging, or organizational performance as separate phenomena, I examine them as products of underlying relational structures. My goal is to explain how organizations build the relational capacity to coordinate effectively, adapt to change, and sustain legitimate authority over time.

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This research agenda spans organizational design, disagreement and democratic practice, social values, artificial intelligence, the future of work, vocational and liberal education, and cultural institutions. Although these projects address different organizational challenges, they are united by a common question:

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How do institutions build the relational capacity to coordinate across difference, respond to change, and remain effective and legitimate over time?

 

Across these projects, I am interested less in solving isolated organizational problems than in understanding the broader conditions that allow institutions to evolve. I ask how institutional design shapes both organizational effectiveness and the capacity for diverse groups to work together productively.

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My scholarship is intentionally interdisciplinary and practice-informed. Through collaborations with institutions of higher education, nonprofit organizations, companies, philanthropic entities, and community partners, I seek to produce research that advances theory while informing institutional design and leadership practice.

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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.