Works in Progress
Below you can find a description of some of the projects I’ve been working on lately.
Please click on a project heading below to see project description, collaborators, and other information.
+Race, Gender and Color Diversity Among Global Elites
This is a joint project with a few wonderful collaborators:
Seth Goldman (Department of Communication, UMass Amherst)
Brendan O'Connor (Department of Computer Science, UMass Amherst)
Tuugi Chuluun (Department of Finance, Loyola University)
Project Description: The issue of who controls powerful organizations is central to questions of legitimacy and representation in contemporary society. A key question both in studies of organizations and leadership, and in public debate at large, is the issue of diversity. Our project examines the diversity of the world’s most consequential organizational leaders by examining the board members and executive leadership of the organizations that govern much of global resource allocation, policymaking, and public discourse: large corporations, prestigious think tanks, international organizations, and private foundations.
By using a multi-method approach that employs a range of innovative techniques, including network analysis, natural language processing, and crowdsourcing, along with a rich new dataset of organizational leaders and their attributes that will be made publicly available, we aim to answer three key questions about the leadership of major global organizations. First, how diverse are their leaders in terms of gender, race and color? Second, how are leaders located differently within the structure of the broader organizational network they are a part of? And third, to what extent are organizational leaders treated differently based on their gender, race and color in news media coverage?
This project aims to go beyond descriptive analyses to study the interrelationships among organizational leaders—that is, the dynamics of their social networks, based on ties across board memberships. Prior studies focus almost entirely on simple headcounts of diversity within organizations, thus neglecting important questions about how organizational leaders are connected to one another through a complex network of connections. This is important because even if racial and gender minorities achieve leadership positions, they may be marginalized to the periphery of elite networks, giving them substantially less influence in the decision-making process. Using natural language processing we also examine how organizational leaders may be treated differently based on their race, skin tone, and gender in news media coverage.
The project has several grant proposals submitted to date, and one paper currently under review:
+Ideas, Conflict and Hegemony in the Economics Profession
This is a joint project with two wonderful collaborators:
Leonard Seabrooke (Copenhagen Business School)
Lasse Folks Henriksen (Copenhagen Business School)
Project Description: Neoliberal economics has reshaped the human experience in profound ways. How did this doctrine ascend historically? Existing explanations have emphasized a variety of factors, ranging from the role of particular think tanks and foundations, orchestration within the business community, intellectual failures of Keynesianism and/or social democracy, and more. We argue that an important missing piece of these historical accounts is the dynamic of inter-professional rivalry within the economics profession. Neoliberalism had to succeed as an esteemed system of thought, before it was implemented in policy; it had to attain prestige against the grain of the intelligentsia before it became a major force in the world to organize political power. Using a wide range of qualitative and quantitative evidence, our study focuses on elite economics departments in the United States from 1960-1985, focusing on two rival networks: the University of Chicago broadly recognized as pioneering neoliberal economics, on the one hand, and Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (the ‘Charles River Group’) associated with the Keynesian-neoclassical synthesis on the other. Our analysis centers on the social dynamics within and between rival groups, composed of a ‘core-set’ of 26 economists and the hundreds of graduate students that they trained and socialized. We provide a micro-level explanation of how rivalry networks form and change, one that spans generations, and includes analysis of funding patterns, job placement, citation practices, and evidence of differential solidarity among academics.
+Science Communication During the COVID-19 Pandemic
This is a joint project with a many wonderful collaborators, and is led by Bernhard Leidner (University of Massachusetts Amherst), with two other great collaborators at UMass, namely Quinnehtukqut J. McLamore and Stylianos Syropoulos (University of Massachusetts Amherst), as well as Mengyao Li (Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn). Together we have been collaborating with 18 other researchers from a total of 21 different countries.
Project Description: In 21 countries/regions, a collaborative research network collects primary data from representative adult samples at three time points during the pandemic. We have tracked changes in public endorsement of different values over the course of three months of the pandemic, and we are examining how these changes predict attitudinal and behavioral responses to policies and scientific recommendations. The project also examines the roles of country-level factors such as the severity of the pandemic, socio-economic conditions, and existing value systems in these changes.
The Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub wrote up a short article about our work, led by Berni Leidner here.
The First article to be published in this series is:
McLamore, Quinnehtukqut, Siropoulos, Stylianos, Leidner, Bernhard, Hirschberger, Gilad, Young, Kevin, Zein, Rizqy Amelia, Baumert, Anna, Bilewicz, Michal, Bilgen, Arda, van Bezouw, Maarten J., Chatard, Armand, Chekroun, Peggy, Chinchilla, Juana, Choi, Hoon-Seok, Euh, Hyun, Gomez, Angel, Kardos, Peter, Khoo, Ying Hooi, Li, Mengyao, Légal, Jean-Baptiste, Loughnan, Steve, Mari, Silvia, Tan-Mansukhani, Roseann, Muldoon, Orla, Noor, Masi, Paladino, Maria Paola, Petrović, Nebojša, Selvanathan, Hema Preya, Uluğ, Özden Melis, Wohl, Michael J., Yeung, Wai Lan Victoria. 2022. “Trust in Scientific Information Mediates Associations between Conservatism and Coronavirus Responses in the U.S., but Few Other Nations”, Scientific Reports 12(3724). Available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-07508-6