Research

I'm a graduate student in the Strategy and Organization Area of the PhD Program at the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University. My supervisor is Samer Faraj. 

I'm fascinated by expertise in organizations, and the many ways in which it is conceptualized in the literature and in practice. I have a three intertwined streams of inquiry related to expertise: First, I am interested in exploring the role of expertise enactments in organizational primitives such as decision-making, coordination, control, and innovation. Second, I'm interested in how expertise arrangements influence the societal and organizational construction of emerging technologies, and how such technologies in turn produce new forms of expertise. Third, I'm interested in expert discourse and how vocabularies and grammars can shape expertise.

Please see my Google Scholar page for recent publications. My current research is organized into the following projects:

Orchestrating expertise in extended crises

This project is based on a qualitative field study of how a frontline hospital coordinated an organization-wide response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In development as one coauthored manuscript targeted at top journals, and one management case study. 

This project has produced two conference proceedings.

Artificial Intelligence in the Operating Room: Doing expertise and expert systems in healthcare

My doctoral dissertation research monograph  is based on a qualitative comparative field study of OR scheduling and AI technology development at two hospitals. In development as two coauthored manuscripts targeted at top management journals, and one management case study. 

This project has produced two conference proceedings and will feature in a symposium I am helping organize, to be showcased at the 2024 Academy of Management annual meeting.

Knowing and organizing with expert technologies

This project comprises two theory papers on knowing and organizing with technologies potentially capable of expertise. One project has senior faculty co-authors, and the other is co-authored with PhD students. In development as two coauthored manuscripts targeted at top management journals.

Past publications from this project include one well-cited refereed paper in the journal Information and Organization, and one refereed book chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Uncertainty Management in Work Organizations (eds. G. Grote & M. Griffin).

An ecology of knowledge in expert communities

This early stage project explores how knowledge emerges, is inherited, and evolves across a dynamic expert community. The source of the analytic metaphor driving this project is the single stranded RNA virus, the only category of life where ecological and evolutionary processes unfold at similar timescales. In development as one traditional quantitative theory testing paper, and one exploratory computational social science study. 

This project is associated with the knowledge artifact JRNLS.  Prototypes of this artifact have been used by senior scholars and students to conduct machine-assisted literature analyses, including one featured in  Faraj, S., & Leonardi, P. M. (2022). Strategic organization in the digital age: Rethinking the concept of technology. Strategic Organization, 20(4), 771-785. JRNLS will be added to my existing open-source contributions.